Dr. Zoomie – I read that France is talking about using radioactive waste to make cutlery!? Is this legal? More importantly, is this safe?
It’s hard for me to imagine conveying noodles or veggies from plate to mouth with a fork made from radioactive waste. On the other hand, it’s not quite as hard for me to imagine using a fork made of metal with very small levels of radioactivity from small amounts of recycled metals. But, then, this evening the food I ate at dinner was slightly radioactive, as was my cutlery, as well as the plate. The food, of course, contains traces of tritium and carbon-14 (produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere), potassium-40 (a naturally occurring primordial radionuclide), and likely scant traces of uranium, thorium, and some of their decay series nuclides. But, then, so do I – you too, for that matter – it’s just a part of living, breathing, drinking, and eating on Earth, and every organism on our planet has most of all of these same nuclides. And the cutlery? That almost certainly has traces of radioactive fallout from the era of nuclear weapons testing, including cesium-137 and maybe even some plutonium from the weapons as well as from a spacecraft power source that burned up in the atmosphere in the 1960s. As far as the plate goes – that’s traces of potassium and maybe even a little uranium in the clay from which the plate was made.
So here’s my question – does cutlery (or whatever) made with recycled nuclear power plant components have more radioactivity than tonight’s dinner? If not, then I’m not really very concerned. Truth be told, though, the cutlery could have even more radioactivity than that before I’d start being concerned. Bananas, for example, contain measurable amounts of potassium-40 while Brazil nuts contain elevated levels of radium; these are safe to eat. By comparison, whatever radioactivity might be incorporated into the cutlery discussed in the story is locked up inside the metal; because of this, while the user might be exposed to very low doses of radiation, but won’t be ingesting any radioactivity.
But there’s more to this issue than the radioactivity – there’s also the environment to consider; in particular, the environmental cost of what to do with 500,000 tons of metal that can be recycled or that can be trucked to a remote radioactive waste disposal site and that will have to be replaced; and replacing it will require excavating millions to tens of millions of tons of rock and soil, shipping it to a processing facility to extract the metal (which is done with a bevy of chemicals, many of which are toxic), remove impurities, and so forth – everything that’s needed to dig down to the ore, remove it from the ground, and turn it into metal. Each step of the process requires energy, each step produces waste that must be disposed of, each step uses (and potentially contaminates) water, and each step can be avoided for the amount of metal that’s recycled.
The bottom line is that no individual aspect of this occurs in isolation. We can’t look at the potential exposure to radiation, no matter how slight, without also considering the health effects of mining, processing, and transporting the ore, metal, and waste products that accompany the production of a half-million tons of metal. Nor can we ignore the risks associated with transporting this metal hundreds or thousands of miles and burying it underground. Our aim – the aim, actually, of the Europeans, in this case – ought to be to minimize the total amount of risk to society as a whole, not to minimize the radiation exposure to a small fraction of the population from a small amount of radioactivity.