Radioactive Recycling

If the Department of Energy has its way, the nation’s nuclear garbage could end up in everyday items like bicycles, frying pans, and baby strollers.

Image: Peter Hoey

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


From the air, the East Tennessee Technology Park looks like clusters of enormous Wal-Marts, sprawling across 4,700 acres in the rural countryside west of Knoxville. But for decades the Oak Ridge complex had a more ominous name — the K-25 site. Its mission: to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

Today, the facility contains tons of contaminated junk — machinery, metal, concrete, and tools — some of which will remain radioactive for generations. Faced with a massive cleanup, the Department of Energy has come up with an ingenious plan to get rid of the slightly radioactive scrap: “recycle” the metal and sell it for reuse. Both the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are quietly revising rules that would allow millions of tons of radioactive garbage at the nation’s weapons facilities and nuclear reactors to be converted into consumer products and building materials. Under the plan, the leftover metal could end up in baby strollers, bikes, frying pans, engine blocks, and I-beams.

“This scrap is an asset,” says Val Loiselle, former director of the Association of Radioactive Metal Recyclers. “Until now, we’ve literally been burying our assets.”

Most low-level radioactive materials are currently disposed of in secure, government-licensed landfills. But as former weapons plants are cleaned up and aging reactors are decommissioned, the volume of nuclear junk is expected to soar. The DOE already has 1.6 million tons of slightly radioactive metals at weapons installations across the country, and the NRC expects to have 8.9 million tons of contaminated steel and concrete to dispose of by 2030.

In the past, both the DOE and NRC have recycled such materials on a case-by-case basis. At K-25, for example, approximately 6.6 million pounds of slightly radioactive material left Oak Ridge’s gates before sales were halted in 2000. The material was treated no differently than any other scrap, and nobody made any effort to keep track of where it ended up.

But with the nuclear scrap heap mounting, federal agencies and industry officials want a formalized recycling program in place to speed up the disposal. The plan calls for setting an exposure standard below which irradiated metals would be deemed “safe” and suitable for release. Because radiation levels would be low, the reasoning goes, there would be no need for labels identifying that the materials came from nuclear reactors or weapons facilities — even if they end up in homes, offices, and schools.

If the changes are implemented, they would end a decades-long policy against the intentional release of radioactivity into the general populace. Opponents of the plan say it could jeopardize public health, exposing consumers to materials previously deemed too contaminated to use. “One day it’s hazardous, the next day it’s safe,” says David Ritter, a policy analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington, D.C. “They just change the definition.”

Some of the most vocal opponents of the plan are those who would be on the receiving end of the “released” materials. “The DOE and the nuclear community cannot use us as a dumping ground for their waste,” says Thomas Danjczek, president of the Steel Manufacturers Association, which processes 70 million tons of recycled material a year. “We worry about damaging the public perception of steel being a safe material. If this goes through, it would kill our market.”

In the past, such concerns have been enough to block attempts to redefine what constitutes radioactive waste. Since 1980, the NRC has twice proposed rule changes declaring some irradiated material as “below regulatory concern,” meaning there would be no limits on its reuse or disposal. Congress eventually intervened to block the rules.

In 2000, hoping to gain support for its newest recycling plan, the NRC contracted with the National Research Council to convene a panel to review its recommended changes. But in March the panel declined to endorse the wholesale release of radioactive materials, observing that the NRC has “failed to convince any environmental and consumer advocacy groups that the clearance of slightly radioactive solid material can be conducted safely.”

Radioactive recycling efforts at the DOE have also run into sharp criticism. In 1999, a federal judge in Washington ruled that not enough was known about the dangers of releasing radioactive materials at the K-25 site. “The potential for environmental harm is great, especially given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which [officials] seek to recycle,” U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler declared.

Despite the widespread opposition from consumer advocates, steel manufacturers, and scientists, federal officials appear determined to proceed with recycling. The reason? Dollars and cents. If decommissioned debris from the nation’s 103 nuclear plants must be buried in secure landfills, costs to the utility industry may hit $12 billion. If the rubble can simply be carted to the nearest landfill or scrap metal broker, the price could be as low as $300 million.

History offers some indication of what can happen when radioactive materials find their way into consumer goods. In the early 1980s, contaminated metal from unknown sources was fabricated into jewelry (wearers developed cancer and lost their fingers) and restaurant table legs (most were detected prior to delivery, but some patrons and employees may have been exposed to radioactive cobalt 60). In 1998, occupants in Taiwanese apartment buildings made with radioactive steel beams began reporting health problems, and a Michigan manufacturer was forced to recall hundreds of La-Z-Boy recliners after learning that the rocker springs contained radioactive metal.

Despite the health risks, global trade in radioactive materials is thriving. The European Union has already set standards allowing the release of materials contaminated with what it calls “trivial” amounts of radiation, and industry trade groups like the Nuclear Energy Institute are pressuring the United States to follow suit. “Consistency with standards set by other nations and international agencies is important,” the NRC declared in a 1999 report, “because materials can be both imported and exported between the U.S. and other countries, and differing standards could create confusion and economic disparities in commerce.” Officials at the Department of Transportation are currently revising rules on radioactive shipments to conform to international guidelines.

But with so much of the current regulatory focus on economics and commerce, consumer advocates worry that a simple fact of physics is being overlooked: Any dose of radiation, no matter how small, increases the risk to public health. And if a host of recycled products ßoods the market, there will be no way to measure the effects of multiple doses.

“When it comes to ionizing radiation, you can’t draw some line and say anything above that line is dangerous and anything below is safe,” says Ritter, the policy analyst with Public Citizen. “You have to ask: What is avoidable, what is preventable?”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate