Radioactive mesh from China used to make 30,000 filters in Florida

It was the fall of 2007, and the steel mesh that had just arrived from China was radioactive. No one knew it.
Pall Aeropower Corp., a Fort Myers, Fla., parts manufacturer, had ordered the 20,000 pounds of metal to use to make hydraulic filters for airplanes. Unknown to the company, the mesh had been tainted with Cobalt-60, a radioactive material dangerous in high doses.
Unaware of the contamination, Pall Aeropower produced 30,000 filters, said John Williamson, administrator of Florida's Bureau of Radiation Control.
By the time the radioactive material was detected, Pall had already shipped 20,000 tainted filters to companies involved in manufacturing and fixing airplanes, Williamson said.
The mesh was only slightly radioactive -- emitting 0.12 millirems of radiation per hour, according to a November 2007 Florida Department of Health report. At that level, the mesh would give off the equivalent of a chest X-ray -- about 20 millirems -- every 160 hours, an amount too low to cause an immediate or directly apparent health threat, the report said.
The Pall incident is far from the only example of radioactive isotopes finding their way into metal products in Florida. Tainted metals have slipped into state scrap yards, trash dumps and manufactured goods, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports retrieved from the national Nuclear Material Events Database, a little-known library of 18,740 radioactive-material incidents, the vast majority since 1990.
The database shows that Florida has had 1,646 reported incidents, the third-highest of all states. But that number is far from a full accounting, because no law requires Florida scrap and recycling outfits to screen for radioactive material or report any they discover.
And even if a Florida metal facility detects radioactivity, there is nowhere to safely dispose of it.
That is because a disposal site in Barnwell, S.C., stopped accepting radioactive material from 36 states, including Florida, last summer. As a result, Florida and the others have nowhere in the United States legally to dump low-level contaminated waste.
"For many people, there is no way to dispose it," said Williamson, the Florida official. "The scrap-metal dealers are going to find more (castoff radioactive material) because there is no disposal option."
This new problem comes after a Florida metal-processing plant inadvertently melted a radioactive item. The incident occurred in July 2001 in Jacksonville, Fla., when Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope common in nuclear waste, slipped into metal recycler Ameristeel's facility, when a thunderstorm disrupted its monitoring system, creating 1.4 million pounds of a radioactive byproduct. It cost $10 million to clean up the plant, according to an NRC report.
The melting led to a broad safety overhaul by Ameristeel, according to Jim Turner, corporate environmental director of Ameristeel's parent company, Gerdau Ameristeel. The company developed radiation procedures at each steel mill, and Gerdau Ameristeel has installed up to $1 million in radiation equipment at each of its 19 mills.
Twenty-two people worked near the radioactive material, but no one was immediately harmed, according to Turner and an NRC report on the incident.
The story of how tens of thousands of fuel filters in Florida came to be contaminated with radioactivity starts in China, where the tainted metal was forged. From China, the metal entered the United States through the Port of Los Angeles and was then shipped through Texas, said Charlie Adams, an emergency-response supervisor for the state of Florida.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they scan incoming containers for radioactive material, and they had no idea how the steel mesh got into the United States.
"I haven't the foggiest," said Ira Reese, executive director of Customs' Laboratory and Scientific Services section in Washington.
But Williamson thinks he knows how the metal slipped in. Incoming shipping containers moving through border radiation monitors pass at 5-10 mph, which can be too fast for a monitor to catch, he said.
"If it had been moving at that speed, you wouldn't have been able to detect it," Williamson said.
As Pall Aeropower produced the filters, it collected leftover scraps of waste and sent them to a nearby metal recycler, Allied Recycling. There, the tainted metal set off radiation alarms: Aside from the 20,000 filters that had been distributed, another 10,000 filters remained at the Fort Myers plant, U.S Environmental Protection Agency documents obtained by Scripps Howard News Service show.
But a Pall spokeswoman said no radioactive metal was shipped to customers. Spokeswoman Pat Iannucci said the tainted metal was identified before any went to market.
Neither the company nor the state bureau of radiation control could reconcile the differing accounts of the distribution of the filters.
Pall's immediate response after learning of the contamination was to stop production, alert authorities and quarantine the materials, Iannucci said. Now, Pall requires metal suppliers to provide third-party certification that the materials they send are safe.
"Everything we did was with a 'safety first' objective," Iannucci said.
Because the radiation levels were so low in individual filters, the state didn't issue a recall, Williamson said.
While responding to the incident, Florida officials consulted with the EPA, which decided not to take responsibility for disposing of the remaining 10,000 filters.
They left that task to Florida state officials and determined that there was little risk of dangerous radioactivity spreading from the filters. Pall stored them out of the way until they were sent back to China, Williamson said.
E-mail Isaac Wolf at wolfi(at)shns.com

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