Widespread Use of Radioactive Scrap Assailed

It is the nuclear age equivalent of beating swords into plowshares: the conversion of mildly radioactive scrap metal from the nation’s obsolete defense arsenal into a vast array of consumer products.

The Cold War rubble has become the raw material for I-beams and automobiles, jewelry and silverware, leg braces and hip replacements.

However, as the volume of radioactive recyclables mushrooms, the federal government still lacks uniform health standards for safely disposing of the material.

Now, environmental groups, labor unions, the metal industry and scientists are demanding that the so-called free release of lightly contaminated materials be stopped.

The critics say the rules for screening out truly hazardous contaminants are obsolete and current policy--requiring no labeling, tracking or recall procedures for material deemed eligible for free release--is a recipe for calamity.

The federal government has been releasing such material quietly for years, trucking if off to municipal landfills and selling it to demolition contractors, scrap dealers and recyclers. Items include furniture, concrete blocks, the structural remains of demolished buildings, even soil from a variety of government installations.

One of those is within the Santa Susana Field Laboratory above Simi Valley operated by Boeing’s Rocketdyne Division. There, government scientists tested several nuclear reactors, manufactured nuclear fuel and made engines for rockets and missiles.

Officials insist that the radioactive matter at Santa Susana and other nuclear research stations is being released in such small, diluted quantities that it is safe.

They point out, for example, that the dose of radioactivity contained in a piece of recycled scrap metal is often less than in a chest X-ray or in the potassium content of a shaker of table salt substitute.

Safety Compared With Savings

Environmental groups counter that the harm from radioactivity, which can cause cancer and birth defects, tends to come from repeated exposure to small doses over many years. Any increase in the amounts of radioactivity that people are exposed to during the course of everyday life is a potential hazard, said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an organization of nuclear critics that has long monitored events at Santa Susana.

“The sea of natural radioactivity in which we all live and from which we cannot escape is estimated to cause 5% to 50% of all cancers and a large fraction of birth defects,” he said. “There is nothing we can do about that except not add to it.”

Hirsch noted that the amount of radioactivity that people encounter in their daily lives, from such sources as cosmic rays or household radon, can produce one cancer case in every 40 people.

But with the volume of recyclable objects from defense facilities alone expected to grow to well over 1 million tons, officials say there are huge savings to be made by exempting slightly contaminated material from requirements that it be stored in dumps designed specifically for radioactive items.

At Santa Susana recently, objections by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) held up a shipment of 100,000 cubic feet of dirt laced with strontium 90, cesium 137 and other long-lived radioactive particles.

Bound for a landfill north of Bakersfield that is not licensed to handle radioactive debris, the soil had been excavated from a pit at Santa Susana where chemical residue was burned for at least a decade.

Boxer and Kuehl have cited government prohibitions against sending the soil to the landfill if the radioactivity is higher than “background”--the levels commonly found in nature.

They contend that, before it approved the soil shipment, the government’s own analysis showed the soil’s radioactivity is higher than background levels. Officials in charge of the cleanup say they have no idea how radioactive material got into the pit.

“Somehow the normal process failed and we ended up with other contaminants, some of them radioactive,” said Steve Laflamme, director of safety, health and environmental affairs for Rocketdyne.

However, Rocketdyne officials insist that the overall amount of radioactivity in the soil is too minute to pose a health hazard, and they still plan to send it to the landfill.

Such disputes are common at Santa Susana and elsewhere. Critics say that poor screening is letting out material contaminated in excess of prescribed levels, that those thresholds themselves are not low enough and that economics is shaping policies that ought to be based on health considerations.

Scientific disagreements over just how much radioactivity is acceptable have frustrated efforts to establish a single health-based national standard designed to shield people from hazardous exposure.

Lacking consensus, officials look to an assortment of regulatory “guidances” and agency orders with widely varying standards of risk tolerance.

“This is an essentially unregulated activity,” said Richard Miller, a policy analyst for the Paper, Allied-Chemical, Industrial and Energy Workers International union.

“The government is saying, ‘Just take this radioactive metal and turn it into knives and spoons, and it will cut the cost of decommissioning,’ ” Miller said. “But I doubt the public would go along with the bargain if they knew how irresponsible the government has been in handling this material in the past.”

The Steel Manufacturers Assn. reports 50 incidents in which materials released for recycling were contaminated at levels higher than the government considers safe.

No one was injured handling the metal, the association says. But at least two companies spent millions of dollars cleaning up contaminated mills. Those costs and the fear of a public backlash against radioactive metal have prompted the association and other metal industry trade groups to issue their call for halting the release of any radioactive materials by government facilities.

“We’re talking about material the government said was ‘clean’ that set off our detectors,” said Tom Danjezek, president of the association. “Unfortunately for the companies, the radioactivity wasn’t detected until after a lot of machinery was contaminated.”

Southern California had its first known brush with a rogue release 11 years ago when UCLA gave away concrete insulation blocks that had undergone a neutron bombardment from a university reactor. School officials admitted at the time that they had not adequately tested the material for contamination and did not know what was done with all of it after the reactor was dismantled.

One effect of neutron bombardment of an object close to a reactor is that the material is permeated with radioactivity, resulting in a condition known as “volumetric” contamination, for which there is still no federal cleanup standard.

Just four months ago, the U.S. Department of Energy put a temporary ban on the release of volumetrically contaminated metal until a regulation could be formulated.

To regulate surface radioactivity, the department has been relying on a 1974 guidance, or recommendation, that set contamination limits on the basis of what detection equipment of the time was capable of sensing.

The regulatory guidance used by the Energy Department tolerates a broad spectrum of risk, depending on the radioactive element involved. For some elements, the guidance would permit a risk of up to one cancer case per 300 people exposed. For others, the risk level is well beyond one per 1 million people exposed.

On the other hand, the Environmental Protection Agency requires a fixed risk standard of one cancer case per 1 million people. However, the EPA can grant exemptions to that standard.

Both the EPA and the Energy Department have been involved in the Santa Susana cleanup, although EPA officials are playing a subordinate role. An EPA oversight team arrived on the scene early this year only to find that the Energy Department had torn down several of the buildings the EPA had asked to inspect.

“We were asked by the local community to look over the [Energy Department’s] cleanup, and we’ve tried to flex what little muscle we have in the situation,” said Tom Kelly, the EPA’s project manager at Santa Susana. “We wouldn’t send radioactive waste to commercial recyclers. . . . But we can’t order the [Energy Department] not to.”

Kelly was also critical of the pending shipment of contaminated soil to a landfill not licensed to receive radioactive materials. “You look at the [radiological readings], and you question why they chose that path,” he said.

Phil Rutherford, who oversees the Santa Susana cleanup for Boeing and Rocketdyne under contract with the Energy Department, countered that the majority of soil samples taken were within the range of what is found in nature.

He said that there has been no nuclear research conducted at Santa Susana since the late 1980s and that the site cleanup is scheduled for completion in 2006.

Lingering Concerns About Santa Susana

For several years, the thoroughness of the Santa Susana cleanup of chemical waste has been open to question. In 1996, Rocketdyne pleaded guilty and paid a then-unprecedented $6.5-million fine for illegally disposing of hazardous waste after two scientists died when rocket fuel they were burning blew up.

In February, Boxer raised new safety concerns at Santa Susana. She complained to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson that several trailers that had been parked within 200 yards of buildings that once housed nuclear reactors had been donated to the Shandon School District in San Luis Obispo County and to the Wildlife Waystation in the Angeles National Forest, without ever being tested for radioactivity.

In response, the Energy Department tested the trailers, found them to be free of radioactivity but laden with asbestos, and agreed to retrieve them.

In a letter to Richardson, Boxer also said she was shocked to learn that radioactive debris from buildings involved in nuclear weapons production at the lab “has been sent to municipal landfills, sold to scrap dealers and metal recyclers, while other items have been sold to the public.”

Rocketdyne’s Rutherford confirmed that lightly contaminated material has been shipped to a Terminal Island metal-processing and export company, as well as to a privately owned Ventura County ranch and to landfills in the north San Fernando Valley and in Kettleman Hills north of Bakersfield. Neither of those dumps is licensed to receive radioactive waste.

In at least two cases, the recipients say they were unaware of the nature of the material they were getting.

The overriding concern is whether the contamination that slips through is hazardous.

At Santa Susana, according to Rutherford, nothing is released until it passes three separate reviews--by Rocketdyne, the Energy Department and the state Department of Health Services. By then, he said, any hazardous radioactive waste has been carefully segregated for shipment to one of three federal disposal sites for such material--in Washington state, Nevada or Utah.

He said his own analysis of cleanup work, triggered by Boxer’s letter, indicates that material released recently for recycling has met the government’s most stringent standard: the EPA risk level of one cancer case in a million people exposed.

A senior Energy Department official said that although the flexible 1974 “guidance” is still in effect, detection equipment now is much more sensitive. The official said the agency’s goal is to clean up more thoroughly than the guidance requires.

Yet surveys done by an Energy Department contractor show much higher levels of residual radioactivity in at least three buildings that were torn down after being cleared for “unrestricted use.”

According to Rocketdyne, material from the buildings released to nonnuclear landfills and to recyclers was actually lower than the readings for the building itself.

Even the higher overall level of contamination shown for the buildings fell well below the amount of radioactivity the average person is exposed to from natural and man-made sources--such as cosmic rays or household radon--during the course of a year, the officials said.

“For the average person, a little extra radioactivity may not matter,” said Steve Wing, a University of North Carolina epidemiologist who studies the effects of radioactivity. “But not everyone is average. We know pregnant women are more vulnerable, and we are seeing signs that people in their 50s or older are also more at risk.”

But Wing said there is no adequate way to keep material away from more sensitive groups.

“We don’t know where it’s ending up and who is getting exposed,” said Wing, a member of a panel studying health effects at Santa Susana.

“What we do know,” Wing said, “is that as more and more of the stuff gets into the industrial stream it will likely expose many millions of people over many generations. There will be no way to keep it away from sensitive subpopulations.”