Nuclear scrap contaminating consumer goods

[bananas]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/11/business/scrap.php

Nuclear scrap contaminating consumer goods

By Jonathan Tirone and Subramaniam Sharma Bloomberg News
Published: November 11, 2008

VIENNA: The French authorities made headlines last month when they said as many as 500 sets of radioactive buttons had been installed in elevators around the country. It was not an isolated case.

Improper disposal of industrial equipment and medical scanners containing radioactive materials is letting nuclear waste trickle into scrap smelters, contaminating consumer goods and spurring the United Nations to call for increased screening.

Last year, U.S. Customs rejected 64 shipments of radioactive goods at U.S. ports, including purses, cutlery, sinks and hand tools, according to data released by the Department of Homeland Security in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. India was the largest source, followed by China.

"The world is waking up very late to this," said Paul de Bruin, radiation safety chief for Jewometaal Stainless Processing in Rotterdam, the world's biggest stainless-steel scrap yard. "There will be more of this because a lot of the scrap coming to us right now is from the 1970s and 1980s, when there were a lot of uncontrolled radioactive sources distributed to industry."

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[madokie]

1. we will come to rue the day we let the uranium genie out of the bottle IMO

[Nihil]

2. There again, you could always read the article and respond to that instead?

> Many atomic devices were not licensed when they were first widely used
> by industry in the 1970s. While most countries have since tightened
> regulations, it is still difficult to track first-generation equipment
> that is now coming to the end of its useful life.

Uranium? No ... this stuff is more dangerous than uranium ...

> Abandoned medical scanners, food-processing devices and mining equipment
> containing radioactive metals like cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often found
> by collectors and sold to recyclers

Uranium is nice friendly stuff compared to the above (lower intensity and
less able to be absorbed by the body) but don't let facts get in the way
of a standard pre-packaged anti-nuclear-power reply.

> There may be more than one million missing radioactive sources of various
> levels worldwide, the IAEA estimates.

This is the stuff that you *really* want to worry about if your thoughts
stretch to "dirty bombs" or "terrorists".

> For example, about 1,000 radio-electronic thermal generating units were
> misplaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union ...
> The devices, used to power remote lighthouses, each contain as much
> radiation as was released by the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, he said.

AAARRRRGGGHHH!!!! THE "C" WORD!!!!! Oh noes!!! It's the end of the world now!

There are 1,000 Chernobyls out there (currently "misplaced" ... how quaint)
just from this one example and they don't involve earthquakes or supplying
electricity to large cities. In fact, by way of complete contrast to the
fenced, guarded, huge and basically unmoving & well-known sites of nuclear
power stations, these are simply "somewhere out there" ... along with the
other 999,000 or so missing radioactive sources. If those manufacturing and
recycling industries had been as tightly regulated as the nuclear industry,
this problem wouldn't arise. Still, might as well blame nuclear power eh?

I shall now return you to the standard "BAN TEH EVUL NUKES" programme.

[NNadir]

3. Not that you give a rat's ass that every piece of food on earth is contaminated with coal waste.

The fact that stupid people have heart attacks because of the detection of a few radioactive decays does not hold a single implication whatsoever about human health.

Nuclear power doesn't have to be perfect to be better than every thing else, it merely needs to be better than all the shit you don't care about, which it is.

Oh and genius, uranium was discovered in the 18th century. One of the chief uses for it before the discovery of radioactivity was as a pottery glass and to prepare stained glasses in churches and other places.

Are you trying to demonstrate complete ignorance of science, or it is unintentional?

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

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[Strelnikov_]

5. Seconded n/t

[Name removed]

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