Request for Information

["J. J. Rozental" <josrozen@netmedia.net.il>]

Subject: contamination in recycled metals

Dear Franz,

1) Thank you for your comment. 

However I insist: There is not many published documents on radioactive
contamination in recycled metals.  Both paper that I mentioned are the most
important published  up to now and in those including enough  reference;

2) Myself,  I could add many others' examples, but would be redundancy;

3) On what your mention: "It contains mostly cases from the USA"

You can see that there are 11 out of USA among  the 35 mentioned. Anyhow,
is very simple to explain why:

a) From the above 11, 6 resulted from contaminated product export to USA;

b) The most famous case detected out of the origin country, was the
teletherapy unit, the "Contaminated Mexican steel incident" Ref. NUREG
1103, 1985, known as "The Juarez (Mexico) Radiological Incident." Such
incident   was detected 6 weeks after the  dismantled unit contain 16 TBq
of Co-60 was  sold as scrap metal, when a truck delivering steel passed
through a road radiation monitor at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory..... 

c) USA is the largest user of sources in any practices;

d)  The register of incident and relevant feedback is a common practice in US.

4) Considering "potential contamination sources, which not necessarily
need to be disastrous, but should not occur in scrap anyway, some of them
being from old applications"

This is another subject. This  is one of my concern, as consultant for
developing country, specially those one with little or any infrastructure.
If you wish we can discuss a lot on this matter.

J. J. Rozental <josrozen@netmedia.net.il>
Consultant Radiation Safety & Regulation
for developing country
Israel