Norm: The New Hot Wastes

Abstract

Concerned about the threat of contamination from illegally dumped radiopharmaceuticals earlier this year, the managers of a Pennsylvania landfill increased the sensitivity of the radiation detector used to scan incoming wastes. To their surprise, the first shipment to set off the alarm contained nothing but concentrated brine sludge a mineral waste produced by oil and gas drilling. sludge, which arrived in April, contained significant levels of two radium isotopes. In July, a batch of paper mill wastes tripped the radiation alarm at a scrapmetal yard in Pittsburgh. mill's operators and Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Resources (DER) are still puzzling over the source of the uranium in the mill wastes. Both cases involved naturally occurring radioactive materials, collectively known by the acronym NORM. Geologists have recognized for decades that could contaminate equipment and wastes at nearly any mineral-extraction site. But because mining engineers suspected that the risk of finding anywhere but in the residues, or tailings, of uranium and phosphate mining was small, no one systematically sought it elsewhere. Over the past three years, however, a number of incidents have raised concerns that is ubiquitous usually in small, diffuse quantities in many industries traditionally regarded as nonnuclear. Indeed, regulators and waste managers now use the term primarily to describe contaminants produced by such industries. Because neither waste shipper involved in the Pennsylvania incidents was aware that its goods contained contamination, the shipments were apparently quite legal, says James G. Yusko, a health physicist in DER's Pittsburgh office, who investigated both incidents. Still, these shipments proved about as welcome-and perhaps as innocuous-as a kiss from someone with halitosis. But nobody's laughing off. Some NORM-contaminated sites and equipment may pose a real health hazard. Moreover, the growing number of related incidents poses political, legal and financial headaches for everyone who encounters NORM, from state officials and industrial-waste generators to waste-treatment operators and metal smelters. One widely touted remedy for those headaches involves the development of new regulations. The American public continues to press for increasingly stringent environmental and public health regulation, observes Linda S. Wennerberg, a regulatory analyst with Arthur D. Little, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. This sentiment is especially strong in the areas of radioactive material and waste management. According to a draft preliminary risk assessment for diffuse that the Environmental Protection Agency began circulating in May, NORM materials are not covered by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and are generally not specifically covered by most existing [federal] regulations. Although they are covered by some state regulations, there are presently no universally applicable regulations for materials. As such, NORM management represents a gap in the federal regulatory structure, and is currently one of the complex, interdisciplinary regulatory issues emerging in the 1990s, Wennerberg says.