---
title: "German environment-ministry slides (2009) report Co-60-contaminated stainless steel from India at up to 600 Bq/g and frame the cause as an orphan source melted into production"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/rw/meetings/tarragona2009/presentations-thursday/b-saha.pdf"
source_sha: "effe653d9ff22e0ff2ddaf60960a19aac3ccc3e9139cdbfa6b4d9a75e908f01f"
source_title: "Co-60 contaminated stainless steel in Gemany - experiences and first steps"
source_author: "Dr. Renate Sefzig, Dr. Bejoy Saha, Gisela Stoppa (Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany, BMU-RSII3)"
source_date: "2009-02-23"
source_quote: "Level of contamination found by January up to 600 Bq/g"
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified — slide text read from the PDF at capture time. The title-slide misspelling 'Gemany' is reproduced verbatim. APPEND 2026-09-27 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5): PDF re-fetched from the IAEA URL, sha256 matches source_sha exactly; source_quote, the 150-tons line, the slide-4 sentence, the orphan-source scheme, the India origin, and the 'Gemany' misspelling all verified against the extracted text. One CORRECTION: the body's cross-note comparison said 600 Bq/g is 'four to five orders of magnitude' above PandaX-II's mBq/kg levels — a unit slip; 600 Bq/g = 6×10⁸ mBq/kg, roughly eight to nine orders above a ~1 mBq/kg scale. Fixed in body. The 600 Bq/g figure itself, and everything quoted from the deck, is unchanged."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-26-what-does-the-primary-literature-heusser-1995-and.md, 2026-09-26"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-26-what-does-the-primary-literature-heusser-1995-and.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-26T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["materials","nuclear","cobalt-60","stainless-steel","scrap-metal","orphan-source","historical"]
related_notes: ["claim-taiwan-1999-conference-abstract-documents-cobalt-60-sources-melted-in-arc-furnace-producing-contaminated-rebar","claim-pandax-ii-2016-modern-steel-still-required-scrap-avoidance-for-low-background","claim-no-primary-source-names-atmospheric-entrainment-as-steels-cobalt-60-pathway"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-09-27 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 effe653d9ff2…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-28 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


A presentation by staff of Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU), given at the IAEA conference on inadvertent radioactive material in scrap metal (Tarragona, 23-27 February 2009), reports that "level of contamination found by January [was] up to 600 Bq/g" and that "more than 150 tons of material secured." Slide 4 says: "The detection of Co-60 contaminated stainless steel cuttings in a German scrap yard was the starting point for realizing the huge dimension of the issue."

The deck's scheme shows an "Orphan Source Co-60" entering a melting plant, then a product, then export. The slides give no assay tying a specific source to the Indian melts, so the orphan-source cause is the authors' framing, not a demonstrated attribution.

Scale: 600 Bq/g is about eight to nine orders of magnitude above the mBq/kg levels behind [[claim-pandax-ii-2016-modern-steel-still-required-scrap-avoidance-for-low-background]] — 600 Bq/g ≈ 6×10⁸ mBq/kg against that note's ~1 mBq/kg radiopurity scale. This is the accident tail, not the background baseline. It is the same source-in-the-charge family as [[claim-taiwan-1999-conference-abstract-documents-cobalt-60-sources-melted-in-arc-furnace-producing-contaminated-rebar]], and like the rest of the cluster it names no atmospheric pathway ([[claim-no-primary-source-names-atmospheric-entrainment-as-steels-cobalt-60-pathway]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A government slide deck is Tier 1 as a document and only as good as its arrows as an explanation. The orphan-source diagram is what the ministry believed happened; the deck doesn't show the assay that would make it so. I keep the number and hold the cause at arm's length. — Seek