A quarter-century after two Mexican foundries produced thousands of pounds of radioactive metal, the contaminated material continued to cross the U.S. border and reach California.
In March 2006, Hugo Neu-Proler Corp., a Terminal Island, Calif., scrap-metal company, received radioactive rebar -- used as a steel skeleton for concrete buildings -- that investigators eventually traced to the Juarez, Mexico, foundries and the contaminated batch they had produced in 1983, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports.
The bad metal the California company received was forged in Mexico, after a disassembled hospital X-ray machine was sold as scrap to the two Juarez foundries.
The foundries, in turn, melted it with other scrap, creating a Cobalt-60-laced batch of metal that, nearly 25 years later, found its way to Hugo Neu-Proler.
In fact, the metal dealer received nine shipments of radioactive Mexican rebar between November 2004 and August 2006, according to NRC reports. Of those, six shipments came from the same Mexican scrap dealer -- Yarda Lupita of Mexicali. Hugo Neu-Proler shipped the hot rebar back to Mexico, the reports said.
Hugo Neu-Proler officials declined to comment.
The Juarez melting -- which is estimated to have created as much as 1.9 million pounds of contaminated material -- stands as the largest known production of radioactive metal in North America, according to research by James Yusko, a radiation expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and Joel Lubenau, formerly of the NRC, who have compiled an unofficial list of such incidents.
That metal from Juarez did not surface in California alone. In 1983, authorities found 2,500 cast-iron table legs made from the same batch in U.S. fast-food restaurants and other sites in 42 states, according to the research by Yusko and Lubenau.
The tainted mountain of metal created in Juarez is far from the only example of radioactive material finding its way to California scrap yards, trash dumps and recycling facilities and into manufactured goods.
Eight years ago, for instance, U.S. border authorities in San Diego caught a shipment of radioactive school desks bound for the United States from Mexico, turning it back before it crossed the border, said Gonzalo Perez, chief of radioactive-materials licensing for California's Department of Public Health.
Those cases are among 1,810 incidents identified in California -- a total surpassed only by Texas, with 2,147 -- in which radioactive metals have turned up in scrap yards, trash dumps and manufactured goods, according to NRC reports analyzed by Scripps Howard News Service. The cases are compiled in the national Nuclear Material Events Database, a little-known library of 18,740 radioactive incidents, the vast majority since 1990.
The database consists mostly of reports that were voluntarily reported to state agencies by landfill operators, metal companies and medical facilities, and is not considered by the NRC or other agencies to be a definitive compilation of incidents.
Because neither the federal government nor any state -- including California -- requires those businesses to screen metal goods for radiation or report it when found, the true magnitude of the problem is unknown. (The only mandatory rule is that anyone knowingly transporting radioactive material must notify the U.S. Department of Transportation.)
The problem is currently compounded because California -- along with 35 other states -- no longer has anywhere to dispose of any radiation-contaminated materials and goods it finds. Last July, the only low-level radioactive waste site available to those states -- in Barnwell, S.C. -- stopped accepting the tainted material.
Reflecting its position as an entry point for Asian goods, California also has been the destination for radioactively tainted goods and material from that continent.
According to a bare-bones NRC report, U.S. Customs agents at the Port of Oakland determined in March 2005 that a load of China-made hinges destined for Cleveland contained Cobalt-60. The hinges were found to be emitting 0.05 millirems per hour. Americans receive about 300 millirems a year from naturally occurring radiation sources. At that level, the hinges would emit the equivalent of a chest X-ray -- about 20 millirems -- every 400 hours.
Even so, California officials, after consulting with the NRC, allowed the hinges to enter the country. No further explanation is given in the reports.
State official Perez, who wasn't part of the decision-making and could shed no light on it, said he is not aware that any California company in the past 10 years has inadvertently -- or intentionally -- melted radioactive metal in its operations. Perez said that makes him optimistic that metal brokers and recyclers are using radiation detectors and monitoring more effectively.
But Perez acknowledges his ability to make that assessment is limited, because California does not require landfill operators or metal dealers to report any radioactive metal they find.
Doug Kramer, owner of recycling company Kramer Metals in Los Angeles, said California and U.S. metal dealers are always on guard against contaminated material.
But despite their efforts, the industry has no failsafe way to prevent radioactive sources from entering the scrap stream.
"We don't know where they are," Kramer said. "There's no good safeguard."
E-mail Isaac Wolf at wolfi(at)shns.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Recycled Radiation