Just four teaspoons of this material found widely in medical devices could contaminate up to 10 square miles of Manhattan — if spread by a terrorist’s dirty bomb.
, a former commissioner whose tenure ended on April 30, said the NRC had sought to balance public safety with the interests of the facilities using the devices, notably hospitals wary of the commission “regulating the practice of medicine.”The NRC’s stance toward regulating cesium contrasts with public warnings about radiological-weapon threats issued by every presidential administration since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.In a series of investigative reports, the U.S.
The U.S. Department of Energy has also diverged from the NRC’s hands-off stance. The department has worked with users and manufacturers to harden the devices against theft.2015, the department started giving incentives to convert to safer technologies, offering to pay 100% of the expense to remove and dispose of any cesium irradiator, which typically cost up to $200,000 per unit. The department says 108 of the devices have been replaced.
“We were surprised,” Margaret Cervera, a health physicist at the NRC, said of the increased numbers. “We expected them to be going down.”irradiators that the commission suspected were being used for animal experiments or other research, rather than sterilizing human blood. In April, the Department of Energy reported to Congress that an additional 315 cesium irradiators were being “used primarily for research irradiation.
That evening, both men began to vomit. It wasn’t until two weeks later — after the equipment and the strangely glowing material inside it had changed hands through two scrap yards and become a source of fascination for adults and children — that a local physicist persuaded authorities to take action.
The effort was quickly scaled back in the face of opposition from other senators. But that year, Clinton introduced a bill calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study whether any uses of radioactive materials — including cesium — could be replaced with effective and safer alternatives. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Chief Executive Thomas M. Priselac, shown in November 2010, wrote in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that his hospital might be unable to reliably irradiate high volumes of blood without its cesium irradiator, possibly compromising patient safety., president and chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Without its cesium irradiator, Priselac said in an Oct.
Cesium irradiators typically contain material amounting to about 2,000 curies, a measure of radioactivity. Scientific “vulnerability assessments” performed by thefour teaspoons of cesium, could contaminate up to 10 square miles of Manhattan if dispersed uniformly.Members of Congress and their staffs were briefed on the details.
But Avax fell into financial distress and as of 2014 had “essentially ceased operation,” said Terry J. Derstine, a radiation program manager for The landlord restored power to the room on the afternoon of the inspection. In August 2015, state officials agreed to allow Avax to keep the device on condition that the company post a $200,000 bond to cover expenses if more trouble arose. Derstine and his colleagues also alerted city police and the FBI’s Philadelphia field office.visit of Pope FrancisEarlier this year, Derstine told NRC commissioners that if a terrorist had set loose the cesium, “many people could have easily been exposed.
“Over the last 30 years,” the incident “was probably the No. 1 thing we’ve had to deal with,” he said.Technicians confirmed the accidental release of cesium from the irradiator in central Seattle at about 9:30 p.m. on May 2. What unfolded that night — and over the months that followed — demonstrates the disruption caused by even a tiny, unintentional release of cesium, according to interviews with those involved and The Times’ review of local, state and federal documents.
“Hospitals aren’t used to dealing with radioactive contamination,” said Mikel J. Elsen, the Washington health department’s director of radiation protection, who commented alongside Henry and other state officials in Tumwater, Wash.The testing of all 13 individuals found their contamination levels “did not pose a health risk to any of those individuals or the general public,” according to a university medical school spokeswoman, Susan Gregg.
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