Scripps Howard News Service response to comments from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on SHNS' "Recycled Radiation"

This is a response to the three "errors" claimed in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's June 12, 2009 "For the Record" statement about Scripps Howard News Service's investigative project, Recycled Radiation. The NRC statement can be found at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/for-the-record/2009/ml091630471.pdf.

The Scripps Howard News Service investigation found that thousands of everyday consumer products containing radioactive metals have surfaced -- in large part because of a lack of government oversight. SHNS found a troubling pattern: Poorly tracked radioactive material becomes blended with recycled metal and then is used in metal products.

Instead of helping the metal industry by addressing oversight gaps, enforcement shortfalls, inadequate resources to find and collect lost radioactive materials, and the shortage of disposal options for radioactive waste, neither the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other federal agencies have taken responsibility, according to experts quoted by SHNS in its package of 12 stories.

What follows is a point-by-point response to the NRC's criticisms:

NRC complaint that "thousands of everyday products" claimed but not listed, and cases are from years ago.

Response: The NRC's own database -- cursory though it is because the NRC does not require such reports -- contains cases of thousands of consumer products becoming tainted with radioactive material. The reports also are far from comprehensive, lacking many high-profile radioactive material meltings that SHNS discovered elsewhere in its investigation.

Even so, NRC's database includes contains accounts of the following radioactive consumer products, among others, several of which surfaced in the past three years:

• 430,000 pounds of radioactive sheet steel was imported into the United States and was used in at least 1,000 recliner chairs in 1998.
• 44 ladies handbags from India were found to be radioactive in 2006.
• 1,542 ladies handbags from India were found to be radioactive in 2007.
• At least 500 sets of elevator buttons were found to be radioactive in 2008.

The SHNS investigation also reported on scores of radioactive products not included in NRC's database. They included 2,500 cast-iron table legs used in fast-food restaurants across the country, and a shipment of radioactive school desks from Mexico.

Response to "error" 1: "No one is in charge of protecting Americans from products made from radioactively tainted metal."

As the NRC's response says, there indeed are state, federal and non - governmental efforts to track down out-of-use radioactive material and educate the metal industry. SHNS described them all.

The SHNS project included an entire story on the federal efforts, and described the state and non-governmental efforts in most of the other stories.

However, the SHNS articles show that neither the NRC's nor the other entities' efforts are comprehensive. In fact, no one governmental or non-governmental agency is taking primary responsibility to protect the public.

• Oversight efforts are piecemeal, SHNS showed. In response to the discovery of a radioactive cheese grater in Michigan, EPA health physicist Sara DeCair wrote: "EPA's company line would be that this is not regulated by anyone."
• Radiation-protection measures are voluntary. As SHNS reported, there is no federal law requiring metal companies to scan for radioactive materials. This lack of regulatory muscle was reflected in 2006, when a Texas metal recycler that wasn't using radiation detection equipment melted radioactive material.
• Where they do exist, cleanup efforts have a several-years' backlog. The Department of Energy's Off-Site Source Recovery Project -- which is not responsible for collecting all lost radioactive material -- has a 9,000-item waiting list, the effort's program manager told SHNS.
• The current system is not comprehensively tracking low-level radioactive material. As Michael Mobley of the Southeast Compact Commission for Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management told SHNS: "There is no one federal agency responsible for regulating all ionizing radiation, and therefore regulations are fragmented or non-existent in some areas." And when radioactively contaminated metal is found, there's no clear chain of command for responding to it.
• There is no oversight of foreign metal once it leaves the United States. As the SHNS project found, NRC reports reveal that radioactive reinforcement metal from Mexico was found almost 25 years after it was created.
• "You suspect that in some cases they know the material is radioactive but they're going to ship it out anyway because it's money," said Paul Frame, a radiation expert at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in Oak Ridge, Tenn. He was referring to radioactive Indian fencing that continued to surface a decade after it first reached America.
• As the NRC statement claims correctly, metal and recycling companies do indeed have an incentive to not accept or melt radioactive material. But holders of radioactive material have a competing incentive -- to pass off radioactive material so they don't have to pay for proper disposal.

Radioactive material can cost thousands of dollars to dispose of properly. Doug Kramer, a Los Angeles scrap metal company owner, reports radioactive material being hidden in shielding and passed to scrap companies so as to avoid proper disposal costs.

The lack of reporting standards for the metal industry is having a race-to-the-bottom effect: When a Baltimore scrap dealer, Ansam Metals, rejected metal from Texas that set off multiple radiation alarms, the owner of the metal simply sold it to another company, according to Ansam Vice President Steve Steinbach.

And businesses have an incentive to sell or use products with radioactively tainted metal. After one of its cheese graters was found to be radioactive, World Kitchen decided not to issue a product recall on cheese graters.

Another example from SHNS' reporting: After a Florida airplane parts company found out it was using radioactive metal for fuel filters, it did not recall the 20,000 tainted filters that it had sent out, according to John Williamson, administrator of Florida's Bureau of Radiation Control.

Response to "error" 2: "Since last summer, 36 states have had nowhere to dump the radioactively tainted metal, material and products that have come to light."

The NRC is sidestepping the fact that the 2008 closing of a national radioactive waste facility in Barnwell, S.C. left a majority of states without a disposal site for common radioactive items -- the kinds of radioactive items that aren't tracked well, get lost, become blended into recycled metal and are then processed into metal products.

A U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson said in an e-mail interview with SHNS: "With the closure of Barnwell, licensees in 36 states lost the ability to dispose of <30 curie, sealed sources that meet the definition of Class A, B, or C low-level waste - i.e, all Co-60 sealed sources <widely used for irradiation of blood supply and in other applications), smaller Cs-137 and Sr-90 sources, and a wide variety of other sealed sources of various isotopes. These sources comprise a significant percentage of the total number of low-level waste sealed sources."

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that 500,000 of these radioactive sources are unaccounted for in the United States.

Barnwell's closure has caused more radioactive material to get lost. Ahead of Barnwell's closing, the U.S. Government Accountability Office described what state and federal authorities say is now unfolding: "Domestic and international experts contend that the lack of disposal availability for unwanted sealed radiological sources makes them more vulnerable to abandonment, misplacement, and theft that would pose a safety and security risk." (GAO-05-967, page 6).

On July 7, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, answering a question from SHNS after a speech, admitted that the lack of a disposal site plagues cleanup efforts.

When a lost radioactive item -- often called an "orphan source" -- is found, it often has nowhere to go, Jaczko said.

"The biggest challenge that we face, to some extent, is that when we collect these orphan sources, we don't have a clearly-defined disposal site," Jaczko said. "And that's a challenge. It's one of those challenges that the nation faces. It's not necessarily a challenge that the NRC faces, because we have a good regulatory infrastructure in place and the states have good regulatory structure in pace to license those facilities as necessary."

Response to "error" 3: " The NRC…allowed the 250 tons of tainted waste to be disposed of without agency oversight.

After a Texas metal company melted radioactive material in 2006, it created 250 tons of radioactive waste. As SHNS reported, the NRC exempted this radioactive metal-byproduct from NRC oversight.

As cited in the SHNS story, the NRC published a "Notice of Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact for Exemption" in the March 20, 2007 Federal Register.

In this document, the NRC states in the "Identification of Proposed Action:" "The material, upon its receipt at [U.S. Ecology Idaho's] disposal facility, would not be subject to NRC licensing and would not be subject to NRC regulation."

Furthermore, there is evidence that metal companies are gaming the system. Since the NRC decided in 1997 to allow metal producers to dispose of this radioactive waste without NRC oversight, some companies have mixed non-radioactive dust with radioactive dust to get within the allowable limit, Ray Turner, one of the top national experts on radioactive materials who serves as a consultant on low-level radioactive contamination problems at recycling facilities, told SHNS in February.