Nuclear scrap contaminating consumer goods

By Jonathan Tirone and Subramaniam Sharma Bloomberg News
Published: November 11, 2008

VIENNA: The French authorities made headlines last month when they said as many as 500 sets of radioactive buttons had been installed in elevators around the country. It was not an isolated case.
Improper disposal of industrial equipment and medical scanners containing radioactive materials is letting nuclear waste trickle into scrap smelters, contaminating consumer goods and spurring the United Nations to call for increased screening.
Last year, U.S. Customs rejected 64 shipments of radioactive goods at U.S. ports, including purses, cutlery, sinks and hand tools, according to data released by the Department of Homeland Security in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. India was the largest source, followed by China.
"The world is waking up very late to this," said Paul de Bruin, radiation safety chief for Jewometaal Stainless Processing in Rotterdam, the world's biggest stainless-steel scrap yard. "There will be more of this because a lot of the scrap coming to us right now is from the 1970s and 1980s, when there were a lot of uncontrolled radioactive sources distributed to industry."
Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Energy are already financing a $60 million program to install radiation monitors at ports around the world. The Secure Freight Initiative started in October 2007 at three sites in Britain, Pakistan and Honduras.

About 800 ports worldwide handle cargo containers, according to London's Drewry Shipping Consultants.
Health officials say the levels involved generally would be dangerous only if a person was exposed over a prolonged period of time - like sleeping in a building built with contaminated steel. That is usually not the case.
On Oct. 21, France's Nuclear Safety Authority said elevator buttons assembled by Mafelec, a company based in Chimilin, France, contained radioactive metal shipped from India. Employees who handled the buttons received three times the safe dose of radiation for nonnuclear workers, according to the agency.
But after discovering that their exposure was less than previously reported, another agency, the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Security, said on Oct. 27 that the buttons "should not have any consequences on the health of the exposed personnel."
Operations at the factory are now back to normal and the company has cut ties with the "source" of the radiation, Mafelec said in a statement. "In the worst-case scenario the exposure would have been under that of a medical scan," the chief executive, Gilles Heinrich, said.
Many atomic devices were not licensed when they were first widely used by industry in the 1970s. While most countries have since tightened regulations, it is still difficult to track first-generation equipment that is now coming to the end of its useful life.
Abandoned medical scanners, food-processing devices and mining equipment containing radioactive metals like cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often found by collectors and sold to recyclers, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the UN's nuclear arm. De Bruin said he has found items hidden inside beer kegs and lead pipes to prevent detection.
There may be more than one million missing radioactive sources of various levels worldwide, the IAEA estimates.
"We're passing by the first era of nuclear applications, so disused material is increasing," said Vilmos Friedrich, an IAEA inspector.
Smelting such items contaminates recycled metal used to make new products and the furnaces that process the material.
The danger increases when metal prices rise, pushing scavengers to pick up and sell more material, said Martin Magold, who led a UN team that tracked radioactive metal shipments in Europe.
Prices for scrap steel quadrupled to $665 a ton in Rotterdam during the past five years. After peaking on July 3, prices dropped to $115.50 last week as the slowing global economy eroded demand.
"Because of high scrap prices, any little piece is being sold for recycling," Magold said. "Alarms will go up dramatically in coming years."
Chronic exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cataracts, cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A study of 6,252 Taiwanese people who lived in apartments built with radioactive reinforcing steel found that 117 cancer cases were diagnosed from 1983 to 2005. The research showed a statistically significant increase in leukemia and breast cancer.
"People don't understand the risk," said Dr. Peter Chang, a professor of environmental health at Taiwan's National Medical Center who developed the study. "We have an extreme lack of education."
In 1998, equipment containing cesium-137 was smelted at a foundry in Los Barrios, Spain, operated by Acerinox, the world's largest stainless steel producer. Radiation spread over Italy and France, triggering concern that a reactor had melted down in Russia, according to an IAEA report on the incident.

While only six people were exposed to radiation, the cleanup, hazardous waste storage and interruption of business cost the company an estimated $25 million, the report said.
At the time, Acerinox had radiation detectors installed in parts of the factory and assumed the scrap it purchased had been inspected by the dealer, said Juan Garcia, a spokesman in Madrid for the company. Acerinox has since improved security by spending about €100 million, or $126 million, on "advanced contamination-detection technologies," he said.
The event also led Spain to rewrite rules governing the scrap metal industry and to create an agency that helps recyclers dispose of radioactive materials.
The IAEA may recommend that governments increase monitoring of scrap shipments at international borders and recyclers screen all material entering their plants, according to draft guidelines circulated by the agency.
Many large metal producers in the United States and Western Europe say that they already screen for nuclear material.
"All our steelworks are equipped to verify possible radioactivity contamination of the scrap shipments," Jean Lasar, a spokesman for ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steel maker, said in an e-mail message.
Much of the contaminated scrap originates in or passes through countries with inadequate licensing regulations and detection equipment.
For example, about 1,000 radio-electronic thermal generating units were misplaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Abel González, a former IAEA inspector who helped retrieve such orphaned sources in Russia. The devices, used to power remote lighthouses, each contain as much radiation as was released by the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, he said.
Russia and the other former Soviet states accounted for 13 percent of the scrap exported worldwide last year, according to the World Steel Association, which represents about 180 metal companies.
At the large Indian port of Kandla, most scrap is imported in shipping containers that are unloaded at one of 12 cargo docks. None of it is screened for contamination.
"There are no means as of today to check the radioactive material in the scrap that's imported or exported," said H.C. Venkatesh, a traffic manager at Kandla Port Trust.
India plans to install scanners at Kandla and three other ports that handle about 80 percent of the nation's container traffic. They will become operational starting in April.
Over all, 123 shipments of contaminated goods have been denied entry to U.S. ports since screening began in 2003, according to the Homeland Security data. Of those, 67 originated in India, 23 came from China and 20 were from Canada. This year, a total of 32 cases had been reported through early July.
There is no guarantee materials rejected by the United States will not reappear in countries with less stringent monitoring.
"The only authority we have is that we don't let them into the U.S., so that ship was turned around and those components left the U.S.," said Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Where they went, we have no authority and no control."
In Rotterdam, the busiest European port, mountains rising 30 meters, or 100 feet, of disfigured metal wait to be processed by radiation monitors.
At nearby Jewometaal, De Bruin switched on a dosimeter, the modern equivalent of a Geiger counter. The device squealed as he entered the corner of a warehouse where radioactive metals are stored until they are sent to Covra, the Netherlands' state-run nuclear waste dump.
"We should accept these orphaned sources rather than making a fuss over which country is responsible and who should bear the burden," said Henry Codee, the manager of the facility.
Subramaniam Sharma reported from New Delhi.