Scrap does not arrive with a hazard label. It arrives as baled sheet, mixed turnings and cut structural steel, and the first person to touch something odd is usually a shear operator in ordinary work gloves. The IAEA has now published TECDOC-2100, a 46-page strategy for preventing, detecting and responding to radioactive material that enters metal recycling, covering ports, border posts, steel mills, fragmentisers and scrap yards. Its timing fits the data: the agency's incident and trafficking database recorded 236 events in 2025 reported by 34 states, 89 more than in 2024, mostly through retrospective reporting. Roughly seven in ten thefts over the past decade happened during authorised transport.
The Find Is Small and Quiet
A case study published this year in Radiation Protection Dosimetry describes a discovery in Kosovo: an alpha-emitting source in scrap, identified as containing thorium-232 and uranium-232. Close-range survey gave about 2,000 counts per second and 6.51 microsieverts per hour at five centimetres. That is not a dose rate that trips a distant alarm, and alpha particles do not pass through steel. Identification came from a portable instrument and gamma spectrometry, not from the person who picked the item up.
Alpha emitters are an internal hazard, and the route in is dust, grit and residue transferred to fingers, cuffs and boot soles, then to the mouth or an eye. Gloves and boots control contamination; they do not shield.
No Glove Stops Gamma
A heavier barrier is not a better barrier in a radiation field. A thick butyl or fluoroelastomer glove gives no useful dose reduction and costs the dexterity needed to read a meter, label a wipe sample and open a bag without touching its rim.
What the job wants is a smooth, non-absorbent outer that wipes clean; a gauntlet long enough to stay over the sleeve when the wearer crouches; no fabric cuff that holds grit; a shallow, open boot tread that releases debris rather than packing it; and overboots that can be cut away instead of pulled over a contaminated sole. Layering does the rest: a cheap disposable outer changed at the boundary, not at the end of the shift.
Time, Distance and a Bag
The Kosovo team sealed the item in a 200-litre drum filled with reinforced concrete and mapped dose rates before and after, reporting a reduction by a factor of up to 4.86. That is the shape of a real response: enclosure, distance and paperwork rather than heroics. In practice it means tongs rather than hands, short rotations, and a one-way exit route for anything that came near the find.
That route turns PPE into waste. Gloves and overboots from the entry team are not laundered and returned to a locker. They are bagged, labelled, surveyed and held for decay or clearance. A buyer who orders 20 pairs for a shift also needs a waste route, storage space and records. Consumable outers priced per pair are simpler to write off than a reusable boot that has to be surveyed and released.
What Belongs in the Specification
Keep the radiological clause apart from the chemical one, because the evidence differs: wipe-clean performance, contamination release after repeated washing and a stated number of decontamination cycles, rather than permeation breakthrough times. Ask for a size run that covers everyone who might join a search line, drivers included. Specify spare outer layers by the shift, not the year. And write the operating rule into the contract, so that PPE selection follows an on-site radiological assessment rather than a catalogue page. TECDOC-2100 is about procedures and structures; the equipment only works inside them.