It began in late 2007 as a routine audit. Retail giant Wal-Mart noticed that some exit signs at the company’s stores and warehouses had gone missing.
As the audit spread across Wal-Mart’s U.S. operations, the mystery thickened. Stores from Arkansas to Washington began reporting missing signs. They numbered in the hundreds at first, then the thousands. Last month Wal-Mart disclosed that about 15,800 of its exit signs a stunning 20 per cent of its total inventory are lost, missing, or otherwise unaccounted for at 4,500 facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico.
Poor housekeeping, certainly, but what’s the big deal?
In a word: radiation.
The signs contain tritium gas, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Tritium glows when it interacts with phosphor particles, a phenomenon that has led to the creation of glow-in-the-dark emergency exit signs.
It’s estimated there are more than 2 million tritium-based exit signs in use across North America.
It turns out that Ontario-based companies SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc. of Pembroke and Shield Source Inc. of Peterborough have sold the lion’s share of these signs, which use tritium produced as a by-product from the operation of Canadian-made Candu nuclear reactors.
The health effects of tritium exposure continue to be a hot topic of debate. It’s not strong enough to penetrate the skin, and in low quantities regulators and industry groups say tritium is safe. But when inhaled or ingested it can cause permanent changes to cells and has been linked to genetic abnormalities, developmental and reproductive problems and other health issues such as cancer.
“The problem is that because it’s hydrogen it can actually become part of your body,” says Shawn-Patrick Stensil of Greenpeace Canada. “The radiation doesn’t emit far, but when it actually becomes part of your cell it’s right next to your DNA. So for a pregnant woman, for example, it can be really dangerous.”
General exposure from one broken sign might be the equivalent of getting up to three chest X-rays, even though today we no longer give pregnant women X-rays. If tritium is ingested, for example, by a child who breaks a sign with a hockey stick, it’s much more potent.
If only 5 per cent of the tritium in a large exit sign is ingested, it would be equivalent to 208 years of natural background radiation, according to a report from the Product Stewardship Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
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Somewhat off-the-wall, but certainly plausible...
The company that distributes the signs in the US keeps track of where they go, but some users don't follow the rules (you have to have organizations that can track seemingly mundane things for long periods).
Airlines do OK with tritium signs because they track everything all the time, but big box stores, McDonalds, and the like just are not set up to have a contracted maintenance company know what to do with an old dusty exit sign.
From NRC:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2009/09-011.html
NRC is asking T sign users for an inventory based on Wal-Mart story
The CANDU reactor is in many ways superior to US-designed light water reactors. We ought to license (& build) enough of them down here to burn our supposedly 'depleted' fuel rods, to produce additional electricity. That ought to make the Obama administration/wacko-environmentalists/earth-worshiping-pagans happy: producing electricity from so-called 'nuclear waste' (used fuel rods from existing US light water reactors)...
;>)
Thanks, Lori.
Pinging some TM’ers.