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

The Department of Energy has a problem: what to do with millions of tons of radioactive metal. So the DOE has come up with an ingenious plan to dispose of its troublesome tons of nickel, copper, steel, and aluminum. It wants to let scrap companies collect the metal, try to take the radioactivity out, and sell the metal to foundries, which would in turn sell it to manufacturers who could use it for everyday household products: pots, pans, forks, spoons, even your eyeglasses.

You may not know this, but the government already permits some companies, under special licenses, to buy, reprocess, and sell radioactive metal: 7,500 tons in 1996, by one industry estimate. But the amount of this reprocessing could increase drastically if the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the burgeoning radioactive metal processing industry get their way. They are pressing for a new, lax standard that would do away with the special permits and allow companies to buy and resell millions of tons of low-level radioactive metal.

If the rules change, the metal companies could increase their output a hundredfold. And the standard the companies seek could cause nearly 100,000 cancer fatalities in the United States, by the NRC's own estimate.

"We're looking at an exponential increase," says Diane D'Arrigo, a staff member at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, which is fighting the push to recycle radioactive metal. "Think about the metal you come into contact with every day. Your IUD, and your bracelets, your silverware, the zipper on your crotch, the coins in your pocket, frying pans, belt buckles, that chair you're sitting on, the batteries that are in your car and motorbike, the batteries in your computer."

A June 30 memorandum from John Hoyle, NRC Secretary, announces the Commission's decision to establish a new, legal dose of radiation for metals released from nuclear facilities.

"This level should be based on realistic scenarios of health effects from low doses that still allows quantities of materials to be released," says the letter. "The rule should be comprehensive and apply to all metals, equipment, and materials, including soil."

Metal companies want that standard to be in the vicinity of 10 millirems per year. A millirem is a unit of measure, based on the standard man, that estimates the damage radiation does to human tissue. The NRC studied the health effects of such a standard back in 1990. It found: "A radiation dose of 10 mrem per year ... received continuously over a lifetime corresponds to a risk of about 4 chances in 10,000" of fatal cancer. That translates to 92,755 additional cancer deaths in the United States alone.

Many scientists argue that any release of hot metals into the product stream is a serious health hazard.

John Gofman is a former associate director of Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and co-discoverer of uranium-233. "There is no safe dose or dose rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold-dose," said Gofman. "Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not `hypothetical,' `just theoretical,' or `imaginary.' They are real."

Karl Morgan, known as the father of health physics, shudders at the idea of more and more radioactive metal entering people's homes. He is particularly worried about dental fillings. "You certainly don't want people going around with radioactive teeth," he says.

Some of the most dangerous radioactivity around the home, says Morgan, will be the metals people unintentionally ingest. "Some of these find their way directly into the human body, especially copper and iron, stainless steel [from] knives and forks," he says. "It doesn't help any cell in the human body if you send an alpha particle through it."

Richard Clapp, associate professor in the department of environmental health at the Boston University Schools of Public Health, says you may soon need to fear household products you have most contact with: "If you're sitting on it, or if it's part of your desk, or in the frame of your bed-where you have constant exposure and for several hours," you will be in most danger.

Clapp, who published a study on the increases in leukemia and thyroid cancers associated with low-level radiation exposure among people living near a Massachusetts nuclear power plant, says radioactive metal recycling will raise overall radiation levels. "Who in their right mind would want to do that?" he asks. "This is the legacy of an industry gone mad."

It's early August, and I'm attending the "Beneficial Reuse" conference of the Association of Radioactive Metal Recyclers, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

"We were not always called Beneficial Reuse," says Val Loiselle, chairman of the association, during his opening speech. "In our first year, we were called the Radioactive Scrap Metal Conference."

This is the sixth annual gathering of radioactive metal recyclers. There is a special session for those interested in recycling depleted uranium and a presentation on recycling radioactive concrete.