Editorial: The hidden radiation around us

Admittedly, it sounds like bad science fiction, but long-term exposure to such products as diverse as reclining chairs, common kitchen utensils and tableware, elevator buttons and construction steel could be a long-term health hazard.
That's because radioactively tainted metal is increasingly turning up in common consumer goods and industrial products, thanks to widespread use of radioactive isotopes, increased recycling in the United States that sometimes inadvertently processes them and imports of metal products from countries like China that have a relaxed attitude toward consumer safety. And there are reports that exporters in China, India, the former Soviet bloc and some African nations are taking advantage of the fact that the United States has no regulations specifying unacceptable levels of radiation in imports.
The health hazards -- for the time being -- are perhaps not great, but as one official said, "There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial."
But as Scripps Howard News Service's Isaac Wolf found out, following extensive interviews, Freedom of Information requests and access to databases, that although the possibility of risk to the public is widely acknowledged, in our highly regulated society there is no federal agency or body of regulation specifically charged with protecting Americans from radioactively tainted products.
Wolf turned up a case from 2008 -- a Chinese-made cheese grater contaminated with Cobalt-60 that was giving off the equivalent of a chest X-ray every 36 hours -- that was almost comical in the way one bureaucracy dished it off to another. After an alert recycler that tested for radiation spotted the hot grater, five agencies -- the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection -- all said they had no authority to force a recall, penalize the manufacturer or dispose of the grater safely.
The cheese grater had fallen into a regulatory gap. By itself, the grater wasn't a threat, but what else is out there? It may be a lot. To cite another of Wolf's examples, 430,000 pounds of steel laced with Cobalt-60 somehow made its way into the U.S. heartland from Brazil.
The solutions are straightforward: A single U.S. agency in charge of oversight over radioactively tainted materials; standards for maximum acceptable levels of radiation; monitors and reporting requirements for scrap yards and recycling centers; incentives for safe disposal of radioactive devices, and penalties for those who don't.

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