On June 9, one-fourth of a gram of plutonium spilled from a cracked bottle in a laboratory at the Boulder campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an incident that investigators say was the result of carelessness by researchers compounded by subsequent inadequate responses to the emergency.
One of the five radiation and health experts brought in to examine the incident said it was as though researchers forgot what they were handling.
“The actual handling of the source bordered on the cavalier,” wrote Lester Slaback Jr., the former supervisory health physicist for NIST who retired in 2001.
“It is speculative to assume the age of the bottle or its exposure to radiation made it any more fragile than a new bottle. But even if the users were ignorant of the potential exposure risk, based on the quantity of material, the simple fact that it was plutonium should have produced some level of respect in the handling of the source,” said Slaback.
According to NIST officials, medical tests have indicated that internal plutonium exposure was found in “a small number” of NIST personnel. But the agency said the individuals are not expected to suffer any clinically significant impact to their short- or long-term health.
On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation will examine the incident.
The purpose of the hearing, according to the subcommittee, is to examine the causes of the incident and the subsequent response to the situation by NIST employees, as well as to discuss improvements to environmental, health and safety practices at NIST.
Among the witnesses will be James Turner, NIST’s acting director; Charles Miller, director of the Office of Federal and State Materials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Elmo Collins, regional administrator of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and Kenneth Rogers, one of five independent investigators appointed by NIST to review the spill.
The subcommittee said that because of the spill, radiological contamination was found on the hands of two people, the shoes of 20 others and in a hallway and office space near the lab.
In addition, the subcommittee has learned that:
In an internal report released last week, NIST said the bottle or vial containing the plutonium broke during an experiment when the researcher apparently hit the vial against a lead shield or a device called a “detector.”
The report said that the probable cause of the spread of contamination inside and outside the laboratory was the failure of the researcher to recognize and report the event in a “timely, appropriate and accurate manner” and to limit his movements.
An additional problem, said the report, which probably led to further spread of the contamination was “lack of an emergency-response plan, which left safety personnel unprepared and unequipped to respond to the incident.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
