Hightower Lowdown

If you’ve got lemons, make lemonade, right?

As recently reported by Mother Jones magazine, the brains at East Tennessee Technology Park realized that the lemons on their sprawling facility would make some mighty zesty lemonade. They have to be quiet about it, though, because what they’ve actually got is radioactive scrap metal.

This “technology park” used to go by another name: the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons facility. It enriched uranium for America’s nukes, and now it has tons of contaminated metal on its grounds.

Until now, regulators have required the corporate operators of Oak Ridge and other nuclear facilities to dispose of their radioactive waste. But our industry-friendly Bush administration has come up with the bright idea of turning tons of this stuff into a moneymaker. How? By selling what they call “slightly radioactive” scrap metal to recyclers who can then resell it to manufacturers of consumer products.

But wait . . . doesn’t this mean that things like baby strollers, frying pans, bicycles, La-Z-Boys, jewelry, and whatnot could contain radioactive material? That’s correct, say those pushing the scheme, but—ha, ha—you don’t have to fret, because we’re rewriting the rules to declare that low levels of irradiated metals are “safe.” And to keep you from worrying, the Bushites won’t require any labeling of products made from recycled nuclear metals.