And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: sent by Dawn..thanks..:) Hot Metal May Find Its Way To Your Dinner Table http://www.progressive.org/cusac9810.htm BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC The amount of radioactive metal that already enters manufactured goods is difficult to pinpoint. ''We just don't keep that kind of data,'' says Bob Nelson, chief of the low-level waste and regulation issues section in the NRC's Division of Waste Management. Vince Adams, who heads the DOE's National Center of Excellence for Metals Recycle, a center committed to recycling as much metal as possible from decommissioned DOE facilities, says that Oak Ridge has released 2,610 tons in the past decade. All the other DOE sites together released 11,129 tons in that time. Loiselle says that companies tend to protect their data, but he estimates the industry received 15,000 tons of metal from the DOE and commercial reactors during 1996. Approximately half that metal was recycled. Those thousands of tons are nothing compared with the heaps of metal we could see as more and more nuclear reactors tumble to the ground in the next twenty years. The sheer volume of available radioactive metal is astonishing. ''DOE has 3,000 to 4,000 facilities that are in D and D [Decommission and Decontamination] state,'' says Loiselle. ''There are 123 commercial nuclear power plants. Thirteen of these are entering the decommissioning pipeline. As these plants come down, we will be seeing lots of metals and equipment.'' According to Adams, the DOE's database shows 1,577,000 stockpiled metric tons for both the DOE and the NRC combined. ''And that is dwarfed by what we've got coming,'' says Jane Powell, program manager of the DOE's metal recycling center. She points to all the metal at the gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge that was used for the Manhattan Project. That plant now sits idle, awaiting demolition crews. ''They have one tunnel there that is a half-mile long,'' says Powell. ''We joke and say you can see the curvature of the earth. You can actually look down and see where the light stops. We are going to have metal coming out of our ears.'' That could mean substantial profits for the radioactive metal industry. ''We've got metal. We've got a need for it,'' says Powell. ''We need to make it economically viable so that going out and getting virgin metal isn't the answer. We are going out in the real world to create a business. It is a business.'' The NRC is planning on unveiling its proposed new standard in October, explains Robert Meck, who is currently conducting research on the standard for the NRC. The standard, he says, will use millirem doses. It will involve ''the concept of an average member of the critical group--a group of individuals who can realistically be expected to have the highest dose,'' he explains. The standard will not invoke ''the worst case imaginable. It's really a concept that makes it applicable to the real world.'' This approach downplays risks to the sick, the elderly, the young, and those who are particularly sensitive because they are exposed to abnormal amounts of radioactive material through their work. It also fails to specify a maximum dose any member of the public would be allowed to receive. ''After age forty-five, there is a much more dramatic association of radiation with cancer,'' says David Richardson, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who assisted with a recent study of Oak Ridge nuclear workers sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control. ''This is very low-level radiation. What we're looking at is cancer death.'' This study adds evidence to Alice Stewart's 1950s research that discovered cancer incidence rose sharply among children whose mothers were exposed to X-rays while pregnant. A dose-based standard would also change the way the regulators see radioactivity. No longer would they measure how much radioactivity each piece of metal gives off. Rather, the regulators would use a theoretical estimate of how much damage a piece of radioactive metal does to the human body. ''Each of the objects could meet government standards on its own, but there's no limit to the number of objects a person could be exposed to,'' says D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. ''You should err on the side of safety and not expose the public,'' says Wing, who led a DOE-funded study on nuclear workers at Oak Ridge that concluded low-level radiation exposure is four to ten times more dangerous than previously believed. He says the plan to allow more radioactive metal into the manufacturing process is ''like a massive experiment.'' While the DOE and the radioactive metal recyclers await a new NRC standard for releasing more hot metal in the United States, the stuff already appears to be causing trouble overseas. ''Our fear is that entrepreneurs have found a way to market it into countries that don't have our strict standards,'' says Kittrell of the American Environmental Health Studies Project. In June 1996, Chinese officials in Tianjin, a port city 100 miles southeast of Beijing, stopped a seventy-eight-ton shipment of radioactive scrap metal from the United States. Some of the scrap was thirty times the official Chinese safety limit for radioactivity. According to an article in European Business Report, the metal came from discarded equipment that had belonged to a U.S. fertilizer company. An April 4, 1994, article in The Advocate, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, paper, suggests such exports may be widespread. ''Radioactive metal is being welcomed by smelters in China, where a booming economy is driving up the demand for steel,'' reporter Peter Shinkle wrote. Shinkle discovered that three major U.S. oil companies--Texaco, Mobil, and Phillips--were exporting large shipments of oil-field pipe and equipment ''encrusted with radium, a radioactive material that is carried to the surface in oil production.'' Shinkle spoke with representatives of the three companies. All shared their discovery of the large Asian market for radioactive metal. ''Since 1993, the three companies have shipped some 5.5 million pounds of radioactive steel scrap to China from Louisiana and Texas,'' Shinkle found. ''We have every reason to believe they handle it safely in China,'' Pierre DeGruy, spokesman for Texaco Exploration and Production Inc., told The Advocate. ''The radioactive material reached a high reading of 2,000 microrems per hour, DeGruy said. That's about 400 times the background radiation levels from natural sources in Louisiana,'' The Advocate reported. The companies all told Shinkle that they planned to keep selling radioactive scrap to China. '''They need steel, and they're looking to get it any way they can,' said Larry Wall, spokesman for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. And the oil companies can sell the metal to the Chinese rather than paying for its costly cleaning or disposal at radioactive waste facilities in the United States.'' Texaco and Phillips Petroleum say they no longer send the metal overseas. They now reprocess it here in the United States. Mobil spokesman Bill Cumming says the company has not exported metal to China since 1996, but might again in the future. ''It remains a legal option for us to do so,'' he says. Nina Sato, a Japanese journalist and author of the book We Are All Exposed, gave the only talk at the Beneficial Reuse conference that strongly criticized the recycling of radioactive metal. Her reason: It is showing up in Taiwanese buildings. ''In the past two days, we have heard about how recycle and reuse are good things,'' she began. ''My stories talk about when it turns out to be a disaster.'' As of January 1998, says Sato, there were 178 buildings known to be contaminated with radiation in Taiwan. The buildings contained 1,573 apartments. Residents began to find radiation contamination in steel pipes and fittings. According to news reports on the incidents, some Taiwanese officers knew about the apartments constructed out of radioactive steel bars, but concealed that information from tenants for more than a decade. The apartments showed some background radiation levels at more than 1,000 times that of most buildings in Taiwan. The people who lived in the apartments suffered from congenital disorders, various cancers, and unusual chromosomal and cytogenetic damage, reported The Lancet.. ''Taiwanese are still living in the buildings because it's not easy to move out,'' says Sato. She cites high housing prices in Taiwan and the impossibility of selling an apartment once people know it has radioactive contamination. So the inhabitants tend to come up with practical, if questionable, solutions. ''Sometimes it's only in the kitchen,'' says Sato. ''You just close the kitchen. Sometimes it's only one bedroom. You close the bedroom.'' Sato says radioactive metal is coming into Asia from former Soviet bloc countries and from the United States. ''The worst thing is,'' she says, ''Russian metal is very cheap.'' Sato is afraid of accidentally buying a contaminated product. ''When I go to the department store, I always bring my Geiger counter,'' she says. ''Frying pan, tatatata,'' she imitates the sound of a Geiger counter going off. ''I'm afraid it's made in China.'' ''In the future, radiation will be with you all the time,'' says Sato. ''Because no one tried to stop it. All they talk about is money, money, money.'' Sato's speech did not dampen enthusiasm at the conference. As Shankar Menon ended his talk, he displayed an overhead slide: This Is a Radioactive World. He added, ''This is something we have to put up with, like traffic.'' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Source: http://ipn.intelihealth.com/ipn/ihtIPN?c=234769 ==================================================== Study: Nasal Radium Put Vets At Risk WASHINGTON, Jul 28 (AP) — Navy submariners treated with nasal radium in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s may have a higher cancer risk than veterans who did not get the treatment, a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found. The study represents one of the strongest acknowledgments by the U.S. government to date that nasal radium, which was administered to as many as 2 million civilians as well as thousands of people in the military, could pose health risks. Nasal radium was given mostly to military submariners, divers and pilots who were troubled by atmospheric pressure changes and to children who suffered from colds, tonsillitis, ear infections and sinus or adenoid problems. The VA study found a 47 percent increased risk of deaths from head and neck cancers in submariners who were treated with radium, compared with those who were not treated. There was also a higher, overall death rate. The study, released Tuesday by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., compared deaths among 1,214 submariners who had the treatment with deaths among a control group of 3,176 randomly selected veterans who were not treated. The treated veterans were identified from a log kept at the U.S. naval base in Groton, Conn., where submariners are trained. Many received the treatment there to help them cope with drastic changes in pressure from being submerged underwater. The VA said the findings were not statistically significant due the relatively small number of deaths: 307 in the treated group vs. 605 in the untreated group. Even so, "this finding does suggest that WWII veterans who received (nasal) irradiation while in submarine school may be at increased risk for deaths due to head and neck cancers," it found. The study, which only dealt with submariners, is the only one to date on veterans. Other studies have found increased incidence of cancer in treated children. Nasal applicators containing 50 milligrams of radium were typically used to shrink tissues at the entrance of the Eustachian tubes. Those tubes help drain and balance pressure on the inner and outer ear. A typical regimen involved three to four treatments, of six to 12 minutes each, a few weeks apart. Years later, radium patients have complained of tumors, thyroid and immune disorders, brittle teeth and reproductive problems. Radium treatments were gradually abandoned with the development of antibiotics, the use of pressurized aircraft cabins in the military and increasing questions about radiation's health effects. The VA is conducting a follow-up study on the health of living veterans who had radium treatments. That is due sometime early next year. Under a law passed by Congress in 1998, the department is also offering free medical examinations and treatment to veterans who have head or neck cancer and were treated with radium. Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
