Los Alamos Dork radiates two states

[FoxFour]

With everything that was going wrong there, with lax security and all- this incident still crops up.
From the lamoniter.com site
Contamination found out of state



ROGER SNODGRASS, [email protected], Monitor Assistant Editor

The intensity of the latest radiological accident at Los Alamos National Laboratory may be relatively small, but the geographic extent is growing, as new information about the incident emerges.

A lab report updated July 29, revealed that the lab worker who was contaminated by americium-241 in mid-July made an ordinary Federal Express shipment of weld test samples he was working on to Bechtel Bettis Inc., a DOE laboratory in West Mifflin, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Penn.

The package, processed as a non-hazardous, domestic unclassified shipment contained welded capsules of uranium pellets and was shipped on July 20, according to the report.

The occurrence report was obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C., public interest organization.

The contaminated package reached Bettis on July 21, Bechtel Bettis lab confirmed today.

When Bettis was notified by LANL on July 27 that the package might have inadvertently contained radioactivity, Bettis lab's statement said, Bettis conducted a comprehensive survey of items or locations that might have been contaminated.

"No radioactivity was found on the outside of the shipping container or in areas of Bettis where the shipment was handled," the statement added.

Bettis calculated that the maxium amount of radioactivity detected was about 1/1000 of the amount of radioactivity in a common household smoke detector.

Americium-241 is commonly used in a variety of smoke-detectors.

While Bechtel Bettis officials found "no adverse affect on Bettis employees, the public or the environment," their statement indicated 11 employees who may have been exposed to the low-level radioactivity are undergoing monitoring.

The source of the americium-241 contamination had not been determined at the July 29 update of the occurrence report, and identifying the source is still one of the subjects of the investigation, Delucas said.

"We discovered the incident on July 25, but the pathways of contamination weren't fully known until July 27," she added, explaining the two-day delay in notifying the Bettis lab.

According to the LANL's report, the problem was initially uncovered when a radiological control supervisor found a radiological material tag in a trash can in an unexpected location - in a non-radiological area of the Sigma Complex in the main administrative area.

The supervisor began reconstructing the situation, tracing the event to a technical staff member who had received a shipment of radioactive materials on July 14 and unpacked it at that time.

The supervisor surveyed the room and a found reading of 118,000 dpm (disintegrations per second) in areas around the glove box that was used in unpackaging the initial shipment.

Significantly lower amounts were subsequently measured on the technical staff member, in his office, and personal badge. A reading of 10,000 dpm was recorded from the back of his office chair and 9,000 dpm on his right thumb.

The preliminary investigation led to a temporary closure of the Sigma Complex and several workers from the immediate area were placed on a testing regime.

Additional amounts were found at the technical staff member's home, on computer equipment, furniture, and household pipes, as well as on parts of his private vehicle.

The worker who delivered the repackaged material for shipment to Pennsylvania was surveyed and a towel on which the shipment rested before being dispatched recorded 2,000 dpm.

David Chen, a radiation biologist and director for the molecular radiological biology group at UT Southwestern in Dallas, noted that the alpha particle radiation of americium-241 was not strong enough to penetrate through the dead skin of the employee's thumb, for example, but might pose a more serious problem if it contacted sensitive areas of the nose or eyes.

"The problem is we really don't know the low-dose effect," Chen said, a former group leader at LANL, "That's why the Department of Energy has a low-dose program," researching the question.

He also noted the long half-life of americium-241, over 400 years, as the reason it had to be cleaned up.

Bernie Pleau, a team leader of the Department of Energy's Radiological Assistant Program that conducted sweeps of two out-of-state locations the LANL employee visited, said Monday that the employee drove to his wife's house in Colorado and then on to a location in Kansas. He said harmless amounts of radioactivity were detected, but some items were removed for safe disposal.

"It is an ongoing, unraveling story," Delucas said, "One for which we won't have all the facts and details for quite awhile."


And the guy radiates everthing that he touches. I hope he didn't rub his eyes. Radiation is can kill your eyes.