Last summer and fall dozens of reports warned of radioactive cesium-137 contamination of imported shrimp, cloves, tennis shoes, and zinc powder. The shrimp contamination led to the recall of frozen shrimp — shipped from Indonesia — by Walmart, Kroger, and dozens of other grocers across 31 U.S. states. The scandal led to international investigations seeking to find the source of the cesium as well as the ways the contamination was spread, how it doused consumer goods, and how it came to be exported around the world. Kroger stores alone recalled 77.5 tons, or 155,000 pounds, of the shrimp it sold between June 12, 2025 and Sept. 17, 2025. (For background on the story, see both the Fall and Winter 2025 Nukewatch Quarterly.)
Reporters and investigators chased leads in search of the source of the cesium contamination, which has now been traced to airborne particles from a smelting plant at PT Peter Metal Technology, a stainless-steel processing and scrap iron smelting company in the Modern Cikande Industrial Estate (MCIE), 35 miles west of Jakarta. (Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city with 41.9 million people.)
PT Peter Metal Technology (PMT) is about two miles from the shrimp processing facility, PT Bahari Makmuri Sejati which exported the tons of recalled shrimp to the U.S. last summer. The U.S. imported some 84 million pounds of shrimp from Indonesia in 2025.
Bara Hasibuan, spokesperson for the Indonesian government’s “Cesium-137 Radionuclide Hazard Task Force” investigating the contamination, said Dec. 4, 2025, “The purchase of scrap materials mixed with used industrial equipment contained cesium-137, which was processed legally or illegally.…” Investigators now believe radioactive cesium dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap containing cesium-137.
At a Sep. 30, 2025 press conference Bara said, “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind.” Later, Steven Biegalski, PhD, Chair of the nuclear and radiological engineering and medical physics program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Consumer Reports, that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The cesium-137 could have become gaseous in the PMT smelter and then been released from the smokestack, he said. “That whole island likely had a cesium-137 plume go over it, leaving a trail of contamination,” he said. (Yes, that, and the smelter itself, the smokestack, and the surroundings. Several families were evacuated from the area after cesium contamination was identified.)
If Biegalski is correct, and the plume passed over Jakarta’s 41 million people and blew east across the “whole island,” then the government’s hazard task force was right to send inspectors to far-flung locations across Java. Two sites were a shrimp processing facility in Surabaya, 500 miles east of the smelter in MCIE; and two farms in Pati, in central Java, 310 miles east of the MCIE.
The contaminated cloves, which were intercepted before being sold in the U.S., came from a plantation in Lampung on Java’s neighboring island of Sumatra, 100 miles west of the MCIE and across the Sunda Strait. This contamination indicates that part of the cesium’s plume was blown west as well as east. “We can confirm that contamination has been found on plantations in Lampung,” Bara said in October according to ABC News.
Nevertheless, Bara claimed last December that the source of the cesium-137 plume, the PT Peter Metal Technology smelter, had been completely cleaned up. “The decontamination in the Cikande industrial area [known as MCIE], which was the source of contamination, has been completed,” he said, according to Tempo English.
Bara’s claim must be considered in light of Indonesia’s Minister of Environment and Forestry Hanif Faisol Nurofiq’s statement to the press Dec. 3, 2025. Hanif said that his Ministry “does not possess specific duties or functions related to radiological activities or managing radioactive waste.” Minister Hanif also heads the investigative cesium task force of which Bara is the spokesperson.
Minister Hanif also publicly “stressed the critical importance of effectively managing the … case to restore international confidence in the safety of Indonesian export products,” Tempo reported. The mission is clear: if the Ministry can’t restore a safe environment, it can try to restore a belief in safety.
One attempt to boost confidence early last December was the filing of criminal charges against Lin Jingzhang, a Chinese citizen and Director of PT Metal Peter Technology. Lin was charged with environmental crimes and faces 3 to 10 years in prison, and a fine of up to $480,000, according to the Indonesian news service Antara. —JL
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