Radioactive Baby Buggies?

Thank Al "Hot Zippers" Gore

Presidential candidate Al Gore is pushing a plan to turn 100,000 tons of radioactive metal waste into consumer goods - pots, pans, forks, zippers and baby buggies. On August 12, 185 environmental, public interest, consumer and labor groups appealed to Gore to halt the project.

The problem starts with the Department of Energy's Superfund site at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee weapons plant. The US gave the clean-up contract to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, Inc. Unfortunately, BNFL's idea of "cleaning up" involves selling 100,000 tons of radioactive aluminum, nickel, steel and copper to metal recyclers.

On June 29, 1999, Federal District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that "The potential for environmental harm is great, given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which [DOE and BNFL] seek to recycle. " Kessler found DOE's refusal to explain why it failed to provide adequate public notice for comment "quite troubling" and warned that the DOE/BNFL agreement provided for "no oversight by any regulatory agencies." Unfortunately the court was unable to take action owing to a provision of the Superfund law that says federal courts cannot challenge cleanups until after they are completed.

The government has refused to identify the firms that would receive the rad-waste.

Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service [NIRS (202) 328-0002] notes that, following the US lead, "other nuclear power and weapons sites have begun the dangerous practice of sending their radioactive materials to be recycled."

Officials at an Oak Ridge site in Paducah, Kentucky have confessed that their workers had been routinely exposed to plutonium. Plutonium has shown up in Oak Ridge nickel selected for recycling into consumer goods "If DOE denied or didn't know plutonium was present at Paducah," asks Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project, "why should we trust them to release waste from identical production plants into products ranging from intrauterine devices to hip replacements?"

Robert Wages, Executive VP of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union (PACE) is also disturbed by the Paducah revelations. "Now DOE wants to dump radioactive metals into everything from baby rattles to zippers and they ... tell us 'not to worry.' In fact, this is all about profits for a contractor who wants to cash in on the DOE's nuclear weapons complex clean-up bonanza."