Nuclear spoons: hot metal may find its way to your dinner table.

The Department of Energy has a problem: what to do with millions of tons of radioactive metal. So the DOE has come up with an ingenious plan to dispose of its troublesome tons of nickel, copper, steel, and aluminum. It wants to let scrap companies collect the metal, try to take the radioactivity out, and sell the metal to foundries, which would in turn sell it to manufacturers who could use it for everyday household products: pots, pans, forks, spoons, even your eyeglasses.

You may not know this, but the government already permits some companies, under special licenses, to buy, reprocess, and sell radioactive metal: 7,500 tons in 1996, by one industry estimate. But the amount of this reprocessing could increase drastically if the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the burgeoning radioactive metal processing industry get their way. They are pressing for a new, lax standard that would do away with the special permits and allow companies to buy and resell millions of tons of low-level radioactive metal.

If the rules change, the metal companies could increase their output a hundredfold. And the standard the companies seek could cause nearly 100,000 cancer fatalities in the United States, by the NRC's own estimate.

"We're looking at an exponential increase," says Diane D'Arrigo, a staff member at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, which is fighting the push to recycle radioactive metal. "Think about the metal you come into contact with every day. Your IUD, and your bracelets, your silverware, the zipper on your crotch, the coins in your pocket, frying pans, belt buckles, that chair you're sitting on, the batteries that are in your car and motorbike, the batteries in your computer."

A June 30 memorandum from John Hoyle, NRC Secretary, announces the Commission's decision to establish a new, legal dose of radiation for metals released from nuclear facilities.

"This level should be based on realistic scenarios of health effects from low doses that still allows quantities of materials to be released," says the letter. "The rule should be comprehensive and apply to all metals, equipment, and materials, including soil."

Metal companies want that standard to be in the vicinity of 10 millirems per year. A millirem is a unit of measure, based on the standard man, that estimates the damage radiation does to human tissue. The NRC studied the health effects of such a standard back in 1990. It found: "A radiation dose of 10 mrem per year ... received continuously over a lifetime corresponds to a risk of about 4 chances in 10,000" of fatal cancer. That translates to 92,755 additional cancer deaths in the United States alone.

Many scientists argue that any release of hot metals into the product stream is a serious health hazard.

John Gofman is a former associate director of Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and co-discoverer of uranium-233. "There is no safe dose or dose rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold-dose," said Gofman. "Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not `hypothetical,' `just theoretical,' or `imaginary.' They are real."

Karl Morgan, known as the father of health physics, shudders at the idea of more and more radioactive metal entering people's homes. He is particularly worried about dental fillings. "You certainly don't want people going around with radioactive teeth," he says.

Some of the most dangerous radioactivity around the home, says Morgan, will be the metals people unintentionally ingest. "Some of these find their way directly into the human body, especially copper and iron, stainless steel [from] knives and forks," he says. "It doesn't help any cell in the human body if you send an alpha particle through it."

Richard Clapp, associate professor in the department of environmental health at the Boston University Schools of Public Health, says you may soon need to fear household products you have most contact with: "If you're sitting on it, or if it's part of your desk, or in the frame of your bed-where you have constant exposure and for several hours," you will be in most danger.

Clapp, who published a study on the increases in leukemia and thyroid cancers associated with low-level radiation exposure among people living near a Massachusetts nuclear power plant, says radioactive metal recycling will raise overall radiation levels. "Who in their right mind would want to do that?" he asks. "This is the legacy of an industry gone mad."

It's early August, and I'm attending the "Beneficial Reuse" conference of the Association of Radioactive Metal Recyclers, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

"We were not always called Beneficial Reuse," says Val Loiselle, chairman of the association, during his opening speech. "In our first year, we were called the Radioactive Scrap Metal Conference."

This is the sixth annual gathering of radioactive metal recyclers. There is a special session for those interested in recycling depleted uranium and a presentation on recycling radioactive concrete.

"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.

Loiselle explains that the government is getting away from measuring exactly how much radiation it will allow in any given product. Instead, it is making more general target assessments based on risk and is considering setting an allowable dose standard. Many industry members advocate a standard that would allow for the release of all metal estimated to give off doses of radiation at 10 to 15 millirems per year. "The dose shouldn't be ridiculously low," Loiselle says. "We've gone too far toward making it zero. That's really not fair to the industry. Nothing is zero. Pick a number, and you'll have a lot of friends here. We'd rather be regulated at 10 millirems or thereabouts."

As Loiselle explains it, the public has no idea what doses it encounters in household products and car parts because the current release standards for those who get special permits are set so close to zero that the radiation is not measurable. "The public health is better served by something measurable," he says. "In a sense, that means a looser or a less stringent standard. Wouldn't it be better if it were something we could measure?"

Not all industry people agree with that. Steven Stansberry, business development manager for Manufacturing Sciences Corporation, doesn't buy the argument that the public needs a measurable standard. "Personally, I'm not an advocate against it because I work in the industry, and it doesn't scare me," he tells me at his plant in Oak Ridge. "But raising it just so you know it's out there in the public seems a little backwards. If you can't measure it, at the worst case it's minimal. At the best case, it's not there," he says. "If it's dose-based, you know it's there all the time."

Some scientists argue that exposure to continual low-dose radiation is potentially more dangerous than a one-time high-level dose. "The cancer curve rises more steeply at low doses than high doses," says Steve Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In the gravel lot outside U.S. Ecology in Oak Ridge, I am looking at drums labeled RADIOACTIVE and SLUDGE and metal boxes (called B-25s or Sea-Lands) identified by millirem dose rates--.4 MR/HR, .8 MR/HR, 2 MR/HR, 5 MR/HR. "This is not a glamorous industry," says Tom Gilman, the company's government accounts manager. In addition to handling low-level radioactive wastes, says Gilman, U.S. Ecology recycles metals contaminated with low-level radioactivity. Most come from commercial sites, but he says some are from the DOE.

Companies pay U.S. Ecology to remove the radioactive metal from their property. If the metal is not highly radioactive and is contaminated only on the surface, the plant scrubs it, then sells it as clean scrap. From there, the metal travels to a steel mill and enters the consumer market. U.S. Ecology is "turning waste into assets," says Gilman.

But Gilman is careful to say the assets his company is recycling into the metal stream aren't completely clean. "'Acceptable' levels is the word to use," he explains. "There's always going to be some level of radioactivity."

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."

Ordinary precautions like wearing respirators won't be enough to protect workers, says Wright. "There isn't anything that protects people."

In addition to cancers, "these exposures also can cause neurological problems," says Jackie Kittrell, a lawyer with the American Environmental Health Studies Project, an Oak Ridge organization that represents workers who have suffered heavy metal exposure and radiation poisoning while on the job. Radioactive metal exposure can "interfere with immune system function," she says.

Even the Steel Manufacturers Association takes a dim view of radioactive metal. Christina Bechak, vice president of the association, expresses a concern that radiation will accumulate on the machines used for shredding and smelting the metal. "Scrap metal is valuable, but we don't want radioactive scrap," she says. Nor is she happy with the proposal to let companies release this metal freely. "The detectors [in the factories] are set very sensitive," says Bechak. She fears that extremely hot scrap will be able to enter the plants in loads of low-level metal, since the detectors do not distinguish between levels of radioactivity. If the detectors sound an alarm for every shipment of low-level metal, the workers may be tempted to ignore the warning or to set the detectors to a less sensitive, and potentially more dangerous, reading. "All the radioactive metal is going to set off the detectors," she says.

The DOE is so eager to get radioactive metal off its hands that it has hired an arm of British Nuclear Fuels, called BNFL, to do the job. The British-government-owned company has already started work at several large buildings on the K-25 site in Oak Ridge that were originally used to manufacture highly enriched uranium for nuclear warheads as part of the Manhattan Project. The $238 million contract stipulates that the company may recycle for profit all the metals it recovers, including a large amount of formerly classified nickel.

When British Nuclear Fuels released 7,000 metric tons of metal contaminated with low-level radioactivity for recycling into consumer goods in Britain earlier this year, it caused an uproar. A spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels explained his philosophy to the London paper The Independent. "It's recycling," he said. "If you have a cup of coffee, you don't throw the cup away, you reuse it."

BNFL's U.S. project has run into a roadblock. A coalition of environmental groups and unions--including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union--recently won a suit that claimed the Department of Energy had neglected to consider the environmental impact of all the metal it planned to release for recycling. The court ordered the DOE to perform an Environmental Impact Statement. The Department of Energy acknowledges 100,000 pounds of metal have been shipped out already, but this metal, the DOE claims, is clean.

Meanwhile, at the K-25 site in Oak Ridge, there have been problems this summer that have nothing to do with BNFL. The DOE accidentally released two hot metal items and claimed they had been thoroughly checked for radiation contamination. In both cases, the state of Tennessee caught the hot releases and returned them to the DOE. "Unfortunately or fortunately, however you look at it, the only pieces of metal the state looked at were the ones found to be radioactive," says John Owsley, assistant director of the DOE's oversight division.

"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."

This approach downplays risks to the sick, the elderly, the young, and those who are particularly sensitive because they are exposed to abnormal amounts of radioactive material through their work. It also fails to specify a maximum dose any member of the public would be allowed to receive.

"After age forty-five, there is a much more dramatic association of radiation with cancer," says David Richardson, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who assisted with a recent study of Oak Ridge nuclear workers sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control. "This is very low-level radiation. What we're looking at is cancer death."

This study adds evidence to Alice Stewart's 1950s research that discovered cancer incidence rose sharply among children whose mothers were exposed to X-rays while pregnant.

A dose-based standard would also change the way the regulators see radioactivity. No longer would they measure how much radioactivity each piece of metal gives off. Rather, the regulators would use a theoretical estimate of how much damage a piece of radioactive metal does to the human body.

"Each of the objects could meet government standards on its own, but there's no limit to the number of objects a person could be exposed to," says D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

"You should err on the side of safety and not expose the public," says Wing, who led a DOE-funded study on nuclear workers at Oak Ridge that concluded low-level radiation exposure is four to ten times more dangerous than previously believed. He says the plan to allow more radioactive metal into the manufacturing process is "like a massive experiment."

While the DOE and the radioactive metal recyclers await a new NRC standard for releasing more hot metal in the United States, the stuff already appears to be causing trouble overseas.

"Our fear is that entrepreneurs have found a way to market it into countries that don't have our strict standards," says Kittrell of the American Environmental Health Studies Project.

In June 1996, Chinese officials in Tianjin, a port city 100 miles southeast of Beijing, stopped a seventy-eight-ton shipment of radioactive scrap metal from the United States. Some of the scrap was thirty times the official Chinese safety limit for radioactivity.

According to an article in European Business Report, the metal came from discarded equipment that had belonged to a U.S. fertilizer company.

An April 4, 1994, article in The Advocate, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, paper, suggests such exports may be widespread. "Radioactive metal is being welcomed by smelters in China, where a booming economy is driving up the demand for steel," reporter Peter Shinkle wrote. Shinkle discovered that three major U.S. oil companies--Texaco, Mobil, and Phillips--were exporting large shipments of oil-field pipe and equipment "encrusted with radium, a radioactive material that is carried to the surface in oil production."

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."

Sato is afraid of accidentally buying a contaminated product. "When I go to the department store, I always bring my Geiger counter," she says. "Frying pan, tatatata," she imitates the sound of a Geiger counter going off. "I'm afraid it's made in China."

"In the future, radiation will be with you all the time," says Sato. "Because no one tried to stop it. All they talk about is money, money, money."

Sato's speech did not dampen enthusiasm at the conference. As Shankar Menon ended his talk, he displayed an overhead slide: THIS IS A RADIOACTIVE WORLD. He added, "This is something we have to put up with, like traffic."

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive. This article was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Inc.