Radioactive waste could end up in your European sofa or even food cans because of a relaxation in European safety limits, claim environmentalists.
A directive from Euratom, the European Union's nuclear agency, which is due to come into force throughout Europe by May 2000, will exempt small amounts of radioactive contamination from regulatory controls. It will permit organisations to recycle materials that expose people to less than 10 microsieverts of radiation a year. (The yearly safety limit for public exposure to radiation in Hong Kong is 5,000 microsieverts.) Environmentalists claim this could lead to manufacturers' using radioactive material in consumer goods, such as furniture and food containers.
Richard Bramhall, from the Low Level Radiation Campaign - a Welsh pressure group - points to the nuclear industry's plans to treat radioactively contaminated metals so they can be recycled into food cans. 'They are waiting open-mouthed for these exemptions,' he says.
But John Cooper, a senior scientist on the British Government's National Radiological Protection Board who helped draft the exemptions, argues there is no point in trying to regulate every scrap of radioactive waste. He says the exemptions will only apply when 'the risks are trivial and not worth regulating'.
Dead quiet Research in Maryland suggests that deadly bacteria could be wafting round undetected in air-conditioning systems because they enter a dormant state that does not show up in standard tests.
Hospitals run regular checks of bacteria inhabiting their moist air-conditioning systems, such as those responsible for pneumonia, meningitis and Legionnaire's disease. The standard procedure is to dissolve a sample of air and spread it on a Petri dish to observe how the bacteria grow.
But another test - in which nutrients were added to air samples so that dormant bacteria were shown up - indicated that up to 90 per cent of cells were not being detected by the usual method.
