Today I had the pleasure of meeting with the staff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in their office tucked in among the art galleries of Chelsea. Most of the projects they take on are related to transport issues and exposure analysis, and their relationship with industry is often adversarial. They portrayed themselves as fighting for workers who are treated as expendable by their employers.
One of the projects they mentioned doing work on involved radium in some Louisiana oil pipes maintained by Exxon. I’m guessing their work was related to this case described by Bloomberg (pdf). This piqued my interest because I rarely think about radium, and I had not realized just how much of a problem NORM can be for extraction industries. NORM here stands for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, although context is everything with acronyms.What are the U-bearing minerals that are so common in the subsurface that drilling so often brings up and concentrates U and its decay products radium and radon?
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