Archive for category: Adventure & Radiation

Today, we’re going to take a little excursion away from the realm of coffee and cold beer. I’m going to share one of the accidents I’ll be discussing with my students tonight. This is partially a matter of my marshaling my thoughts together for them. Ignoring Chernoybl & Fukushima, this remains the worst accident with radioactive materials in history.

NB: Yes, I am well aware that we killed plenty of people with Fat Man & Little Boy and that we have contaminated vast tracts of land with nuclear weapons testing. But one must remember, those were done intentionally. To a first approximation, we knew what we were doing and had taken appropriate precautions. Or, as one notable former Nevada Test Site employee said, “We never made the same mistake twice. Can’t think of many other institutions that can claim that.”

This story all began when a private cancer clinic with a nuclear medicine center shut down in Goiania, Brazil.  By 1987, much of the clinic was demolished but as derelict buildings in increasingly bad parts of town tend to go, it got a bad case of squatters.  Squatters are poor folk looking for any way to scrape by; one of those more popular ways is scavenging.  And what do most people scavenge: Metal.  Just ask your local homeless person with bags full of cans if you doubt me.  Why everything wasn’t gone when they shut down is a good question, but easy to answer: it wasn’t worth the effort.  What could easily be removed and/or be sold had been, what couldn’t they left, like the radiotherapy unit. Add in a side order of legal dispute about who was responsible for the unit and minimal regulatory oversight authority, and there you go.

Two hearty scavenging lads found this thing with lots of steel and aluminum in the clinic and thought they’d hit the jackpot.  The thought was doubly confirmed as they started tearing it apart and found this heavy metal bar with a goldish black window.  It felt much heavier that steel, and judging by the window, wow, that must mean gold.  So, they broke the window.  Within was a bluish glowing powder.  It wasn’t gold but they figured they could still get a couple bucks at the junkyard and that they did.

The owner of the junkyard thought it was beautiful and strange.  He thought it would make a great ring for his wife, Maria, so he set his workmen to task cracking the bar open and getting the pretty blue stuff out.  It was no easy task.  The found that inside the steel sheath was lead shielding containing an ampule filled with this metallic powder.

One yard worker died, the other lost an arm.  Despite taking what would otherwise be considered a very lethal dose, the owner lived.

After the workers got it free, they brought it back to their boss who then took it home.  His six year old daughter thought it was pretty and asked to play with it.  Being a doting father, how could he deny her?

Of all the people exposed in this incident, the daughter took the highest dose as she tended to eat her sandwiches on the same floor where she’d been playing with the source.  When she finally died a month later, she had to be buried in a lead lined concrete coffin.

Being social people, friends and family came over for a good extended family dinner.  The owner showed the blue powder to his brother who thought it was a miracle.  He asked for some, which his brother gave to him.  The brother went home and painted himself with the powder in the shape of cross, much like at Carnival, and then went out to work with the animals.

Everyone at the dinner party trailed contamination home with them and then to their families.  This is how the count of exposed people needing treatment rose to the hundreds.  Needless to say, the brother lost his arm…and all the contaminated livestock were slaughtered.  Luckily, none had gone to market before discovery of the incident.

When people started getting sick all at the same time, at first Maria started to think that she’d served some bad meat or juice.  She asked a local doctor if that made sense.  He said maybe.  Then she realized people who hadn’t been at the party were getting sick.  It occurred to her that it might be the blue stuff.  After the doctor sent her back home, she got progressively sicker.  Her mother moved in to care for her.

Both Maria and her mother died.

By the time Maria had brought the remains of the radiotherapy source to doctor, contaminating the bus she rode on in the process, 90% of the powdered metal had already been lost, spreading contamination through out the community.  According to Brookhaven National Laboratory, who originally made the Cs-137 cesium chloride source in 1971, it had an activity of approximately 1400 curies. Just for reference, the americium-241 source in your smoke detector contains less than 1 microcurie.  This radiotherapy source was, professionally speaking, motherfucking screaming hot.

This is not to say that comparing Cs-137 to Am-241 is apples to apples when discussing activity. At that point it becomes a matter of chemical characteristics and biological/environmental fate to determine exactly how dangerous a given isotope is for a given activity. However, I’ll have you know that this is a brown trousers time so hard your pants shoot across the room quantity of activity of Cs-137 from the safety point of view when there’s a loss of control. From a medical point of view, it was weak enough they probably couldn’t sell it off as a proper radiotherapy source anymore so they abandoned it.

Authorities learned of the loose source about a month after the scavengers first bust it open.  It took several more days for them to follow the trail back to community in Goiania and start getting people medical treatment; a couple more weeks to discover the full horrible extent of the contamination.  Only four people died, 54 people had exposures serious enough to merit hospitalization out of the 249 people found to be contaminated. This is of the 112,000 people that mobbed the public health officials & hospitals fearing they were going to have a horrible Hiroshima worthy death. It was wisely decided to move triage evaluation to the Olympic Stadium so that they could accommodate everyone, but it was still a nightmare processing everyone that was afraid. Several buildings were demolished and the top several feet of soil were removed as a part of the clean up, with an estimated 3500cu.yd. of contaminated material getting buried in a hole somewhere in Brazil.

As yet another a deeply tarnished silver lining, a lot of good health physics lessons were learned at Chernobyl (once international aid was invited to help with containment and cleanup) which, depending on your point of view, were fortunately/unfortunately put to excellent use at here.

I took a different lesson home when I first learned about this accident in detail several years ago: You Cannot Take ANY Knowledge For Granted. The radioactive source from the radiotherapy machine was prominently marked with the radiation trefoil but in this instance (and many, many others) it didn’t register with the victims in question that this denoted a hazard. This caused the IAEA to create a new ionizing radiation hazard symbol, a mishmash of somewhat familiar international symbols in hopes of scaring people off (skull & crossbones for “poison” and running guy with an arrow for “leave”) that has been called cluttered and confusing. My willfully obtuse reading of the new symbol to my old department chair was “Propeller wind causes pirates, go starboard”.

I think the root cause can be laid at a general lack of awareness/education about ionizing radiation. In First World countries, education has been lax though awareness is quite high, not necessarily in a good way as it is rather paranoid and poorly informed. Hell, I have a hard time getting nuclear engineering students to handle their rather benign sealed check sources. When items made in the First World end up lost downstream in the Third, a heavy price gets paid by the most vulnerable and least knowledgeable when control is weak or non-existent. There are dozens of reports of lost radiography sources at mines in the hinterlands all over the world being picked up because they were shiny and looked like silver (and thus valuable), taken home, and injuring the discoverer and/or their families. There are also far too many incidents of scrap yards like this one in Goiania receiving radioactive materials as metal salvage, reselling them and then tossing them into a smelter for recycling.

If I have any good news to share, it’s that the rate of incidents like this has decreased dramatically despite the increased use of materials worldwide. We’re getting better at playing with this particularly special kind of fire.

Part 1 of the Las Vegas Adventures can be found here.

If you are in Las Vegas, go to the Atomic Testing Museum. As much fun as gambling and debauchery are, make the time to head out to UNLV and visit. Getting a chance to visit the Trinity Test Site or one of the rare tours of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) is once in a lifetime event for most non-weapons complex employees, but this museum is there every day. Give yourself at least three hours if you really want to take the time to read everything they’ve put on display. And if any of the NTS retirees who are now docents are there, sit down and listen. It is as simple as that. Make the time as if you were listening to a WWII vet talking about landing in Normandy or Okinawa.

My apology for this post is that photography is prohibited in the Atomic Testing Museum, so no pictures. However, the Department of Energy Nevada Site Office has released some amazing photo collections from the testing days, along with current operations, and I definitely recommend wandering through them. Hell, we used to have a movie studio/military base in LA devoted to making films and photos from testing. Suffice it to say the picture I am missing for you is a replica of the Whackenhut guard shack that greets you at NTS, where the security guard checks your badge before letting you on site, is the ticket kiosk for the museum. Honestly, entering the Test Site feels a little anticlimactic, like you just passed the mall cop. It feels like not nearly enough security, until you remember that Nellis AFB is less than a minute away on afterburner. Inside the museum, if you pay close attention and look up you will see the US Atomic Energy Commission sign from the former Nevada Site Office hiding over an exhibit.

Reading/listening to the interviews  sends a very clear message that the Nevada desert is where the American front of Cold War was waged, one nuclear blast at a time, in the opinion of the former Test Site workers. To people that haven’t worked in the nuclear weapons complex, this may sound strident and reactionary. I know it felt a bit wrong hearing it and that was me. I was only at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for three years and change, but I spent a lot of time talking with and listening to the older workers and retirees (decontamination of facilities is sometimes like doing an oral history project with people who worked there, starting with “I just need to know what you did so I know what danger I might be in”). The Q cleared workers of the Department of Energy carry a very heavy burden that they can never put down, even the former janitors, because the obligation of the Q clearance doesn’t terminate with employment. In fact, for the rest of their lives they are informed individuals capable of thinking new classified thoughts because nuclear secrets are considered “born secret”. All other classified information is presumed public until reviewed and otherwise classified; nuclear secrets are presumed classified until reviewed and made public. They have been entrusted with the nuclear secrets of the nation and you’d be surprised how informative very peripheral information, like frequency of trash collection, can be. For this reason, they aren’t free to speak…EVER.

They’re used to a sizable population that hates the work they do, but they aren’t allowed to defend their work. On the flip side, they are used to their lives and research being guided by the budgeting whims of elected officials and appointees that, typically, have very little scientific literacy and operate on election timetables. It is funny how the Cold Warriors I used to enjoy talking to felt that while Soviet designers had been their competition, Capitol Hill was the actual enemy of Science. While Reagan called the national labs “The Arsenal of Freedom”, they never felt particularly held in esteem. The budgets and executive actions deeply at odds with the rhetoric in George W. Bush’s administration was a matter of doublethink that alienated the career workers of the complex further. In the middle of budget cuts & layoffs, I remember finding walls of letter with thank yous from the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their commanders, for the development of tools they felt were saving lives and rebuilding countries. With all that in mind, this helps inform the proud siege mentality I find many weapons complex workers to have.

It is also important to remember that weapons work is not the only thing they do. In fact, a majority of the Q cleared workers have nothing to do with weapons whatsoever. Just as it was in my time in Antarctica, for every researcher there are at least eight other people there who make their work possible because you certainly don’t want people like me doing carpentry. Only the most arrogant PhD or callous bureaucrat would fail to acknowledge all the other people working to make the national labs a success. Research grinds to a halt when the toilets don’t work, you know?

Not all of the ideas explored at NTS were particularly good ones. This brings me to the NERVA Program, AKA the nuclear rocket, of which one of the thrusters of which is on display at the museum. It is tagged as activated material as it had been made radioactive by the reactor operation, but it’s had nearly 50 years to  cool down and is kept behind a thick Lexan shield. You are safe to look at it, just don’t try to go lick it. If you want to know why you don’t have moonbases and missions to Mars already, it is because the NERVA program was canceled.

Important note, when America tests rockets we aim them upside down and test the force exerted on a pressure plate below the rocket to see what it yields. We learned, or rather we inherited Nazi rocket scientists that had learned, from the German rocket tests where they aimed them up and tried to tie or bolt them down (sometimes that didn’t work and the misfires were disastrous/amusing). The NERVA test that failed when they let it run dry of hydrogen liquified the nuclear fuel of the reactor, which then turned the upward pointing thruster into a molten uranium fountain. Oops. After letting the short half-life material cool down for a couple weeks, NTS radiation safety workers (my people) got to go in and do clean up, picking up uranium BBs one by one, for months. This is how I got to talking to the docent Layton O’Neill.

Layton is an 82yo former health physicist from NTS, Hanford, and Idaho National Lab. When I said that it must have been a serious pain in the ass doing that NERVA clean up, he said yes, but that it was nothing compared to SL-1 which he’d been a first responder to. My jaw dropped. This is the first time I’d ever met anyone that had been at SL-1.

So, “What is SL-1?” you ask. SL-1, or Stationary Low Power Reactor One, was an Army power project. The idea behind it was that military HQs were increasingly power hungry and that it would be ideal to have a quick field assembly reactor that you could bring in by plane, boat, or rail. You could never depend that you’d have cooling water in any given place (because who knows where a future HQ might be) so it was meant to use river bed gravel as moderator if necessary, but water was preferred. That’s what the reactor was, SL-1 the accident is a different matter.

Honestly, SL-1 is America’s only fatal nuclear accident but it’s one few people know about. To call Three Mile Island (TMI) an accident is a misnomer; something went wrong, but the safety systems operated precisely as intended. It would be more accurate to call TMI an operational success during a systems failure. SL-1 though, we killed the three servicemen operating it and badly contaminated the facility although it was fairly well contained inside the building. Most of the bodies of the three operators were buried in lead lined concrete caskets in Arlington, though some pieces were so radioactive they were buried at the NTS instead. I am extremely happy to say that the 40min long SL-1 abbreviated after action video is available online here. There is a 3hr version that was available in the LLNL training library, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

Your teaser to go read the Wikipedia article and watch the video: Layton is the man who identified that it was a control rod from the reactor, flying out like a spear under steam pressure, that had nailed the corpse of the specialist to the ceiling of the reactor dome.

I kept my fanboy excitement talking to Layton to a minimum. I shook his hand and let him know that it was an honor to get a first hand account, rather than read the reports and do the calculations from textbooks. I learned a few things that weren’t in the reports that will be helpful should the worst ever happen and I get called to respond.