Abstract
A few of the items that might one day be made from decontaminated radioactive scrap.
BRC: here we go again
Reduce, recycle, reuse may be a mantra for the green 1990s, but there's one aspect to the recycling craze that's being hotly contested: how, or if, to recycle slightly radioactive metals coming out of decommissioned nuclear facilities.
But for some, it's déjà vu.
Back in 1986, and then again in 1990, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) attempted to categorize some extremely low-level radioactive waste as “below regulatory concern,” making the stuff eligible for release without further regulation, restriction, or tracking. According to a World Information Service on Energy briefing, the materials could have been used in consumer products, manufacturing processes, or unloaded into sewers, household garbage dumps, and incinerators–all without public notification.
After a grassroots campaign publicized the scheme, local and state governments began passing ordinances and resolutions requiring ongoing regulatory control. Congress revoked the NRC's “ BRC” policies in 1992.
Now it's 1999, and the issue has returned–this time in the form of 126,000 tons of slightly radioactive scrap at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee. While it would cost $800 million for Energy to bury the scrap from three uranium enrichment buildings at Oak Ridge, instead it contracted with British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd. (BNFL) to remove, clean, and sell the material for a mere $238 million. According to the September 20 U.S. News and World Report, Energy is currently considering the release of an additional 60,000 tons of materials from the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant in Kentucky.
The name BNFL may be new to North Americans, but the British public faced this same issue last year when BNFL, owned by the British government, released 7,000 tons of “decontaminated” radioactive metal from the Capenhurst uranium-enrichment plant. According to a January 28, 1998, N-Base Briefing, the metal, which remains mildly radioactive after decontamination, will be used in the production of cars, windows, and a wide variety of consumer goods, including cooking pans. BNFL claimed, however, that the metal would somehow not be able to find its way into cans for food.
According to BNFL spokesperson David Campbell, most of the materials from the Oak Ridge buildings are contaminated on the surface only and can be decontaminated through scrubbing or sandblasting. But there are also 5,000 tons of nickel that are “volumetrically” contaminated (with radioactive material spread throughout their volume, not just on the surface). Although the amount of radiation in the nickel is below background levels after processing, at least some of the radioactive material mixed throughout any volumetrically contaminated metal is there to stay.
Democratic Cong. John Dingell of Michigan, describing the new “nuclear security” agency established within the Energy Department. Quoted in the San Jose Mercury News September 16, 1999.
The state of Tennessee has given BNFL the go-ahead for recycling, but Campbell said only about 5 percent of the material coming out of Oak Ridge (consisting mainly of the volumetrically contaminated nickel ingots made from melting classified bomb-making components) is being questioned.
Campbell added that BNFL is still able to decontaminate the nickel so it is below background radiation levels. “There's an independent verification process, and if we can't get it below background, we can't release it.”
Public advocacy groups feel that none of these materials belong in the commercial metal supply. They also oppose the setting of a fixed standard, which, they say, would allow even more radioactive material to be released. However, the Association of Radioactive Metal Recyclers wants to see some federal standards.
“Oh, stop grumbling. Someone has to teach freshman enlightenment.”
The association's managing director, Val Loiselle, estimated that in 1999 approximately 9,000 tons of slightly radioactive metal from Energy Department facilities was processed in the United States. With many of Energy's facilities slated for decommissioning in the coming decades, the industry could see another 2.6 million tons over the next 40 years. Still, in an industry that produces more than 100 million tons of metal a year, recycled radioactive metals represent less than a tenth of a percent of the yearly scrap metal supply.
But aside from radiation levels, a looming issue remains–tracking and accountability. Scrap brokers have already started mixing ever-so-slightly radioactive scrap taken from Oak Ridge with general scrap before it heads to the electric arc furnaces, and then into items that qualify as “new” steel products.
Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project, is concerned by the absence of federal guidelines for handling radioactive scrap from decommissioned nuclear facilities, as well as by the fact that “agreement” states (which are allowed by NRC to control certain radioactive materials that are specified in the Atomic Energy Act), such as Tennessee, seem to be moving ahead on their own with a variety of other radioactive substances.
In the case of the material being removed from Oak Ridge, it was Tennessee and BNFL who decided–through independent verification and Energy oversight, according to BNFL–that because the level of radioactivity from the processed nickel would be below the level of radiation allowed on surface contaminated metals, they were in compliance with existing guidelines.
Decisions are “on a case-by-case basis,” Hauter said. “And there's no inventory to let us know what's in this stuff.”
Even though the level of radioactivity in these metals is extremely low, Public Citizen is concerned about what will happen when people unknowingly acquire a variety of items manufactured from any radioactive scrap with above-background contamination. “Setting a standard for one dose is irrelevant because the radiation can be coming from multiple sources,” Hauter said.
“You're basically depending on the steel industry to be a safety net.”
Being the safety net does not make the steel industry comfortable. According to a public policy statement from the Steel Manufacturers Association, there have been more than 50 known incidents in the past 15 years in which companies have inadvertently melted shielded, and therefore less detectable, radioactive sources. To the association, more radioactive materials in the supply means more potential accidents. Eric Stuart, an association staffer, said that it can cost as much as $10-20 million to clean up after a single incident.
Thank you!
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the following foundations in 1999:
Member companies use portal monitors at their front gates to scan for radioactive materials. “They're not 100 percent, but they're the best they can be, and member companies calibrate them down as tightly as they can to right above background levels of radiation,” he said.
A postcard from Greenpeace Atlanta's anti-BRC campaign in 1990.
The association maintains a “zero tolerance” stance. If an alarm goes off, the member company may reject any shipment. “We're not saying that every piece of metal that comes from a decommissioned DOE facility is irradiated to the point where it's unusable,” Stuart said, but his association wants the Energy Department to have a notification process that lets them know where materials came from and what they were irradiated with.
All the industry representatives the Bulletin spoke with as well as a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who asked not to be quoted, said that essentially everything is radioactive in some way or another, and adding slightly radioactive materials into the human environment is harmless.
Diane D'Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information Resource Service, disagrees. “[They're] saying that since there's already a risk, it's OK.”
Unlike voluntary X-rays or medical procedures, or even the smoke detectors many of us choose to place in our homes, releasing recycled radioactive materials to an unknowing public, D'Arrigo added, adds “completely involuntary additional risks” to our already radiation-filled lives, but aside from the safety issue, another remains. Does the American public really want Tennessee, BNFL, and scrap haulers to decide what's safe?
–Bret Lortie
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Drinking a cup of coffee in the morning may make you feel a little perkier, but apparently this is especially true if the day happens to be the one when the bombs fall. Scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Mumbai (Bombay) have found that mice injected with caffeine are up to 70 percent more likely to survive high doses of radiation than their uncaffeinated fellow rodents. As reported in the June 19 New Scientist, of 471 mice injected with 80 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight one half hour before being irradiated with 7.5 grays of gamma radiation, 70 percent were still alive 25 days later. But all 196 of a group of irradiated but uncaffeinated mice died. To put the amount of caffeine in perspective, though–an average person weighing approximately 150 pounds would have to drink at least 100 cups of coffee to get a comparable dose.
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Belgian officials believe that a lot of diamonds recently offered for sale by Russian “businessmen” at Antwerp's famous diamond exchange were radioactive. The idea of irradiating gems is not totally bizarre–some “London Blue” topazes are created by zapping duller-colored stones. These gems, however, were black, a very rare color for a diamond. The Antwerp public prosecutor's office says that the sellers were asking $74 million for the stones, which were probably irradiated at a Russian nuclear power plant. The prosecutor's office expressed concern that, after diamond exchange personnel backed out of a tentative deal, the Russians may have sold the diamonds on the black market (BBC, September 16, 1999).
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Neighbors of the Sellafield nuclear facility who live in the village of Seascale are periodically assured by the British government and the plant manager, British Nuclear Fuels, that the nuclear plant presents no risk to their well being. And that may well be true. But it has not been true for one particular garden in Seascale, where a combination of general hospitality and well stocked bird feeders attracts regular visits from as many as 700 pigeons who live in various abandoned buildings at the nuclear facility (New Scientist, August 14, 1999). Last February, neighbors' complaints about the birds and their droppings forced a health inspection of the garden and the birds. It turns out that the pigeons are highly radioactive (more than 40 times above the European Union's food-safety limit). The garden itself was found to have levels of plutonium and cesium 800 times higher than neighboring yards. Britain's Ministry of Agriculture, which forced a cleanup, has warned people living within a 16-kilometer radius of Sellafield not to handle, kill, or eat pigeons.
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One reader of National Defense magazine argued in the letters column of the May/June 1999 issue that if anti-gun forces insisted on outlawing some types of guns, one weapon the civilian market could readily do without was the .50 caliber Browning sniper rifle, which he described as at the “lower end [of the] long-range shooting market.” This view prompted John Whitworth Engel, another reader, to respond in the July/August issue. Engel argued that it was outrageous to call the Browning “low-end” because it costs several thousand dollars and would be purchased only by someone who was “serious about long-range accuracy.” He also asserted that military long-range shooting would be “nowhere near where it is today had it not benefited from [the] vital input” of a civilian organization, the Fifty Caliber Shooter's Association (National Defense, July/August 1999).
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The folks at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), which is about 80 miles west of Jackson, Wyoming, may have taken on more than they could handle when they planned to build an incinerator and compacting center to reduce INEEL's volume of nuclear wastes. It seems INEEL sought permission to build the incinerator from the Idaho Division of Environmental Quali-ty–but it did not ask for an okay from the ultra-wealthy celebrity residents of nearby Jackson Hole, who include people like famed attorney Gerry Spence, the man who successfully sued Kerr-McGee in the Karen Silkwood nuclear contamination case. Speaking at a meeting in Jackson on August 25, the high-priced, fringed jacket-clad lawyer pledged to do whatever it takes to block the Idaho incinerator. Other contributors to the cause include Wyoming resident and movie star Harrison Ford, who was reported to have written a check for $50,000.
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From time to time, tiny “hot particles”–dangerous fragments of highly radioactive material–have been found at the Sandside Beach, a public beach in Caithness, Scotland, about two miles down the coast from the Dounreay nuclear plant. When two more particles were found in August, Britain's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee was asked to decide whether the beach should be closed or remain open. On August 26 the BBC reported that the committee believed particles would continue to turn up, but that was no reason to close the beach. One member of the committee, academic Keith Body, explained that a beach-goer had a one in a billion chance of ingesting a hot particle (which is about the size of a grain of sand).
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Documents just released by Britain's Public Records Office reveal that in 1954 Winston Churchill told the BBC it would not be “wise” to air any programs about the hydrogen bomb. Angry BBC executives responded that it was outrageous for the government to try to limit the content of programming. Nonetheless, at a February 1955 meeting with then-Defence Minister Harold Macmillan, BBC chairman Alexander Cadogan agreed not to broadcast programs about the hydrogen bomb, fallout, or the effects of nuclear weapons. According to the Times of London (August 20, 1999), the BBC did not produce a program on fallout until the 1980s.
Major Tom to prize control
The Proteus, one of American Burt Rutan's designs aimed at winning the X Prize contest's “race to space.”
It used to be that a trip to the Amazon, Antarctica, or Katmandu qualified as an exotic vacation. No more. Terrestrial adventures seem passé to baby boomers who grew up dreaming of more celestial excursions. Space is tourism's “final frontier.” According to a 1995 survey by the National Aerospace Laboratory, approximately 60 percent of Americans would love to spend their next vacation on an orbital cruise.
Problem is, no one can afford to go. And the obstacles to developing an affordable spaceship appear insurmountable. Even NASA, which hopes to design a reusable rocket that would reduce launch costs from $10,000 to $1,000 a pound, has been unable to deliver. According to an August 26 General Accounting Office report, NASA's lead design, the X-33 reusable rocket, has been plagued by $300 million in cost overruns, frequent test delays, and constant revisions of its performance capabilities.
Many analysts argue that fresh ideas and competing vehicle designs are needed to develop affordable space travel. Gary Payton, an associate administrator of space technology at NASA, told CNN Interactive, “Today's launch vehicles have been stretched, squeezed, augmented, and liposuctioned to the absolute maximum limit. We need to do something different. We need new designs. We need new technologies” (August 24).
The X Prize, a St. Louis-based foundation that promotes the development of “low-cost commercial transport of humans to space,” thinks it has hit on the perfect incentive for producing new ideas: a multi-million-dollar contest. In 1997, the foundation announced that it would award $10 million to the first privately funded team to fly a three-person ship to a suborbital altitude of 62 miles. According to the foundation's Web page (www.xprize.org), the ultimate goal of the prize is to “jump-start” the space tourism industry by generating competition between “the most talented entrepreneurs.”
To make sure the winner has an “economically viable tourist capability,” the foundation requires the ship to repeat its performance within two weeks. The contest guidelines also stipulate that “no more than 10 percent of the flight vehicle's first-flight non-propellant mass may be replaced between the two flights.”
Gregg Maryniak, the executive director of the X Prize, told the Bulletin that the foundation decided to run a contest because “prizes have been singularly important to the development of the aviation industry.” He cited the $25,000 Orteig Prize, which in 1927 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, as an “historical analog” to the X Prize. Just as that prize resulted in Charles Lindbergh's historic flight–which in turn helped spark the development of modern aviation–Maryniak hopes his foundation's “race to space” will stimulate the creation of a “new generation of launch vehicles” to carry tourists to space.
Though he acknowledges formidable obstacles to designing a viable tourism spaceship, Maryniak is confident that someone will come up with a workable design. “I would be astonished,” he said, “if someone didn't win the contest within five years.”
So far, 16 teams have entered. And it is clear from the various proposals that the contest has succeeded in generating a variety of designs, including airplanes fitted with rocket motors; vertical lift-off, single-stage-to-orbit vehicles; numerous reusable rocket designs; and even one quasiflying saucer.
The contest's front-runner appears to be Burt Rutan, president of Scaled Composites, a California-based aerospace company that specializes in lightweight, composite aircraft designs. In 1986, Rutan made headlines when his Voyager became the first aircraft to circumnavigate the globe non-stop without refueling.
Rutan unveiled his X Prize launch vehicle, the “Proteus,” in September. A “turbofan” airplane said to be capable of reaching an altitude of nearly 40,000 feet, the Proteus is designed to serve as the first stage of Rutan's planned two-stage space system. Rutan says the Proteus will carry a rocketship to the “upper edge of the atmosphere,” at which point “the aircraft will pitch up at the same time that the rocket-ship ignites its engines and detaches from the mother ship.” The rocket will then travel from 37,000 feet to 62 miles in less than two minutes and “coast into space.”
Left, an artist's rendering of Steve Bennett's “Thunderbird” capsule; right, Bennett's “Starchaser 1A.”
Another contestant is Steve Bennett, an amateur rocketeer and former toothpaste technician from Dukinfield, England. In 1996, Bennett successfully launched the 21-foot “Star-chaser 2.” His latest rocket, the 22-foot “Starchaser 3A,” launched in August, reached an altitude of 20,000 feet before parachuting back to earth.
In June, Bennett unveiled a full-size prototype of the “Thunderbird,” a three-person capsule to be flown on the yet-to-be-built “Starchaser 4.” According to Bennett's Web page (www.starchaser.co.uk), “Aboard the [Thunder-bird], three Starchaser astronauts will usher in a brand new era of affordable access to space and will instantly become living legends. These Charles Lindberghs of the twenty-first century will bring home the $10 million X Prize and their story will be told for a thousand years.”
Bennett, who has reserved one of the seats on his “history-making” flight for himself, is selling another for a mere $100,000. The third seat is up for grabs in a lottery. His Web page explains: “Two places will be offered to candidates without any prior experience or training. We're going to turn two ordinary people into Buck Rogers.”
–Michael Flynn
Oh no, not another weapon of mass destruction
If contemplating the usual poison gases or deadly plagues doesn't send you into a proper tizzy, maybe you need your anxiety level boosted by dark words about other dangers–stem rust, maybe, or root rot or corn smut. Yes–it's time to worry about plant pathogens and “agroterrorism.”
What, you say, agroterrorism just doesn't inspire the same awful dread as, say, the prospect of a nuclear exchange? Well, if you feel that way, you're not alone, according to Randall Murch, the FBI's deputy lab director in charge of detecting “agroterror attack.”
In early September, Murch complained to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Steve Goldstein that even the government had not “fully embraced” the agroterror threat. When the president issued a statement about domestic activities that needed “enhanced security” in 1997, agriculture didn't even make the list. And as for the general public, Murch seemed scornful: “The public understands a terrorist attack on the Olympics, but not on someone's farm.”
The idea of agroterrorism–and the likelihood of increasing funding levels for those engaged in professional fretting about it–got a considerable boost this year from Ken Alibek, the one-time Soviet bioweapons researcher whose new book Biohazard (reviewed in the September/October Bulletin) described a robust Soviet anti-crop program brimming with pathogens programmed to attack wheat, corn, rye, and rice. Alibek says Russia still maintains these agroweapons in its arsenal.
The threat from domestic terrorists concerns Raymond Zilinskas, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland. Put pathogens in their hands and “anti-smoking fanatics could release tobacco blue-mold disease in the Carolinas. An agricultural conglomerate could wipe out a competitor,” he says.
Meanwhile, when it comes to developing agroweapons, the U.S. government had its own program in the 1950s. Researchers, including biologist Charles Kingsolver, worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, developing wheat and rye diseases and delivery systems designed to maximize their spread. Kingsolver, now 85, recently described one of Detrick's most esteemed weapons, the “feather bomb”–a 500-pound aerial bomb packed with turkey feathers that had been infused with fungus. Released at high altitudes, the feathers were expected to drift to the ground, spreading fungal spores far and wide. But the feather bomb was eventually retired after researchers decided it would be relatively ineffective.
–Linda Rothstein
WEB Watch
Each year humans launch more hardware into space. Other than plain old spying, satellites peer into the cosmos, watch weather patterns, and transfer calls from one side of the globe to the other.
Until now, only those with the right equipment–weathercasters, militaries, governments–could use this hightech gadgetry. But thanks to the efforts of Switzerland's John Walker, the sky's never been more free.
Walker's Earth and Moon viewer lets users see our planet from a variety of perspectives–the Earth as seen from the Sun, the Moon, the night side of the Earth, above any location on the planet specified by latitude, longitude, and altitude, from one of hundreds of satellites in Earth orbit, from the Space Shuttle (when it's flying), or above various cities around the globe.
Once you're done satellite surfing, be sure to check out Fourmilab's top page (www.fourmilab.com) for links to other data collected by Walker, including his Solar System Live page, The Hacker's Diet, and probably more collected information than most of us have time to explore.
While it may be fun to peer down from an orbiting piece of hardware, Heavens Above lets you know where any satellite, or planet, or spacecraft is located at any given moment.
The site not only provides the time a satellite becomes visible, but also detailed star charts showing its track through the heavens–all customized for your location and time zone.
Want to really impress your friends? Take them out to watch the Iridium Flares–those dazzlingly bright flashes that occur when the sun is reflected from one of an Iridium satellite's three main mission antennas (flat, highly polished aluminum surfaces), which when angled just right can reflect the sun just like a mirror, even during daylight hours. There are more than 80 Iridium satellites currently in orbit. By entering your location from one of the millions of choices, Heavens Above will provide a weekly schedule of all the visible flares in your area, as well as what direction to look.
So you've looked down, you've looked up, but the big question of the day seems to be, could someone be looking at us? That's what the people at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have been researching since 1960, but this year Berkeley scientists decided to enlist public support to help crunch the growing mountain of data collected by the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico.
This isn't some small, run-of-the-mill information overload problem. For every complete sky survey–and
Another option is to distribute the task among thousands of smaller computers, such as the millions of home and office computers sitting idle, sometimes for hours each day. Why waste those millions of CPU cycles running some flying toaster screen saver, when your computer could be downloading chunks of raw SETI data, chewing on it for a day or two, and spitting back relevant information for further study. At press time, the number of
So come on, ET, if you're not going to phone home, the least you can do is turn up the radio.
-B.L.