(516.5066) WISE Amsterdam - Tennessee State officials acknowledged that the June 29 action makes Tennessee attractive as a nationwide recycling center for radioactive contaminated metals, but they insist the precedent they've set is safe. The state's approval of the recycling plan set a standard even federal regulators have been wary to set, and the state did so without any public input. "Tennessee is being used to basically distribute radioactive materials to homes and workplaces throughout the entire US," said Reuben Guttman, an attorney for Oak Ridge nuclear weapons site workers who sued the government to try to stop the plan.
The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation approved a foreign-owned company's
experimental process to recycle metals from Oak Ridge. That company, British Nuclear Fuels Limited,
is contracted to clean some of the nuclear age's most contaminated facilities at Oak Ridge. The
company then plans to sell the recycled metal on the open market. The new recycling plan could
expose the public to some radiation, said Mike Mobley, director of radiation health for the state
Environment and Conservation Department. But the metal will go through a cleaning process, and the
company's estimates show the level of leftover radiation would be so low it would pose no danger,
he said. However, this is questioned very much. One of the dangers is that more and more radioactie
material is floating around in the marketplace. There is no way, opponents say, to know whether
metal objects in homes and workplaces are made from recycled radioactive metal. "Nobody keeps a
Geiger counter in the house to check out their stainless steel silverware and their frying pan," as
one of them said.
One of the other objections (raised in the June 29 court case) is the fact that no national
standards exists governing the unrestricted release of volumetrically contaminated metals
("volumetric" contamination means when material is radioactively contaminated not just on the
surface, but also internally). Both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) have attempted to develop federal regulatory standards for
volumetrically contaminated metals. Judge Kessler, in her June 29 opinion, pointed out that the EPA
and the NRC, "after taking years to try to develop national standards, were unable to do so because
of (the) inability to develop consensus in the scientific community." In the absence of national
standards, Kessler said, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, "which has
neither the resources nor the extensive expertise of a national regulatory agency, is the only body
with any supervisory power."
British Nuclear Fuels Limited has a US$200 million DOE contract to clean three stadium-size buildings at Oak Ridge and recycle at least 100,000 tons of contaminated metals there, including 6,000 tons of radioactive nickel. The buildings and its machinery were used to make nuclear weapons fuel.
The Oak Ridge facility is a sister to the uranium enrichment facility in Paducah, where the Department of Energy misled workers about the presence of plutonium contamination (see related story in this issue and WISE NC 515.5056). Plutonium has been found in the Oak Ridge facility in the same nickel that is destined to be recycled for commercial use.
Sources:
- PR Newswire, 30 June 1999
- Press Release NIRS and Public Citizen, 12 August
- The Nashville Tennessean, 13 August 1999
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