Dive summary:

• The federal government has proposed to start commercially recycling scrap metal from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other nuclear sites.
• Opposition is building from the steel industry and others claiming that any contamination could affect food cans, building beams and car parts.
• The Department of Energy concluded that it would be safe to recycle metals including file cabinets, tools, equipment and structural steel from buildings as long as it is uncontaminated or radiation levels are low enough.

From the article:

"Scrap metal that is potentially contaminated by radiation should not be released into the general stream of commerce. Period," Thomas J. Gibson, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute, said in a Jan. 30 statement.

Robert Middaugh, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said "only empirically defined clean metal will be candidate for release."

"The material we propose to release is uncontaminated and poses no more risk than the scrap metals that ordinary citizens and small businesses routinely place in their recycling bins," he said in an email statement. "Safety is the only thing that matters here and we will not move forward with any recycling unless we're absolutely confident that it is entirely safe." ...