Texas has highest number of radioactive metal incidents

Texas has highest number of radioactive metal incidents

06/03/2009 By ISAAC WOLF, Scripps Howard News Service

• national

For more than a month in the summer of 2006, a metal recycler in Longview, Texas, produced half a million pounds of radioactive material, state and federal documents show.

When LeTourneau Inc. workers melted Cesium-137 — a radioactive material commonly released in nuclear accidents — the dust containing the radioactive isotope contaminated the workers, along with sections of the facility, according to a July 2006 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission report…………………..Other radioactive meltings in the Lone Star State include a May 1992 incident when El Paso metal recycler Border Steel melted Cesium-137 into a batch of iron, according to a barebones NRC report that provided no more details. In September 1993, Chaparral Steel in Midlothian also melted Cesium-137, according to a December 2007 Texas Department of State Health Services report.

Radioactive material has also been stolen in Texas. In 1996, at a Houston storage facility, someone swiped industrial X-ray devices containing the isotopes Cobalt-60 and Iridium-192. One of the devices was dropped near a scrap yard, where its protective shield was dislodged.

Scrap workers were exposed to dangerously high levels of radioactivity when they recovered the device, according to research by radiation experts James Yusko, of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and Joel Lubenau, who formerly worked for the NRC. Through reports, articles and personal correspondences, the two have unofficially tracked radioactive melting incidents in the United States and around the world.

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/43586

June 4, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, radiation, radioactive