Radioactive Consumer Products?????
Jun 14, 2009 22:59:09 GMT -5
Post by proudtobeadp on Jun 14, 2009 22:59:09 GMT -5
From the got to be friggen kidding file!
A recent example emerged last summer, when a Flint, Mich., scrap plant discovered a beat-up kitchen cheese grater that was radioactive. The China-made grater bearing the well-known EKCO brand name was laced with the isotope Cobalt-60. Tests showed the gadget to be giving off the equivalent of a chest X-ray over 36 hours of use, according to NRC documents.
Estimated to have been in circulation for as long as a decade, the grater likely was four to five times more radioactive when it was new. EKCO's parent company, World Kitchen, of Rosemont, Ill., described the incident as isolated and found no need to issue a recall, spokesman Bryan Glancy said.
It was not the only cheese grater found. NRC documents show that another Cobalt-60-tainted grater had turned up in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2006. The reports do not indicate what brand of grater it was or if it was related to the one that surfaced in Michigan.
Cobalt-60 also tainted a 430,000-pound shipment of metal from Brazil in 1998. Part of that load found its way to Michigan and then Indiana, where it was used to make brackets for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners.
The contamination was detected by a radiation monitor when scrap leftover from the brackets job was shipped to the Butler, Ind., steel recycler Steel Dynamics, according to NRC documents.
The Cobalt-60 tainted Reclina-Rocker chairs, which would have given off a chest X-ray's worth of radiation every 1,000 hours, were still in warehouses when the contamination was discovered, and never made it to stores or living rooms, according to Rex Bowser, director of the Indoor Air and Radiological Health Emergency Response Program of the Indiana State Department of Health.
www.scrippsnews.com/node/43577
A recent example emerged last summer, when a Flint, Mich., scrap plant discovered a beat-up kitchen cheese grater that was radioactive. The China-made grater bearing the well-known EKCO brand name was laced with the isotope Cobalt-60. Tests showed the gadget to be giving off the equivalent of a chest X-ray over 36 hours of use, according to NRC documents.
Estimated to have been in circulation for as long as a decade, the grater likely was four to five times more radioactive when it was new. EKCO's parent company, World Kitchen, of Rosemont, Ill., described the incident as isolated and found no need to issue a recall, spokesman Bryan Glancy said.
It was not the only cheese grater found. NRC documents show that another Cobalt-60-tainted grater had turned up in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2006. The reports do not indicate what brand of grater it was or if it was related to the one that surfaced in Michigan.
Cobalt-60 also tainted a 430,000-pound shipment of metal from Brazil in 1998. Part of that load found its way to Michigan and then Indiana, where it was used to make brackets for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners.
The contamination was detected by a radiation monitor when scrap leftover from the brackets job was shipped to the Butler, Ind., steel recycler Steel Dynamics, according to NRC documents.
The Cobalt-60 tainted Reclina-Rocker chairs, which would have given off a chest X-ray's worth of radiation every 1,000 hours, were still in warehouses when the contamination was discovered, and never made it to stores or living rooms, according to Rex Bowser, director of the Indoor Air and Radiological Health Emergency Response Program of the Indiana State Department of Health.
www.scrippsnews.com/node/43577