Re: Steel and Metal Consumers Radioactivity Protection Act

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

>I suspect that if it's measurable, it will be considered
>contaminated. That's the way it's been in the power reactor world for
years.

The anti's have done a good job of building an image in which the released
metal will end up in your children's braces, and that has resulted in yet
another case of a political solution to a technical question. A politician
who may or may not know better has caved under this pressure and made a
decision that will force the metal into the radwaste disposal world. What I
don't understand is this binary thought process in which the metal must be
thought of as either 1) radioactive waste not unlike spent fuel and disposed
of in a very expensive, ridiculously over-protected way, or 2) it will be
freely released to kill children all over America. Why can't there be an
in-between solution? The metal could go into shipbuilding, rebar to be
imbedded in concrete, bridge girders, etc where there would be essentially
no public exposure and no disposal cost. I can't believe that no one thought
of such a solution, so it must have been found to be unacceptable. Why?
============================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu


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