TBILISI: Leading western countries are planning a massive search in Georgia for potential “dirty bomb” materials - highly radioactive and mobile nuclear batteries which, it is feared, could be combined with conventional explosives to lethal effect by terrorists.

An emergency meeting of western nuclear safety specialists, including experts from Britain, in Paris in a fortnight is expected to agree on air, road and foot searches of the post-Soviet state for two missing lead containers of strontium-90, the first such national quest ever undertaken.

The alarm was raised in December when three lumberjacks working in the mountains of northern Georgia came across another two nuclear batteries, stripped of their lead casing. The men innocently carried them away in rucksacks and suffered severe burns and radiation sickness. One of the three is fighting for his life in a French hospital.

“September 11 has made everyone think differently about this,” said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which will also attend the Paris meeting. “There is more than an assumption that there are two more (abandoned nuclear devices) left in Georgia.”

In the 1960s and 70s, the former Soviet Union manufactured at least 1,000 of these small nuclear batteries to generate electricity in remote areas to power lighthouses, and transmission towers. They were also used extensively by the Soviet military and in satellites.

In the post-Soviet chaos, the devices were abandoned, frequently without supervision. There are believed to be many more of them scattered in remote areas of Moldova, post-Soviet central Asia and the Russian far east.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.