A plutonium spill at the Boulder campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has generated numerous concerns among U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff, an NRC official testified today in Washington.
Among them, said Charles Miller, are the amount of radiation individuals were exposed to as a result of the spill; the amount of radioactive materials released into the Boulder sewer system; and procedures at NIST’s Boulder facility, particularly those related to the handling and storage of radioactive material.
Miller, director of the NRC’s Office of Federal and State Materials, said that on June 29, the NRC dispatched a five-member team from Arlington, Texas, to Boulder and that the team continues its work in Boulder.
He said the team will issue a report within 45 days of completing its inspection effort.
Miller testified before the Technology and Innovation Subcommittee of the House Science Committee.
This afternoon, interim Boulder City Manager Stephanie Grainger blasted NIST’s failure to contain the plutonium spill and the federal agency’s first reports that the spill was localized.
“NIST initially indicated that the spill was contained with no contamination outside the affected laboratory room and the adjacent hallway area,” said Grainger. “However, days later, the city learned that the plutonium was not contained and had been released into the city’s sanitary-sewer system.”
Grainger said that Boulder also discovered that NIST does not have an “identified containment laboratory” that can provide protection from release of radioactive or hazardous materials into the outside environment.
“The city has also learned that any safety protocols in place were violated and failed to adequately address the magnitude of the material being handled. The city finds the lack of containment facilities and compliance with safety protocols unacceptable,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, a member of the House Science Committee, said today that when the release of the plutonium occurred, NIST researchers were working on a project to help better detect “dirty bombs” and “protect our nation.
“That’s very admirable work,” Udall told reporters after the hearing. “But it has to be done in a safe way.”
Specifically, Udall said the NIST researchers were calibrating specific instruments so that “we can better track those who would do us harm.”
“There are also applications in the whole world of non-proliferation. For those reasons (national security concerns), there is not a lot of details about the exact technology, the research and experiments that were being undertaken,” said Udall.
“I asked at the end of the hearing that NIST, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, seriously consider releasing (a list of ) all those hazardous and radioactive materials that NIST has on site or utilizes as long as there was not a national-security concern that might be compromised,” Udall said.
During the hearing, James Turner, NIST’s interim director, told the subcommittee that the “incident and the conditions that permitted the incident to take place are unacceptable.”
“NIST’s safety culture is deficient,” said Turner.
“The incident raises very serious specific and significant issues at NIST with regard to safety, safety culture, training and emergency-response policies, protocols, and NIST’s implementation and adherence to them.”
The ongoing NRC investigation revealed that a “junior researcher” broke a glass vial containing one-fourth of a gram of plutonium powder.
“The junior researcher and other individuals, working both inside and outside the specific laboratory suite were contaminated,” said the NRC’s Miller. “The researcher apparently washed his hands to remove the plutonium contamination, thus introducing a small amount of plutonium into the sewer system. More importantly, analysis confirmed that the junior researcher, as well as others, ingested or inhaled some of the plutonium.”
In a letter to the subcommittee, Boulder’s Grainger said that the city has and will incur expenses to test and monitor the sanitary-sewer system to assess the impact of the plutonium discharge and wants NIST to pay the full costs of the testing.
Further, the city of Boulder wants:
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
