The U.S. government's only effort to hunt down castoff radioactive waste has recovered just 4 percent of the estimated 500,000 X-ray machines, industrial sensors and other items discarded across the country.
In the past decade, the U.S. Department of Energy's Off-Site Source Recovery Project in New Mexico has retrieved 21,000 items, said project manager Julia Whitworth.
It currently has a two-year waiting list and a 9,000-item backlog -- and is fielding requests to collect an additional 2,000 newly detected items a year.
But these efforts are only a drop in the bucket. The Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, estimates there are 500,000 radioactively contaminated metal objects unaccounted for in the United States.
Started in 1999 as a place research institutions could send their unneeded highly radioactive instruments, Energy's recovery program was broadened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to include the less-dangerous items, such as measuring gauges and smoke detectors that use small amounts of radioactive isotopes, Whitworth said.
These radioactive leftovers -- called "orphan sources" by some -- often are left behind when factories or medical facilities close. Other times they are simply dumped by those who don't want the expense of properly disposing of them.
Left loose, the items can pose a threat to people or the environment if their radioactive components are exposed. More commonly, they become mixed with other recycled scrap and then contaminate the reprocessed metal -- and goods manufactured from it -- that results.
With a $15.5 million annual budget, the federal recovery project puts a priority on recovering equipment containing more dangerous material, such as abandoned blood irradiators, which are used to purify blood used in transfusions and transplants, Whitworth said. The irradiators contain Cesium-137, an isotope that remains radioactive for 180 years.
The project's backlog is for collection of items containing less radiation. It ballooned last July with the closing of a commercial low-level radioactive-waste site in Barnwell, S.C. That shutdown left 36 states with nowhere to dump their radioactive material.
To track down the items, authorities are reaching out to private industry and scrap-metal companies. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a training program for scrap workers and a poster explaining what to do if a radiation alarm goes off. The recovery project is working with industry and states to consolidate recovered material.
The Energy recovery project has about 15 full- and part-time employees, said Nancy Ambrosiano, a spokeswoman for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which houses the program.
Of the 21,000 rogue items retrieved by the project, about 4,500 were collected over the past two years by the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors, an association of state and local government radiation officials, said Terry Devine, a technical assistant for the organization.
Until last summer, the recovery program sent the items it collected to the Barnwell facility, but now dumps it at two Energy Department disposal areas -- the Nevada Test Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, outside Carlsbad, N.M.
E-mail Isaac Wolf at wolfi(at)shns.com

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