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

We enter what Gilman calls the survey building. Here, he says, workers search bags with a Geiger counter to find hot pieces of trash.

"So the bags could have radioactive stuff in them?" I ask.

"Anything in this room could have radioactive stuff in it," says Gilman. "Except us." He laughs.

We leave the building. Nearby, sits a chirping Geiger counter. From the pine woods, comes the long drone of locusts. "This is the year for them," says Gilman.

In the next building, we pause near a large pile of bent and perforated radioactive metal beams. "This is structural steel," says Gilman. "They're going to blast this, cutting out the hot spots to make new products to keep America great." Gilman points toward my notebook, gesturing with each word. "Write that," he says. "To keep America great."

Early in the 1980s, gold jewelry in Buffalo, New York, was a hot item. When a local television station offered to survey gold jewelry, it turned up three radioactive pieces in the first two days. "As a result of this finding, the New York State Health Department began a comprehensive campaign in 1981 to find radioactive, contaminated jewelry," reported the journal Health Physics in 1986. "More than 160,000 pieces were surveyed, and, of these, about 170 pieces turned out to be radioactive--mostly from western New York and nearby Pennsylvania." News accounts from the early eighties reported that at least fourteen people had developed finger cancer and several people had suffered amputations of their fingers and even parts of their hands as a result of the hot jewelry.

The reports alleged that the radioactive gold came from the state-owned Roswell Park Institute, a center for cancer research and treatment. The rings contained small amounts of radon that had originally been used to treat tumors. Most of the jewelry dated from the 1940s.

Two attempts to sue the state of New York over the occurrence--one by a woman whose husband died after skin cancer metastasized throughout his body, another by a woman whose finger had to be amputated--failed. According to a May 14, 1983, A.P. report, the judge in one of the cases "ruled that the clock on the statute of limitations begins running at the time of injury." The court also ruled that Roswell Park could not be held responsible because it was "merely a hypothesis" that the gold had come from there.

The hot gold rings--and the cancer associated with them--may be a sign of things to come.

While radioactive metal reprocessing may pose health threats to consumers, it's the scrap metal workers and foundry workers who are likely to receive the most exposure.

A 1987 NRC bulletin describes tiny, extremely hot particles less than one millimeter in any direction (called radioactive fleas) that can cause serious damage to people who accidentally touch them. Such minute but extremely radioactive bits of metal could easily hide away in loads of otherwise low-level metal.

Michael Wright, director of health, safety, and environment for the United Steelworkers of America, claims there is also serious danger to workers from low-level radioactivity in steel. "You can't inhale a piece of steel," says Wright. "But if you melt it, there's a substantial risk of breathing it in. That's orders of magnitude more dangerous."