From bloomberg.. one more reason to buy used
Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) — 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 wasn’t 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, threatening the $140 billion trade in recycled metal and spurring the United Nations to call for increased screening.
Last year, U.S. Customs rejected 64 shipments of radioactive goods at the nation’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 BV 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.”
On Oct. 21, the French nuclear regulator said elevator buttons assembled by Mafelec, a Chimilin, France-based company, contained radioactive metal shipped from India. Employees who handled the buttons received three times the safe dose of radiation for non-nuclear workers, according to the agency.
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,” Chief Executive Officer Gilles Heinrich said.
1 Million Missing Sources
Many atomic devices weren’t 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 such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often picked up by scrap collectors and sold to recyclers, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear arm. De Bruin said he sometimes finds such items hidden inside beer kegs and lead pipes to prevent detection.
There may be more than 1 million missing radioactive sources worldwide, the Vienna-based IAEA estimates.
“We’re passing by the first era of nuclear applications, so disused material is increasing,” said Vilmos Friedrich, an IAEA inspector. “Until recently, there hasn’t been licensing” for industrial devices.
`Alarms Will Go Up’
Smelting such items contaminates recycled metal used to make new products and the furnaces that process the material. Cleanups cost as much as $30 million, according to the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling, which represents metal, paper and glassmakers.
The danger increases when metal prices rise, pushing scavengers to pick up and sell more material, said Martin Magold, who led a Geneva-based UN team that tracked radioactive metal shipments in Europe.
Prices for scrap steel quadrupled to $665 a ton in Rotterdam over 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.”
Nucor Corp., the biggest U.S.-based steel producer, has spent more than $1 million installing and upgrading radiation detection equipment at its plants, said Steve Roland, environmental director for the Charlotte, North Carolina company.
“Orphaned sources are a significant problem worldwide for the recycling industry,” Roland said. “Anything governments can do to remove sources from commerce and hold people accountable for the loss is to our benefit.”
Cancer, Birth Defects
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.”
