Post by Ex_Nuke_Troop on Mar 11, 2014 15:54:37 GMT
NY Times : Workers at Nuclear Waste Site in New Mexico Inhaled Radioactive Materials
By MATTHEW L. WALDFEB. 27, 2014
WASHINGTON — Thirteen employees who worked the night shift at a nuclear waste burial site in New Mexico after an underground leak are carrying radioactive materials in their bodies, but it is too soon to say how much health risk this poses, Energy Department officials said on Thursday.
The workers inhaled plutonium and americium, which if lodged in the body bombards internal organs with subatomic particles for the rest of the person’s lifetime. The dose calculation is a bit arcane because the dose in such cases will be delivered over many years.
Calculating a lifetime dose will require several urine and fecal samples, taken over time, to determine the rate at which the body is eliminating the materials, said Joe Franco, manager of the Energy Department’s Carlsbad, N.M., field office, which oversees operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where bomb wastes are buried in an ancient salt bed deep beneath the desert.
“Right now we have one single data point; there was one reading,” Mr. Franco said at a news conference in Carlsbad, explaining that more readings were necessary. Sensors in the salt mine detected a leak at about 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 14. At that hour, no one was in the mine, and automatic systems reduced the ventilation and ran the exhaust through high efficiency particulate filters, officials said, minimizing the flow of materials to the surface.
The next morning, after officials realized that the surface was contaminated, they told the workers at the site to “shelter in place,” and all were scanned for external radioactive materials before they were sent home; no contamination was found. The mine has not been operating since then.
The Energy Department also took fecal and urine samples to a laboratory, which reported the results this week.
Another way to determine the amount of radioactive materials taken into the body is by using a whole body counter, which measures all radioactive emissions coming from the body, and points out the ones that do not come from naturally occurring isotopes.
Russell Hardy, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, an independent monitoring organization that is part of New Mexico State University, said that he had received such a scan after visiting the site on Feb. 18, and it showed nothing unusual. But the fecal and urine tests can detect radioactive material in far smaller quantities than the whole body counter can.
Mr. Franco said that several employees had made appointments with outside laboratories to have whole body scans, but that if the scans were not ordered by the department, the results would be protected by health privacy laws. He said he planned to order such scans for workers, to establish an upper limit to what their doses might be.
Drugs can be given to people who have absorbed radioactive materials: chemicals that bind with those materials and speed up excretion. But these drugs have health risks of their own and may introduce extra risk if the level of contamination is low, Mr. Franco said.
The contractor that operates the mine has developed a plan to lower instruments down a shaft to measure radiation levels and air quality before sending workers back in. The plan still needs approval by the Energy Department.
www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/us/workers-at-nuclear-waste-site-in-new-mexico-inhaled-radioactive-materials.html
By MATTHEW L. WALDFEB. 27, 2014
WASHINGTON — Thirteen employees who worked the night shift at a nuclear waste burial site in New Mexico after an underground leak are carrying radioactive materials in their bodies, but it is too soon to say how much health risk this poses, Energy Department officials said on Thursday.
The workers inhaled plutonium and americium, which if lodged in the body bombards internal organs with subatomic particles for the rest of the person’s lifetime. The dose calculation is a bit arcane because the dose in such cases will be delivered over many years.
Calculating a lifetime dose will require several urine and fecal samples, taken over time, to determine the rate at which the body is eliminating the materials, said Joe Franco, manager of the Energy Department’s Carlsbad, N.M., field office, which oversees operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where bomb wastes are buried in an ancient salt bed deep beneath the desert.
“Right now we have one single data point; there was one reading,” Mr. Franco said at a news conference in Carlsbad, explaining that more readings were necessary. Sensors in the salt mine detected a leak at about 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 14. At that hour, no one was in the mine, and automatic systems reduced the ventilation and ran the exhaust through high efficiency particulate filters, officials said, minimizing the flow of materials to the surface.
The next morning, after officials realized that the surface was contaminated, they told the workers at the site to “shelter in place,” and all were scanned for external radioactive materials before they were sent home; no contamination was found. The mine has not been operating since then.
The Energy Department also took fecal and urine samples to a laboratory, which reported the results this week.
Another way to determine the amount of radioactive materials taken into the body is by using a whole body counter, which measures all radioactive emissions coming from the body, and points out the ones that do not come from naturally occurring isotopes.
Russell Hardy, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, an independent monitoring organization that is part of New Mexico State University, said that he had received such a scan after visiting the site on Feb. 18, and it showed nothing unusual. But the fecal and urine tests can detect radioactive material in far smaller quantities than the whole body counter can.
Mr. Franco said that several employees had made appointments with outside laboratories to have whole body scans, but that if the scans were not ordered by the department, the results would be protected by health privacy laws. He said he planned to order such scans for workers, to establish an upper limit to what their doses might be.
Drugs can be given to people who have absorbed radioactive materials: chemicals that bind with those materials and speed up excretion. But these drugs have health risks of their own and may introduce extra risk if the level of contamination is low, Mr. Franco said.
The contractor that operates the mine has developed a plan to lower instruments down a shaft to measure radiation levels and air quality before sending workers back in. The plan still needs approval by the Energy Department.
www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/us/workers-at-nuclear-waste-site-in-new-mexico-inhaled-radioactive-materials.html
so whats happening in the Solomons, is haarp missing its mark?