Historical Analysis of Airborne Beryllium Concentrations at a Copper Beryllium Machining Facility (1964–2000)

Copper beryllium alloys are the most commonly used form of beryllium; however, there have been few studies assessing occupational exposure in facilities that worked exclusively with this alloy versus those where pure metal or beryllium oxide may also have been present. In this paper, we evaluated the airborne beryllium concentrations at a machining plant using historical industrial hygiene samples collected between 1964 and 2000. With the exception of a few projects conducted in the 1960s, it is believed that >95% of the operations used copper beryllium alloy exclusively. Long-term (>120 min) and short-term ( 95% of the samples were below the contemporaneous occupational exposure limits or the 1999 Department of Energy action level of 0.2 μg m ―3 and, in most cases, were below the LOD.