AP Impact: Nuclear Waste Piles Up at Hospitals

[Hissyspit]

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20080925/48dc5e40_3ca6_1552620080926259212906

AP IMPACT: Nuclear waste piles up at hospitals
By SEANNA ADCOX (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
September 26, 2008 1:11 AM EDT
BARNWELL, S.C. - Tubes, capsules and pellets of used radioactive material are piling up in the basements and locked closets of hospitals and research installations around the country, stoking fears they could get lost or, worse, stolen by terrorists and turned into dirty bombs.

For years, truckloads of low-level nuclear waste from most of the U.S. were taken to a rural South Carolina landfill. There, items such as the rice-size radioactive seeds for treating cancer and pencil-thin nuclear tubes used in industrial gauges were sealed in concrete and buried.

But a South Carolina law that took effect July 1 ended nearly all disposal of radioactive material at the landfill, leaving 36 states with no place to throw out some of the stuff. So labs, universities, hospitals and manufacturers are storing more and more of it on their own property.

- snip -

State and federal authorities say the waste is being monitored, but they acknowledge that it is difficult to track and inspected as little as once every five years. Government documents and dozens of Associated Press interviews with nuclear waste generators, experts, watchdogs and officials show that thousands of these small radioactive items have already been lost, and that worries are growing. "They'll end up offered up on eBay and flea markets and sent to landfills, or metal recycling plants - places where you don't want them to be," said Stephen Browne, radiation control officer at Troxler Electronic Laboratories, one of the world's largest manufacturers of industrial gauges that use radioactive material.