Seems to keep happening there. The scrap gets reprocessed into commercial steel and sometimes makes it all the way to the consumers in a finished form. Everybody from the scrap workers through to the end user get exposed, sometimes to high dose rates for extended periods. I've seen documentation regarding elevator parts, bulk sheet steel, and some others.
The way that material changes hands, it's hard to tell where stock comes from unless the PO requires documentation. I've seen material with paper trails all over the globe.
What the heck is a university doing selling that sort of machine as scrap with a source still in it, anyway? They must not have licensing like the US, but to think that they don't even control those things?!
Could you imagine what would happen if someone deliberately misused one of those sources?
