Overwatch Inc. has been directly involved in the sales, training and emergency response to portal radiation detector alarms since 2003. We are presently working with Waste Management Corp. to continue building up their excellent proactive, radiation detection program, through provision of equipment and training.

Radioactive Waste Surfaces at Landfills  Mon, November 5, 2007

By Jim Bronskill and Sue Bailey - The Canadian Press

Alarms are literally ringing at a soaring number of Canadian landfills as radioactive waste is detected in loads of trash.

Alerts went off 119 times in the last fiscal year, up from 13 in 2005-06 and just three the year before, Canada's nuclear regulator reports.

More than 75% of the alarms were triggered by small quantities of short-lived radioactive substances of medical origin "which pose little or no risk," says the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in its annual report. The document offers no details on the remaining cases.

But records obtained by The Canadian Press show several radioactive devices have wound up in landfill sites or in the hands of scrap metal dealers in the last five years.

The incidents highlight growing concern about the disposal of potentially harmful nuclear materials, and raise questions about gaps in the patchwork of systems at landfills across the country that monitor and detect such waste from hospitals, laboratories and industrial plants.

British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick, for instance, lack regulations requiring radiation-detection devices, while Quebec plans to have such requirements fully in place by January 2009.

One southern Ontario landfill owner suggests it's easy to get around the monitors.

"Supposedly, if you have any radiation stuff, what you've been instructed to do -- and you never heard this from me -- is go somewhere else and dump it," he said. "Dump it in another dump that doesn't have those detection devices because they don't want to deal with it."

During an April 2005 inventory check, the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal discovered a measuring device containing radioactive cesium was missing, concluding it "likely went to landfill."