French authorities made headlines last month when they said as many as 500 sets of radioactive buttons had been installed in elevators throughout France. It wasn't an isolated case.
Improper disposal of industrial equipment and medical scanners containing radioactive materials is allowing nuclear waste to trickle into scrap smelters, contaminating consumer goods, threatening the $140-billion trade in recycled metal and spurring the United Nations to call for increased screening.
Last year, U.S. Customs rejected 64 shipments of radioactive goods at the nation'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, Netherlands, the world's biggest stainless-steel scrap yard.
On Oct. 21, the French nuclear regulator said elevator buttons assembled by Mafelec, a Chimilin, France-based firm, contained radioactive metal shipped from India. Employees who handled the buttons got three times the safe dose of radiation for noon-nuclear workers, according to the agency.
Operations at the factory are now back to normal and the firm has cut ties with the "source" of the radiation, Mafelec said. "In the worst-case scenario the exposure would have been under that of a medical scan," Chief Executive Gilles Heinrich said.
Abandoned medical scanners, food processing devices and mining equipment containing radioactive metals such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often picked up by collectors and sold to recyclers, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear arm. De Bruin said he sometimes found such items hidden in beer kegs and lead pipes to prevent detection.
There may be more than 1 million missing radioactive sources worldwide, the Vienna-based atomic agency estimates.
"We're passing by the first era of nuclear applications, so disused material is increasing," said Vilmos Friedrich, an agency inspector. "Until recently, there hasn't been licensing" for industrial devices.
Smelting such items contaminates recycled metal used to make new products and the furnaces that process the material.
