A 61-year-old Moscow resident discovered that the 5,000 ruble bills she had been stashing under her pillow were emitting dangerous levels of radiation.

The pensioner, identified in news reports as Yelena Kryzhanovskaya, made the discovery after switching on a radiation meter and seeing the needle spark into life.

"I bought it just in case, you know, to check produce," the pensioner told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, adding that she dialed an emergency number after locating the source of the radiation.

Emergency workers found that radiation levels where Kryzhanovskaya had stashed the 50,000 rubles ($1,600) in savings were almost 20,000 times greater than the norm, comparable to levels experienced during nuclear power plant disasters.

(MT)