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

"In years past, a lot of material went out of these facilities that wouldn't meet commercial-world standards," says Michael Mobley, the director of the division of radiological health in the Tennessee Department of Energy and Conservation. And the cavalier attitude at the DOE is no help, he says. "There's been some issue about this: `Well, if we miss one or two spots it's no big deal because the standard is so strict.' If every once in a while stuff is going out that's hotter than standard, how much is going out that's hotter than standard.'? Their survey processes are just going to evolve into nothing."

The amount of radioactive metal that already enters manufactured goods is difficult to pinpoint. "We just don't keep that kind of data," says Bob Nelson, chief of the low-level waste and regulation issues section in the NRC's Division of Waste Management.

Vince Adams, who heads the DOE's National Center of Excellence for Metals Recycle, a center committed to recycling as much metal as possible from decommissioned DOE facilities, says that Oak Ridge has released 2,610 tons in the past decade. All the other DOE sites together released 11,129 tons in that time.

Loiselle says that companies tend to protect their data, but he estimates the industry received 15,000 tons of metal from the DOE and commercial reactors during 1996. Approximately half that metal was recycled.

Those thousands of tons are nothing compared with the heaps of metal we could see as more and more nuclear reactors tumble to the ground in the next twenty years.

The sheer volume of available radioactive metal is astonishing. "DOE has 3,000 to 4,000 facilities that are in D and D [Decommission and Decontamination] state," says Loiselle. "There are 123 commercial nuclear power plants. Thirteen of these are entering the decommissioning pipeline. As these plants come down, we will be seeing lots of metals and equipment."

According to Adams, the DOE's database shows 1,577,000 stockpiled metric tons for both the DOE and the NRC combined.

"And that is dwarfed by what we've got coming," says Jane Powell, program manager of the DOE's metal recycling center. She points to all the metal at the gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge that was used for the Manhattan Project. That plant now sits idle, awaiting demolition crews. "They have one tunnel there that is a half-mile long," says Powell. "We joke and say you can see the curvature of the earth. You can actually look down and see where the light stops. We are going to have metal coming out of our ears."

That could mean substantial profits for the radioactive metal industry. "We've got metal. We've got a need for it," says Powell. "We need to make it economically viable so that going out and getting virgin metal isn't the answer. We are going out in the real world to create a business. It is a business."

The NRC is planning on unveiling its proposed new standard in October, explains Robert Meck, who is currently conducting research on the standard for the NRC. The standard, he says, will use millirem doses. It will involve "the concept of an average member of the critical group--a group of individuals who can realistically be expected to have the highest dose," he explains. The standard will not invoke "the worst case imaginable. It's really a concept that makes it applicable to the real world."