The Beryllium Thread

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I'm putting this in here so that it won't hang around the top of the lounge while I cut and paste information in to post after post.

This is part of my ongoing offseaon attempt to get us ranked on the first page of some search engine(s) when nerds search for "beryllium".

Before you PM me with "Why?", the answer is simply that I am sitting around reading log files at work and cutting and pasting into this thread requires absolutely NO mental stress.

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0.46--0.78

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Site 300 soils

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1.5

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0.68--42

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The concentration of naturally occurring beryllium is variable. The average concentration in soil is about 6 parts per million (ppm), with a range of 0.1--42 ppm; humus soils show a concentration above the crustal average. The presence of beryllium in other geological materials shows similar variability: sandstones and limestones have a low concentration (<1 ppm), igneous rocks and shales a higher concentration (about 3 ppm). Beryllium ores may have a substantially higher concentration. For more details, see Wilbur (1980) and Rossman (1991), listed in Section 6.3.

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Air samples taken at the LLNL main site and Site 300 perimeters indicate an average of approximately 0.09% of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District guideline of 10,000 pg/m3, as reported in the 1998 LLNL Environmental Report (UCRL-50027-98).

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1.1 Goals

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Controlling beryllium exposure has been a major interest of the DOE and its predecessor agencies. The first exposure standards were published by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1949 and were later adopted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). DOE efforts to control and regulate exposure culminated in 10 CFR 850, Chronic Beryllium Disease Prevention Program, published in December 1999. The essential requirement of the rule is to establish a Chronic Beryllium Disease Prevention Program (CBDPP), whose ultimate goal is to eliminate chronic beryllium disease (CBD) from all DOE facilities by:

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* Controlling exposures.

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* Minimizing the number of workers exposed.

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* Minimizing the opportunities for exposure.

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Achieving this goal requires assessing operations that may result in exposure, identifying the population at risk, and establishing appropriate engineering, administrative, and personal protective equipment (PPE) controls to minimize the opportunities for exposure. The careful review and minimization of the potential exposures of visitors and other ancillary personnel shall be evaluated by the Responsible Individual. Visitors to beryllium work areas should be discouraged unless essential to the mission in question.

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1.2 Applicability

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This document applies to all work with "beryllium," which means beryllium metal, as well as beryllium alloys and insoluble beryllium compounds that contain more than 0.1% beryllium. The following are exempt from the requirements of this document:

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1. Beryllium articles that meet the definition of an article as defined by 29 CFR 1910.1200, i.e., a manufactured item that is formed to a specific shape or design during manufacture, that has end-use functions that depend in whole or in part on its shape or design during end use, and that does not release beryllium or otherwise result in exposure to airborne concentrations of beryllium under normal conditions of use. Therefore, beryllium articles are those items meeting this definition of an article and whose surface contamination level is determined to be less than 0.2 µg Be/100 cm2.