India's cobalt-60 poisoning: canary in a coal mine

that led South Carolina lawmakers to close the Barnwell County landfill to all but three states. Only one low-level landfill, in Utah, has opened in the past thirty years. One more could open in Texas by the end of next year, but it would accept trash from only Vermont and the Lone Star State.

The U.S. government never set up penalties for states that failed to build landfills. “Congress should have gotten involved a long time ago,” said Richard Gallego, vice president of the Orange, California-based Thomas Gray and Associates Inc., a California company that prepares low-level waste for disposal. Rich Janati, chief of nuclear safety for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, said: “It’s a national issue, and we should look at it as a national problem and come up with a solution.”

The government last August did move to shore up security by requiring hospitals and labs to better secure machines used to irradiate blood (see below). Also, dirty-bomb fears have prompted the National Research Council to urge replacing the roughly 1,300 such machines in the United States with less hazardous but more expensive equipment.

Tighter oversight of U.S. nuclear materials

Last August the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed to apply stronger oversight to frequently lost radioactive devices — items a Scripps Media investigation found to have been recycled into metal used to manufacture consumer and other products (“NRC Seeks Tighter Oversight of Often-Lost Radioactive Devices” [7 August 2009 HSNW]).

 

For years, the U.S. metal industry has asked the government to do a better job regulating items containing radioactive isotopes, such as X-ray machines, industrial sensors, and gauges. Scripps Howard’s Isaac Wolf writes that in the past, however, federal authorities have been resistant, saying extra oversight would not be worth the cost. The new proposal, published 3 August 2009 in the Federal Register, would expand that oversight, giving federal and state officials more muscle by stiffening regulations on almost 2,000 items — mostly industrial gauges containing radioactive material. Extra scrutiny would help cut down on lost material, government and private industry experts say.

The Metals Industry Recycling Coalition “believes that the stricter controls and greater stewardship associated with specific licensing are critical to ensuring that sources are properly managed from cradle to grave,” spokesman John Wittenborn said in reaction to the NRC proposal. Wittenborn, though, said more action — such as the expansion of a nationwide tracking system