MOSCOW, December 31 (RIA Novosti) – Radioactive soil from the Fukushima disaster area was found in the baggage of a Japanese man by border guards at Kiev’s Borispol Airport, Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service said Tuesday.
“Two plastic containers with 12 grams of clay soil were found during an inspection of personal belongings. The acceptable level of radiation was exceeded by about a factor of two,” the service said in a statement.
The man told law enforcement that the soil was from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site in Japan and that he was taking it to a university in the Ukrainian city of Zhitomyr.
The passenger’s luggage was flagged with a Yantar radioactivity detector during a routine check of bags arriving on a flight from Frankfurt.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has been leaking radiation since an earthquake and accompanying tsunami knocked out its cooling systems and damaged its containment structure in 2011.
