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

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

"Since 1993, the three companies have shipped some 5.5 million pounds of radioactive steel scrap to China from Louisiana and Texas," Shinkle found.

"We have every reason to believe they handle it safely in China," Pierre DeGruy, spokesman for Texaco Exploration and Production Inc., told The Advocate. "The radioactive material reached a high reading of 2,000 microrems per hour, DeGruy said. That's about 400 times the background radiation levels from natural sources in Louisiana," The Advocate reported.

The companies all told Shinkle that they planned to keep selling radioactive scrap to China.

"`They need steel, and they're looking to get it any way they can,' said Larry Wall, spokesman for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. And the oil companies can sell the metal to the Chinese rather than paying for its costly cleaning or disposal at radioactive waste facilities in the United States."

Texaco and Phillips Petroleum say they no longer send the metal overseas. They now reprocess it here in the United States. Mobil spokesman Bill Cumming says the company has not exported metal to China since 1996, but might again in the future. "It remains a legal option for us to do so," he says.

Nina Sato, a Japanese journalist and author of the book We Are All

Exposed, gave the only talk at the Beneficial Reuse conference that strongly criticized the recycling of radioactive metal. Her reason: It is showing up in Taiwanese buildings. "In the past two days, we have heard about how recycle and reuse are good things," she began. "My stories talk about when it turns out to be a disaster."

As of January 1998, says Sato, there were 178 buildings known to be contaminated with radiation in Taiwan. The buildings contained 1,573 apartments. Residents began to find radiation contamination in steel pipes and fittings.

According to news reports on the incidents, some Taiwanese officers knew about the apartments constructed out of radioactive steel bars, but concealed that information from tenants for more than a decade. The apartments showed some background radiation levels at more than 1,000 times that of most buildings in Taiwan. The people who lived in the apartments suffered from congenital disorders, various cancers, and unusual chromosomal and cytogenetic damage, reported The Lancet.

"Taiwanese are still living in the buildings because it's not easy to move out," says Sato. She cites high housing prices in Taiwan and the impossibility of selling an apartment once people know it has radioactive contamination.

So the inhabitants tend to come up with practical, if questionable, solutions "Sometimes it's only in the kitchen," says Sato. "You just close the kitchen. Sometimes it's only one bedroom. You close the bedroom."

Sato says radioactive metal is coming into Asia from former Soviet bloc countries and from the United States. "The worst thing is," she says, "Russian metal is very cheap."