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Thousands of everyday products and materials containing radioactive metals are surfacing across the United States and around the world.
Cheese graters, reclining chairs, women's handbags and tableware manufactured with contaminated metals have been identified, some after having been in circulation for as long as a decade. So have fencing wire and fence posts, shovel blades, elevator buttons and steel used in construction.
A Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found that - because of haphazard screening, an absence of oversight and substantial disincentives for businesses to report contamination - no one knows how many tainted goods are in circulation in the United States.
But thousands of consumer goods and millions of pounds of unfinished metal and its byproducts have been found to contain low levels of radiation, and experts think the true amount could be much higher, perhaps by a factor of 10.
Government records of cases of contamination, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, illustrate the problem.
In 2006 in Texas, for example, a recycling facility inadvertently created 500,000 pounds of radioactive steel byproducts after melting metal contaminated with Cesium-137, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records. In Florida in 2001, another recycler unintentionally did the same, and wound up with 1.4 million pounds of radioactive material.
But an accounting of the magnitude of the problem is unknown because U.S. and state governments do not require scrap yards, recyclers and other businesses - a primary line of defense against rogue radiation - to screen metal goods and materials for radiation or report it when found. And no federal agency is responsible for oversight.
Despite state and federal officials' belief that tainted metal is potentially dangerous, should be prevented from coming in unnecessary contact with people and the environment, and should be barred from entering the U.S., there is no one in charge of making sure that happens.
In fact, the Scripps investigation found:
•Reports are mounting that manufacturers and dealers from Asia, Africa and former Soviet-bloc nations are exporting contaminated material and goods, taking advantage of a lack of U.S. regulations. Compounding the problem is the inability of U.S. agents to fully screen the 24 million cargo containers arriving each year.
•U.S. metal recyclers and scrap yards are not required to check for radiation in the castoff material they collect, or report it when they find some.
•No federal agency is responsible for determining how much tainted material exists in consumer and other goods. No one is in charge of reporting, tracking or analyzing cases.
•It can be far cheaper and easier for a facility with "hot" items to sell them to an unwitting manufacturer or dump them surreptitiously than to pay for proper disposal and cleaning, which can cost a plant as much as $50 million.
•For facilities in 36 states that want to do the right thing, there is nowhere they can legally dump the contaminated stuff.
•A U.S. government program to collect the worst of the castoff radioactive items has a two-year waiting list and a 9,000-item backlog. It is fielding requests to collect 2,000 newly detected items a year.
The Scripps investigation used a previously unmined Nuclear Regulatory Commission database, the only official assemblage of reports of contaminated items that have turned up in scrap yards, trash dumps and manufactured goods since 1990.
But because such reporting is neither required nor consistent, neither environmental officials nor many in the scrap-metal industry consider the NRC accounts an accurate reflection of the problem's true dimensions.
"Typically, these go unreported," said Carolyn Mac Kenzie, a U.S. Department of Energy physicist. "Whatever number you come up with would not reflect reality."
One of the most conservative estimates comes from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which put the number of radioactively contaminated metal objects unaccounted for in the United States in 2005 at 500,000. Others suggest the amount is far higher. The most recent NRC estimate - made a decade ago - is 20 million pounds of contaminated waste.
In many instances where contamination is identified - generally by companies that have invested in costly detection equipment - the contamination comes from the inadvertent blending of radioactive sources with piles of other scrap that metal recyclers reprocess and later sell.
Often, when a factory shuts down or a plant relocates, industrial smoke detectors, measuring gauges and other machines and parts that contain small amounts of radioactive material are left behind.
Because they commonly are encased in a protective shell, the devices pose little risk when the plant is operating.
But when a facility closes, the devices frequently are trashed as scrap. If those radioactive parts are later heated during reprocessing, the radiation can escape and blend with the finished recycled product.
The global dimension of the recycling of radiation problem is large and growing, experts say.
Between 2006 and 2007, for instance, authorities in the Netherlands found about 900 women's handbags that had originated in India and were decorated with metal rings laced with Cobalt-60 on each bag's shoulder strap. Once discovered, they were sent to a radioactive waste site in the Netherlands.
U.S. officials and metal experts say evidence is mounting that radioactive metal from abroad is increasingly - and intentionally - being sent to the United States, sometimes decades after the contaminated material was first detected and returned to its source.
John Williamson, administrator of Florida's radiation control bureau, predicts tainted steel from China and products from India will continue to surface, at the borders and on the plant floors.
One reason is that, after U.S. customs rejects a load of contaminated material, no one knows what happens once it is sent back to its overseas producer because no tracking system exists, he and other front-line experts said.
"In China and India, who knows what happens?" Williamson said. "My belief is it goes back into the hopper."
Some experts say the United States bears some blame for the infiltration of tainted metal and products.
Even though there is little debate that radiation-laced material is unwelcome, neither Congress nor federal agencies have established a "safe" level of contamination, despite two decades of wrestling with the issue.
That has created a loophole that overseas metal dealers and product manufacturers can exploit, critics say.
But forbidding all radioactive material in metal would throw a damaging and costly wrench into the recycling industry, according to John Gilstrap, safety director for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries trade group.
"If we set the thresholds unrealistically low, we're inflicting pain on businesses for no necessary reason," Gilstrap said.
But Jim Turner, corporate environmental director for steel company Gerdau Ameristeel, disagrees.
Asked what the allowable level of radiation in metal should be, Turner replied via e-mail: "ZERO."
