Nuclear spoons: hot metal may find its way to your dinner table - Dept. of Energy's proposal to recycle radioactive metal into household products - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Oct, 1998 by Anne-Marie Cusac

Ordinary precautions like wearing respirators won't be enough to protect workers, says Wright. "There isn't anything that protects people."

In addition to cancers, "these exposures also can cause neurological problems," says Jackie Kittrell, a lawyer with the American Environmental Health Studies Project, an Oak Ridge organization that represents workers who have suffered heavy metal exposure and radiation poisoning while on the job. Radioactive metal exposure can "interfere with immune system function," she says.

Even the Steel Manufacturers Association takes a dim view of radioactive metal. Christina Bechak, vice president of the association, expresses a concern that radiation will accumulate on the machines used for shredding and smelting the metal. "Scrap metal is valuable, but we don't want radioactive scrap," she says. Nor is she happy with the proposal to let companies release this metal freely. "The detectors [in the factories] are set very sensitive," says Bechak. She fears that extremely hot scrap will be able to enter the plants in loads of low-level metal, since the detectors do not distinguish between levels of radioactivity. If the detectors sound an alarm for every shipment of low-level metal, the workers may be tempted to ignore the warning or to set the detectors to a less sensitive, and potentially more dangerous, reading. "All the radioactive metal is going to set off the detectors," she says.

The DOE is so eager to get radioactive metal off its hands that it has hired an arm of British Nuclear Fuels, called BNFL, to do the job. The British-government-owned company has already started work at several large buildings on the K-25 site in Oak Ridge that were originally used to manufacture highly enriched uranium for nuclear warheads as part of the Manhattan Project. The $238 million contract stipulates that the company may recycle for profit all the metals it recovers, including a large amount of formerly classified nickel.

When British Nuclear Fuels released 7,000 metric tons of metal contaminated with low-level radioactivity for recycling into consumer goods in Britain earlier this year, it caused an uproar. A spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels explained his philosophy to the London paper The Independent. "It's recycling," he said. "If you have a cup of coffee, you don't throw the cup away, you reuse it."

BNFL's U.S. project has run into a roadblock. A coalition of environmental groups and unions--including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union--recently won a suit that claimed the Department of Energy had neglected to consider the environmental impact of all the metal it planned to release for recycling. The court ordered the DOE to perform an Environmental Impact Statement. The Department of Energy acknowledges 100,000 pounds of metal have been shipped out already, but this metal, the DOE claims, is clean.

Meanwhile, at the K-25 site in Oak Ridge, there have been problems this summer that have nothing to do with BNFL. The DOE accidentally released two hot metal items and claimed they had been thoroughly checked for radiation contamination. In both cases, the state of Tennessee caught the hot releases and returned them to the DOE. "Unfortunately or fortunately, however you look at it, the only pieces of metal the state looked at were the ones found to be radioactive," says John Owsley, assistant director of the DOE's oversight division.