[ RadSafe ] RADIOACTIVE RODS LOST, THEN LOACATED. Missing rods located.

[Geo>K0FF]

Below is a summary of the missing radioactive rods. A shipment arrived short one pig with 3 Ge-68 rods in it.

George Dowell
New London Nucleonics Lab


RADIOACTIVE RODS-
Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- FedEx Corp. located a missing shipment of low-level radioactive rods used by hospitals to calibrate CT scanning equipment.

A cylinder containing the rods, which had been missing since Nov. 23, was found at a FedEx facility in Knoxville, Tennessee, the package's destination city, Sandra Munoz, a spokeswoman, said today in an e-mail. The package was sent by plane Nov. 22 from Fargo, North Dakota, Munoz said.

"It was always in our custody," she said, hours after Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx confirmed that it couldn't account for the shipment..

The cylinder was one of three, each packaged separately, in a box that got wet, possibly during a rainstorm in Memphis, where the shipment was transferred for the last leg of its journey to Knoxville, Munoz said. After delivery on Nov. 23, the box had water damage and one cylinder was missing.

FedEx retrieved the cylinder today in Knoxville, Munoz said.

"My guess, and we are looking into this, was as they were doing the sort, they came across a box with no label on it, they set it aside," Munoz said. "They knew we were looking for a cylinder, but they never opened that box until today."

The recovered cylinder, about 10 inches long and weighing 20 pounds, held four rods of germanium-68. They are used in CT, or computerized tomography, scans in which X-rays from a variety of angles produce cross-sectional images of patients' bodies.

Total radioactivity for the rods is 684 megabecquerels, the equivalent of about 18 microcuries, said David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The rods aren't considered significant sources of radiation, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

If someone had opened the canister, "it would take like 1,000 hours of exposure to get a skin blister," Munoz said.

She declined to identify the final destination of the package. FedEx is the second-largest U.S. package-shipping company after United Parcel Service Inc.

--Editors: Ed Dufner, Elizabeth Wollman

To contact the reporter on this story: Will Daley in New York at wdaley2 at bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ed Dufner at edufner at bloomberg.net









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