Re: Request for Information

[Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 14:19 24.01.1997 -0600, you wrote:
>Dear K. K. S. Pillay
>
>Radioactive Material in Recycled Metals - Joel O Lubenau and James G. Yusko
>- Health Physics, Volume 68, Number 4, April 1995, page 440/451. Is the most
>important and complete document on this subject. Describes the wordwide
>smeltings of radioactive sources (35 from 1983 to 1994)
>
>J. J. Rozental <josrozen@netmedia.net.il>
>Consultant, Radiation Safety & Regulation
>for developing country
>Israel
>................................................

The paper mentioned is excellent and describes a lot of cases, but it is far
from a comprehensive and complete survey of "worldwide smeltings". It
contains mostly cases from the USA. We had for instance a case of aluminium
slag imported to Austria from Russia, which contained elevated
concentrations of Cs-137. Obviously a Cs-source in an aluminium containment
had been melted down. (Such assemblies are known to have existed in the
former Sovjetunion.)

There are a lot of potential contamination sources, which not necessarily
need to be disastreous, but should not occur in scrap anyway, some of them
being from old applications: Radium used in luminous paints (air plane
instrument panels, luminous signs...), thorium in gas lantern mantles, slag
containing lots of natural radioactive material (radium, uranium, thorium),
waste from the oil and natural gas industry, tritium sources ........ 

Franz
Schoenhofer
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