Texas has highest number of radioactive metal incidents

For more than a month in the summer of 2006, a metal recycler in Longview, Texas, produced half a million pounds of radioactive material, state and federal documents show.
When LeTourneau Inc. workers melted Cesium-137 -- a radioactive material commonly released in nuclear accidents -- the dust containing the radioactive isotope contaminated the workers, along with sections of the facility, according to a July 2006 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission report.
No workers suffered direct or immediate harm that could be detected in medical screening. And none of the metal sent to LeTourneau's customers was radioactive, according to the report.
But the NRC, which operates under no rules for how much radiation should be allowed in U.S. metal, allowed the 250 tons of tainted waste to be disposed of without agency oversight, according to a 2007 NRC ruling.
A LeTourneau spokesman did not return multiple calls requesting comment.
The LeTourneau case was one of 2,147 incidents identified in Texas since 1990 -- the most of any state -- 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.
Far from comprehensive, the database consists mostly of reports that were voluntarily reported to state agencies by landfill operators, metal companies and medical facilities.
But because neither the federal government nor any state -- including Texas -- 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 the knowing transport of radioactive material must be reported to the U.S. Department of Transportation.)
The contaminated material that has surfaced in Texas and elsewhere comes from factory measuring sensors, specialized medical equipment, smoke detectors and even lighted exit signs, which all use small amounts of radioactive isotopes in their operation. These tools and devices can be left behind when a factory closes or simply discarded as scrap.
This castoff radioactive material then can find its way into the recycling stream, where it can be blended with other scrap, creating recycled metal that poses potential health and environmental hazards.
Even when a Texas metal facility finds lost radioactive items, there is nowhere to safely dispose of the material. In July 2008, a low-level radioactive-waste site in Barnwell, S.C., closed, leaving Texas and 35 other states without a dumping site.
Texas has tried to tighten its oversight of tainted material. Seven years ago, the state introduced more rigorous documentation requirements for businesses possessing radioactive material and began charging an annual fee, said Richard Ratliff, radiation-control program director for Texas. That has led to fewer lost devices and better tracking of them, he said.
"We knew those devices were having problems. People were forgetting them," Ratliff said. "We just thought, there's no reason people shouldn't be more accountable."
Most of the radioactive scrap located in Texas comes from commercial oil and gas operations, Ratliff said. In Abilene, authorities found an empty radioactive container in March that had been used in an oil field, said Bill Whitley, of Abilene's Community Enhancement division.
In the LeTourneau incident, the facility either didn't have detectors or simply wasn't using them, Ratliff said. After the melting, the company updated its equipment.
"Now they have hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of instrumentation," Ratliff said.
Other radioactive meltings in the Lone Star State include a May 1992 incident when El Paso metal recycler Border Steel melted Cesium-137 into a batch of iron, according to a barebones NRC report that provided no more details. In September 1993, Chaparral Steel in Midlothian also melted Cesium-137, according to a December 2007 Texas Department of State Health Services report.
Radioactive material has also been stolen in Texas. In 1996, at a Houston storage facility, someone swiped industrial X-ray devices containing the isotopes Cobalt-60 and Iridium-192. One of the devices was dropped near a scrap yard, where its protective shield was dislodged.
Scrap workers were exposed to dangerously high levels of radioactivity when they recovered the device, according to research by radiation experts James Yusko, of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and Joel Lubenau, who formerly worked for the NRC. Through reports, articles and personal correspondences, the two have unofficially tracked radioactive melting incidents in the United States and around the world.
In the LeTourneau incident, radioactive Cesium-137 somehow slipped into the facility in June 2006. But investigators could never determine what scrap item contained the isotope because the culprit was fully melted in the process, Ratliff said.
Before the Cesium-137 could get blended into the steel that was being produced, it was blasted into something called furnace dust. A byproduct of steel production, this dust is captured to keep toxic materials from being released into the environment.
LeTourneau shipped a load of this dust to Horsehead Resource Development in Rockwood, Tenn., in June 2006, according to the NRC. Instead of just throwing away the dust, companies like Horsehead recover useful materials from it for other industrial purposes.
When the dust finally arrived in Tennessee two weeks later, it triggered Horsehead's radiation alarm and was sent back to Longview. It took the truck nearly two weeks to reach the LeTourneau facility, about 600 miles away.
All the while, LeTourneau continued to run its furnaces, creating even more radioactive dust, according to the NRC report. Finally, on Aug. 6, 2006 -- at least five weeks after the radioactive material was melted -- LeTourneau shut down its furnace, the NRC report said.
None of the actual metal sent to LeTourneau's customers was found to be radioactive, according to Texas Department of State Health Services documents.
Officials found radiation levels in the facility's ash hopper and silo to be nearly the equivalent of receiving a chest X-ray every eight hours, though these most highly contaminated areas were not where the employees would have been working, according to a Texas state report. Tests showed that employees received some radiation, but nothing more than a fraction of an X-ray.
What resulted, however, from the incident was 250 tons of radioactively contaminated dust, according to a March 20, 2007, NRC ruling published in the Federal Register. In that decision, the NRC allowed the radioactive waste to be disposed of without NRC oversight. The NRC said that because the waste had such a low concentration of radioactivity, it would not "significantly impact the quality of the human environment."
The NRC granted permission for that tainted waste to be delivered to U.S. Ecology Idaho, a treatment and disposal facility near Grand View, Idaho.
E-mail Isaac Wolf at wolfi(at)shns.com.

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