An accident at a steel mill in Spain has contaminated large parts of southern
Europe with radioactivity. The Spanish Nuclear Safety Council says that scrap
containing caesium-137 was mistakenly fed into the smelter of a steel mill in
Algeciras, near Gibraltar, at the end of May.
For the first few days in June, atmospheric concentrations of caesium-137 in
France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Germany were up to a thousand times
higher than normal. But levels were still too low to pose a serious health
threat.
