VIENNA, 26 September 2004 — The UN nuclear watchdog is to send experts to Jordan to verify whether the ageing Dimona nuclear plant just across the border in Israel is emitting high levels of radiation, an IAEA spokesman said yesterday.
“We have received a request from the Jordanian government to assist them monitoring the radiological situation,” said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“We agreed to send a fact-finding mission in the coming weeks to help them determine whether there is any radiological incident.”
The request came from Jordan’s parliamentary health and environment committee after former Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu warned that the plant, built in the late 1950s with the help of France, in the southern Negev desert could become a “second Chernobyl.”
Vanunu, a former technician, served an 18-year prison sentence in Israel for revealing secrets about the plant.
But a diplomat based in Vienna said there was no proof of any contamination from the Dimona plant. “There is no evidence of radiation... nobody has ever gotten near Dimona,” he said.
Jordan said in August it was preparing to invite UN experts from the IAEA to carry out independent surveys in the kingdom to eliminate any fear of contamination from the plant in neighboring Israel.
However, Jordan’s government spokeswoman Asma Khodr has insisted the country is free of any contamination from the aging Israeli reactor and reiterated that radiation levels were normal.
The IAEA said it had had no similar request from Israel which maintains a high level of secrecy around its nuclear programs.
Chernobyl was a nuclear plant that exploded in Ukraine in 1986, causing the world’s worst ever civilian nuclear accident.
