Missing radiation source found in New Jersey; state, federal agencies say they did not use drones to look for it

Federal and state agencies on Tuesday said they did not look for a radiation source, since recovered, that went missing in New Jersey earlier this month.

Spokespersons for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection all said in emails Tuesday that they did not use drones to look for a small radiation source more than a week after it was lost in transit.

The agencies wrote to the Exchange Monitor in the wake of widespread and unexplained drone sightings throughout the state that have made national news.

A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection told the Monitor in an email that the Germanium-68 source was found Dec. 10. It went missing Dec. 2.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection “did not use drones to locate the material,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. The lost source, about six inches long and less than an inch in diameter, was repackaged and sent by courier to its manufacturer, the spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection said.

New Jersey regulates commercial nuclear material in its territory under an agreement with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The federal agency, which published a report about the missing source last week, “does not use drones to look for lost material, and we are unaware of any connection between the lost source and recent drone sightings,” a spokesperson said.

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration also was not using drones to look for the shipment, a spokesperson said. The agency operates a small fleet of crewed aircraft, fixed- and rotary-wing, capable of detecting radiation on the ground.

However, “[t]he Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) does not employ drones for nuclear/radiological detection missions, and is not currently conducting any aerial operations in that region,” a spokesperson said.

The New Jersey drone sightings have provoked a rash of speculation, including from prominent public figures such as President-elect Donald Trump (R).

On Tuesday morning, a local politician, Mayor Michael Melham of Belleville, N.J., offered his own hypothesis: that the drones could be looking for a missing source of Germanium-68, reported lost in transit on Dec. 2.

The short-lived isotope, Ge-68, can produce an even shorter-lived isotope Gallium-68, that can be used in a positron emission tomography (PET) scan: a medical procedure that creates images of the body’s interior to search, among other things, for cancer cells.

“There was, and there is, an alert that’s out right now that radioactive material in New Jersey has gone missing,” Melham said Tuesday On Good Day New York, which airs on a local Fox affiliate. “On Dec. 2. There was a shipment that arrived at its destination, the container was damaged and it was empty. So, potentially they’re looking for that.”