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

"I got my start in the commercial nuclear power business," says Leo Hill, the general manager and president of GTS Duratek. "Nowadays, when I go by a scrap yard or an automobile wrecking place, I think, `This stuff is beautiful.' I'm in the garbage business, and I love it."

"I was born a Hindu, and a central feature of the Hindu religion is reincarnation," says Shankar Menon of Menon Consulting in Sweden. "And being trained as an engineer, it's just a short step to the recycling of metals. I'm actually thinking of the soul in them."

But this conference is not so much about the soul of the metal as its sale. "In the scrap business, there's probably about $3 billion in the region, if you count Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana," says Frederick Gardner, who is in charge of business development for Decontamination and Recovery Services of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "The cheaper we can handle this stuff, the bigger business this will be."

Still, there are a few kinks to be worked out in the plan to reprocess radioactive scrap: for instance, public opinion. "What's it going to take to get the public swung around to say, `OK, I don't like it, but I guess you've proven it's safe'?" asks Gardner, who is making a presentation. He answers his own question with an overhead that reads, THE MAIN POINT: IT ALL STARTS WITH THE SALESMAN.

"We can tackle the public on the notion that radioactivity is an effluent, not a waste," says Loiselle, comparing radioactivity to car exhaust. "This industry has a right to effluence just like any other industry. And it cannot be zero. No industry has zero effluence."

Peter Yerace, waste coordinator for the Department of Energy's Fernald project in Ohio, displays an overhead slide: PUBLIC PERCEPTION PROBLEMS: FEARS OF RADIATION, SUSPICION OF DOE.

Fernald has "lots of copper," 120 tons of ingots, says Yerace. He proposed releasing copper that was slightly contaminated with uranium. "When I went in front of the public, I got the crap beat out of me," he says. People asked, "Are my kid's braces going to be made out of that copper?" Yerace told them the metal could enter consumer products. "I went as far as a copper IUD. That's what it's made of," he says. But he tried to reassure them the metal would be of such low levels of radioactivity that it wouldn't be dangerous.

I step into the hallway during a break and hear a voice from one of the display booths. "Come on over and get your CO-2 pellets," calls Chris Wetherall, president of Cryo Dynamics Inc., a company specializing in "cryogenic decontamination and waste minimization." He opens a cooler and cold steam spills onto the table. He dribbles a cup full of dry-ice pellets into my palm. They sting, so I drop them to the carpet, and they bounce away. As I rub my hand on my pants leg, Wetherall explains that the dry ice will decontaminate metals, wood, concrete, and fabrics, while causing no waste. "It sterilizes everything it touches," he says.

But while CO-2 sterilizes some surfaces, not all the "hot spots" on radioactive metal can be scrubbed off. This is particularly true for metals that are radioactive inside and out, which is one reason why companies cannot legally reprocess them. The DOE and the private firms want to be able to recycle these "volumetrically contaminated" metals, too.