Site of 1976 "Atomic Man" Accident To Be Cleaned 299
mdsolar writes with news about the cleanup of the site that exposed Harold McCluskey to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded. Workers are finally preparing to enter one of the most dangerous rooms in the world — the site of a 1976 blast in the United States that exposed a technician to a massive dose of radiation and led to his nickname: the "Atomic Man." Harold McCluskey, then 64, was working in the room at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation when a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode. He was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard. Hanford, located in central Washington state, made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades. The room was used to recover radioactive americium, a byproduct of plutonium. Covered with blood, McCluskey was dragged from the room and put into an ambulance headed for the decontamination center. Because he was too hot to handle, he was removed by remote control and transported to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank. During the next five months, doctors laboriously extracted tiny bits of glass and razor-sharp pieces of metal embedded in his skin. Nurses scrubbed him down three times a day and shaved every inch of his body every day. The radioactive bathwater and thousands of towels became nuclear waste.
Re: Question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't seem to be accurate; the local newspaper describes a fellow technician who dragged him out of the room, and I don't believe they would've had some sort of building-wide system of manipulators that could've then moved him from there to an ambulance:
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/... [tri-cityherald.com]
At any rate, it looks like the glove box was just to allow access to adjust the equipment, and not perform the procedure. So there's every possibility that the actual work was done with manipulators. (You can play around with some of them in the museum in Richland; they're surprisingly nimble.)
1984 People article (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the background for this article* comes from a 1984 piece in People Magazine, in some cases word for word:
http://www.people.com/people/a... [people.com]
*It's an AP wire service piece
Re:the chemical reaction (Score:2, Informative)
He didn't die though... Except for 11 years later for heart reasons in his late 70's (he had a heart condition).
Re:the chemical reaction (Score:4, Informative)
The process involved nitric acid and a large resin column (probably an ion exchange column). Probably it was forming some nitrates and these decomposed.
Re:Safety margins (Score:3, Informative)
WTF are you talking about?
The exposure limit to benzene is 1 ppm. You will easily survive 500 ppm for a short time.
Re:Faith in God (Score:4, Informative)
Just so you are informed. Religious reasons for no vaccination is very low on the list and is mainly from groups such as the Amish and the main reason Amish don't vaccinate is not for religious reason but items such as since they are closed community the risk is not as high.
The biggest reasons for people not going with vaccines are not trusting of "big" science and vaccines are loaded with all those chemicals, similar to GMO.
Re:David Hahn (Score:5, Informative)
The clean-up was less due to the severe amount of radioactivity and more due to the fact that he was careless and got it everywhere.
The total amount of radioactive material was small and the actual dose of radiation he was exposed to was probably minimal. Although the exact dose isn't known because he never completely revealed his experiments and he never underwent testing.
One thing I find interesting is that he was arrested again in 2007 on charges related to stealing smoke detectors for their Americium, 13 years after his boy scout experiments.
Cecil Kelley (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I am aware the highest radiation dose anyone has received was Cecil Kelley, whom was exposed to a criticality accident at a plutonium processing plant. When the tank stirrer turned on, the geometry of the plutonium solution became critical, exposing him to ~12,000 rem. He died 36 hours later.
See Page 16 for a description of the accident here: http://ncsp.llnl.gov/basic_ref/la-13638.pdf [llnl.gov]
Or the wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accident [wikipedia.org]
Re:But WHY are they demolishing the room? (Score:5, Informative)
That whole site is part of a gigantic, long-term cleanup [wikipedia.org] - partially motivated by the desire not to let radioactive waste reach the Columbia River.