The question
My company does industrial abrasive cleaning & painting on steel structures. We use certain abrasive media to clean the steel from old paint. All the spent abrasive with the old paint gets collected in designated storage for proper disposal under EPA guidelines and classification. This time, the waste collected from the particular project had traces of radionuclides, which has been unheard of in our line of work. Tons of waste were rendered radioactive, causing our company thousands of dollars to dispose it as "NORM" waste. We ran 2 comparable tests through a lab from separate batches and different waste streams. We strongly believe that it was the abrasive media we selected that caused the waste to be radioactive, but we need the proper professional interpretation and furthermore legal insight to determine if we can proceed to legal action for undisclosed material safety data and product liability.