Subject: radioactive household products (Weiner) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 121720 -0500 (CDT) From: "Roy L. Beavers"To: emfguru -------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 12:54:18 -0700 From: Bob Weiner To: "Roy L. Beavers" Subject: radioactive household products Hi Roy, I came upon this from a Public Citizen newsletter. Why worry about a "trivial" amount of nonionizing radiation when you can buy a cell phone that emits its own ionizing radiation? This is the same tactic that industries have used to "recycle" toxic waste by calling it fertilizer and selling or giving it to farmers to put on their soil. This practice of "recycling" radioactive material apparently is going on world-wide. I suppose Gore invented environmentalism the same time he invented the internet. That someone could even conceive of putting hazardous materials on farmland or allowing "low-level" radioactive waste to be widely distributed is psychotic thinking which far transcends greed. Greed I can understand. Behavior like this makes me ashamed to be a human. Some resources and brief excerpts follow. Bob Weiner http://www.citizen.org/CMEP/radmetal/radioactive_recyclingindex.htm The Floodgates Are Opening For Radioactive Metal Recycling! Do You Know If Your Child's Braces Are Radioactive? Why Should I Care About Radioactive Metal? http://www.citizen.org/CMEP/radmetal/radrecycle.htm NUCLEAR SPOONS Hot metal may find its way to your dinner table BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC http://www.progressive.org/cusac9810.htm John Gofman is a former associate director of Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and co-discoverer of uranium-233. ''There is no safe dose or dose rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold-dose,'' said Gofman. ''Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not 'hypothetical,' 'just theoretical,' or 'imaginary.' They are real.'' Karl Morgan, known as the father of health physics, shudders at the idea of more and more radioactive metal entering people's homes. He is particularly worried about dental fillings. ''You certainly don't want people going around with radioactive teeth,'' he says. Some of the most dangerous radioactivity around the home, says Morgan, will be the metals people unintentionally ingest. ''Some of these find their way directly into the human body, especially copper and iron, stainless steel [from] knives and forks,'' he says. ''It doesn't help any cell in the human body if you send an alpha particle through it.'' One Hundred Eighty-Seven Organizations Call on Vice President Gore to Stop Radioactive Recycling into Consumer Products Wednesday, August 11, 1999 http://www.citizen.org/CMEP/radmetal/gorepress.htm Washington, DC--One hundred eighty-seven consumer, public interest, labor and environmental groups from across the country and around the world delivered a letter to Vice President Al Gore today, calling on him to stop the release of radioactive materials from nuclear weapons and power plants into every day consumer goods and building materials. Specifically, the letter calls for a halt to a Gore-supported contract by the U.S. Department of Energy and BNFL, Inc. at the massive, closed uranium enrichment buildings in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The contract allows over 100,000 tons of radioactive metal (nickel, aluminum, copper and steel) to be "processed" and released into the marketplace to produce consumer products such as belt buckles, zippers, frying pans, forks, and baby carriages. There would be no limit on the final use of the contaminated material and there has been no notification nor consent of the steel industry, workers and members of the public who will be exposed. Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com