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

This approach downplays risks to the sick, the elderly, the young, and those who are particularly sensitive because they are exposed to abnormal amounts of radioactive material through their work. It also fails to specify a maximum dose any member of the public would be allowed to receive.

"After age forty-five, there is a much more dramatic association of radiation with cancer," says David Richardson, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who assisted with a recent study of Oak Ridge nuclear workers sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control. "This is very low-level radiation. What we're looking at is cancer death."

This study adds evidence to Alice Stewart's 1950s research that discovered cancer incidence rose sharply among children whose mothers were exposed to X-rays while pregnant.

A dose-based standard would also change the way the regulators see radioactivity. No longer would they measure how much radioactivity each piece of metal gives off. Rather, the regulators would use a theoretical estimate of how much damage a piece of radioactive metal does to the human body.

"Each of the objects could meet government standards on its own, but there's no limit to the number of objects a person could be exposed to," says D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

"You should err on the side of safety and not expose the public," says Wing, who led a DOE-funded study on nuclear workers at Oak Ridge that concluded low-level radiation exposure is four to ten times more dangerous than previously believed. He says the plan to allow more radioactive metal into the manufacturing process is "like a massive experiment."

While the DOE and the radioactive metal recyclers await a new NRC standard for releasing more hot metal in the United States, the stuff already appears to be causing trouble overseas.

"Our fear is that entrepreneurs have found a way to market it into countries that don't have our strict standards," says Kittrell of the American Environmental Health Studies Project.

In June 1996, Chinese officials in Tianjin, a port city 100 miles southeast of Beijing, stopped a seventy-eight-ton shipment of radioactive scrap metal from the United States. Some of the scrap was thirty times the official Chinese safety limit for radioactivity.

According to an article in European Business Report, the metal came from discarded equipment that had belonged to a U.S. fertilizer company.

An April 4, 1994, article in The Advocate, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, paper, suggests such exports may be widespread. "Radioactive metal is being welcomed by smelters in China, where a booming economy is driving up the demand for steel," reporter Peter Shinkle wrote. Shinkle discovered that three major U.S. oil companies--Texaco, Mobil, and Phillips--were exporting large shipments of oil-field pipe and equipment "encrusted with radium, a radioactive material that is carried to the surface in oil production."

Shinkle spoke with representatives of the three companies. All shared their discovery of the large Asian market for radioactive metal.