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Deadly radioactive nugget missing on mainland

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A watermelon-sized ball of lead containing a nugget of radioactive Caesium-137 has been missing in Tongchuan, Shaanxi, since Monday, probably buried under tonnes of scrap metal waiting to be smelted, an official from the city's Environmental Protection Bureau has confirmed.

The radioactive material was part of a measuring device at an old factory run by Shaanxi Qinling Cement, one of the biggest cement producers on the mainland.

'The lead container disappeared when the company was dismantling the old plant,' the official said yesterday. 'It might have been shipped to Fuping county. Our people are there, searching every pile of scrap. But so far we've had no luck.'

The city government ordered a blackout on all news of the disappearance, but Xinhua and China News Service broke the news yesterday, triggering anger among Tongchuan residents.

Resident Ma Yanjiang said he had not known about the missing radioactive material until he read about it online yesterday afternoon.

'It is horrible, I mean, to keep it a secret,' he said. 'It has been four days. There's a good chance that uninformed people could stumble over it and some ironsmith might have already shovelled it into the furnace.'

Jiang Qian, director of the tumour department at Wanjie Hospital in Zibo, Shandong, said that anybody who was exposed to the radioactive substance at close range would probably have one of the worst days of their life.

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