An ‘extraordinarily severe’ emergency: the radioactive leak at Harborview
capitolhillseattle.com
capitolhillseattle.com
Lax standards or just changing circumstances such as an owner moving or going out of business (or collapsing entirely, like in the case of the USSR) has caused accidents, in the past.
A famous example is the accident in Goiânia, in Brazil, in 1985. In short, a private radiotherapy institute moved house leaving behind a working caesium 137 teletherapy unit with the source still in it. Two people took parts of the unit, broke them apart and sold them to a scrap yard. The owner noticed the blue glow of the strange salt-like substance in the unit and took it home and showed it to his friends and family. People became fascinated with the sight and took fragments of it to their homes where their kids and family played with it. Eventually, someone connected the fact that people were getting sick with the strange glowing stuff and took a sample to the public health department. This led to the accident being discovered.
Some 250 people were contaminated and four died while others suffered radiation sickness, but fortunately recovered. Lest this be taken as evidence of the low risk from such accidents let it just be said: you don't want your kids playing with sparkly blue radioactive stardust.
IAEA accident report here:
https://www.iaea.org/publications/3684/the-radiological-acci...
UW Medicine itself is not doing well financially (they lost $75 million last year): https://www.washington.edu/regents/files/2018/01/2018-02-B-2...
Harborview was the only profitable hospital in the system. Seattle is the second-largest tech city in the nation and housing prices have grown astronomically, just like in SF. The difference between UW and, say, Stanford or UCSF, is that UW's patient population comes from the WWAMI states. They don't typically treat the young tech works, although I have had a couple older Boeing/Microsoft patients. UW/Harborview patients continue to be mostly low-income Seattlites and tertiary care/trauma patients from the WWAMI states. The UW takes care of poor/rural patients while existing in a wealthy city. It's a unique place to work.
EDIT: I asked my fellow radiology residents about this event
"We had a nuc med lecture on the event! It's super interesting how they managed it."
"We had a separate nuclear medicine lecture on a Tuesday by the woman who helped managed the incident and is responsible for nuclear accidents."
"Was on HMC call that night. Physics lecture on that was useful. Radiation --> reflex call radiologist is a real thing."
"Cool. Honestly they should just reflex call them. I just paged them anyway."
“3.6 roentgens per hour. Not great, not terrible.”
Is that a “Chernobyl” (HBO miniseries) reference? (Protip: watch it)
I have minor quibbles on the facts, and with some of the tone of the story, but I'm glad to see that a journalist was able to put in the time to research and write a long-form story about which the Seattle community will care.
For the commenters lining up to throw stones -- we all find in time that our own homes are made, at least in part, of glass. It is intrinsic to any accident that at least one mistake was made, but discerning how and why the mistake came to pass almost always takes longer than anyone would like. Throwing stones too early often means that they will miss their mark, becoming mistakes of their own.
Edit: crediting Margo Vansynghel, the article's author
> The Goiânia accident [ɡojˈjɐniɐ] was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, after a forgotten radiotherapy source was taken from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 were found to have significant levels of radioactive material in or on their bodies.
> In the cleanup operation, topsoil had to be removed from several sites, and several hundred houses were demolished. All the objects from within those houses, including personal possessions, were seized and incinerated. Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents".
That sounds like a "Dilute the pollution by pouring it into the ocean" solution. Isn't burial the better option?
If you incinerate them carefully (running all waste gases through filters before being released to the atmosphere), you can convert 500 wooden chairs into a couple pounds of contaminated ashes and filters. Which are much easier and cheaper to dispose of.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
For radioactive isotopes with moderate half lives (that are not produced industrially in serious abundance), this actually works.
But that doesn't work for isotopes that bioaccumulate, and get concentrated up the food chain. Especially if that happens faster than radioactive decay.
A good example is plutonium production. Back in the 40s-60s, they'd dissolve irradiated uranium in nitric acid. With remote manipulators, behind massive steel/lead/concrete shielding. But two of the major fission fragments are gases at processing temperatures: Xe-131 and I-131. So they just blew that up the stacks.
Xe-131 stable, but inert, so dilution is arguably OK. Although the I-131 half-life is only ~8 days, animals bioaccumulate it very effectively. Also, it's concentrated in milk.
In designing Hanford, scientists did a risk assessment for I-131 releases. They got that releasing I-131 was risky when the wind was blowing westward, toward coastal cities. But when the wind was blowing eastward, no problem. Especially because, for commercial milk production, delay from deposition on fodder to milk sales is (as I recall) on the order of weeks.
However, they didn't consider subsistence farmers living around Hanford, raising cattle and goats for milk. For them, delay from deposition on fodder to milk consumption is on the order of days. Oops. So a bunch of people (mainly children) developed thyroid disorders and cancer.
I could tell a similar story about radioisotope releases from above-ground testing. Which increased incidence of thyroid disorders and cancer throughout the US. But I'll just share the false assumption.
Nuclear explosions inject crap into the lower stratosphere. Where it floats, just above the stratopause, driven by the jet stream. So there's not much dilution, just movement. And then, somewhere, there's an intense thunderstorm, which punches convection into the lower stratosphere. If that happens to intersect a mass of radioactive crap, it comes down right there. Almost as if the explosion had occurred right overhead.
Who would have thought? If you're interested, you can find maps online that show deposition patterns for all of the above-ground test series.
TFA is about Cs-137, which melts at 28.5 °C, and boils at 671 °C. So filters should capture it, as long as the flue gas is cooled first. I-125 boils at 184.3 °C, so more will go through particle filters. But activated charcoal will absorb it.
"International Isotopes contractors had set up a secure steel “chamber” wherein they would perform a crucial, most perilous part of the operation: removing the capsule with cesium-137 from the irradiator."
The problem is they didn't realise it had happened straight away. They only discovered the leak later, when performing a routine wipe-down check of the area. There are still details missing though, like how come they didn't perform the wipe-down check before opening the chamber? Or did they? As the article says, it's not clear exactly what happened.
Also if this is possible wouldn’t you put sone contingencies in place, like mount the grinder on limited travel arm or something? Sound’s like they just went at it with a $30 DeWalt.
The whole thing seems kind of ridiculous.
Like many companies, they may also have trouble hiring people.
A jig to limit grinder motion sounds like really cheap insurance to prevent this failure mode.
In which case a more sane procedure would probably mandate some examination of the capsule, formulation of a plan off-site, then implementation of said plan.
"Trained experts in radiation equiped with geiger counters and all the stuff, were unable to see it coming" Chapter 35.
They had one job. One small area to check for radiation leak in a controlled environment. How this could happen?
A) Maybe geiger counters can't detect Caesium radiation? I'm not expert in the area but would appreciate the point of view of some experts.
B) Geiger counters failed. How? didn't have batteries?
C) The leak was detected in time, but the culprit keeped his/her mouth firmly closed because... human nature. Not my fault. I didn't cut it.
D) There was not leak to detect (Leak was in a different area, Hidden second point of radiation like waste containers accumulated in the broom closet, ect)
Choose your option. In any case it feels like a lie again. This is not how you build trust on nuclear safety procedures.
In films at least, Geiger counters do a peep constantly when turned on. Could a geiger counter fall silently and be mistaken for absence of radiation? Aren't equiped with visual clues also? (lights blinking... etc)
B) Of course there is batteries in there. But if they are dead, the Geiger counter would be completely dead and not even detect the natural background. You should notice that before you actually use the device.
C) You had one job...
D) that's the problem with invisible dangers and why we have fixed procedures to follow.
A simple Geiger counter give a current pulse when a bit of ionizing radiation makes the tube conductive and then has an external circuit switch of the supply voltage to extinguish the current in the tube. During that dead time it is unable to detect radiation. After a set time the tube is powered up again. Some models would detect if there is too much current flowing and would switch of the voltage again. This current flow could happen for two reasons: it is _STILL_ flowing from the first event or it is _AGAIN_ flowing because there is too much radiation. So depending on models it might simply stay completely silent when there is a lot of radiation (failing silently when it should really warn you) or it could detect that simulation and raise an alarm (possibly giving a false positive if the tube ages and the current takes a long time to shut down after an ionization even in the tube). It is important to know which of the two the model in your hand does.
Source: Radiation Safety training more than a decade ago when studying physics.
That is devastating for the researchers.
https://i2.wp.com/www.capitolhillseattle.com/wp-content/uplo...
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/...
There's some pictures of a similar device here:
https://www.bnl.gov/nsrl/grsf/
It doesn't show why you'd need a grinder to take it apart, though.
The bit where someone asks "did you turn off the HVAC in the building once the radioactive particles went airborne?" is a classic example.
> “Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, labor, and samples are being lost on a daily basis. This could destroy the careers of people who have been working their entire lives on research meant to save lives and improve public health and hospital outcomes,” an anonymous source told KIRO.
> UW/Harborview personnel moved the contents of some units to other freezers nearby about a week after the spill, said Susan Gregg of the UW Medicine.
> “If they were showing signs of failure, the materials were moved to other freezers,” Gregg said. “We were very diligent that none of those research specimens were damaged.” No specimens were found to have any contamination, she added. The animals, mostly rodents, held in the building’s vivarium, have all been moved to another location as well. It took about two weeks for the HVAC system to be turned back on.
I love how they use a FUD quote from an "anonymous" source while following it up with an actual source which claims the complete opposite...
People love to be dramatic.
Also an interesting fact from Wikipedia:
>> Accidental ingestion of caesium-137 can be treated with Prussian blue, which binds to it chemically and reduces the biological half-life to 30 days.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Caesium-137#/Health_risk_of_radi...
Cryogenic freezers commonly cost > $10,000. Needless to say, space is very much at a premium.
Worse, moving samples between freezers is incredibly time consuming because allowing them to thaw even slightly will often damage them. In a biomedical lab such as you might reasonably expect to find at Harborview, many of the samples will invariable be living cells that have been frozen in order to preserve them (ie they can be thawed later and will still be alive... some percentage of them, at least). These samples are incredibly sensitive to how they are handled.
Accidents with irradiation sources of Caesium 137 have previously happened. See my other comment in this thread on the radiological accident in Goiania, Brazil, in the 1980's, where the source of the radiation was a radiotherapy unit with a Cs-137 source, that was sold for scrap and taken to peoples' homes for the strange blue glow it emited.
With radiation risks, the idea is to find a balance: don't go mad with fear, but don't treat it like it's trivial, either. I mean, it's not like because you can neutralise Cs-137 with Prussian blue, you can go ahead and solve some in your afternoon tea and imbibe it, and no worries.
On a more serious note, the “Chernobyl” tv series needs to be commended for showing that institutional lying and hiding things under the rug is indeed a global phenomenon, its viewers’ reaction shows that.
> EDF plans to ask the regulator for permission to restart with a new operational limit of up to 700 cracks.
Surely you must be joking? Am I not reading this correctly?
We know that caesium can be treated with prussian blue? Okay, I have an idea: What if we require, by law, to put any radioactive caesium's container floating in a bigger recipient filled with Prussian blue?
Caesium leaking would dip in Prussian blue inmediately. Any leak in the external enclosure would make also a noticeable blue stain. Impossible to miss, not tempting to eat, and would clearly delimitate the real boundaries of contaminated area that need to be cleaned.
Looks like a cheap solution to me.
On a flatbed or inside a semi, down the freeway, then installed with a combination of cranes and forklifts.
The irradiator goes out on the truck, but in modern times they don't want the cesium in it because of less perceived risk of truck accidents and terrorist hijackings. The small radioactive capsule can be sent more discretely via a smaller vehicle, and a security escort.
I made medical imaging software for treatment and diagnosis for a living. I suspect I have the same reaction to posts on oncology issues, or FDA issues that you are having to posts on this issue.
It's important to realize though, that some of the people commenting with obvious gaps in their knowledge are making a sincere attempt at learning more. Especially if the subject is technical rather than political in nature. Just jump in and correct them. If any of your corrections are received poorly by the user, well, just let them alone. But the curious, 'seeker' types will probably thank you and ask for more information.
On the other hand, I think it's common to see threads that have a high ratio of signal to noise. Like a link to a scientific paper will have one of the authors of the paper in the comments section answering questions.
So it is ironic and kind of funny when you realize that, apart from a few outliers, Hacker News is just as infested with trolls, fools, posers and Dunning-Krueger as the rest of the web.
It is just a more polite /g/ without the pictures and memes. That's not an insult, just an observation of how deeply the sets of users here, there, on Reddit and elsewhere overlap.
No, it merely hides the insults behind 300 words of passive-aggressiveness.
If only, at the least, because the guidelines for HN discourage pointless and inane commentary. Reddit is very likely 95% funny one liners on the most active threads.
There are observably obvious differences, even if you don't agree with any inferences made from them.
Also, Reddit is not 95% funny one liners in technical or programming forums, and the guidelines for those often also discourage pointless and inane commentary. Go look at /r/askhistorians for one example. Reddit does have a higher tolerance for humor and memes than HN, but humorlessness is not necessarily an indicator of quality.
To your first point, I also concede that this phenomenon certainly does happen, but would counter with the notion that this probably happens with every conversation ever, with it perhaps tapering off in materials science discussions amongst experts.
I'd assert that it's happening right now, given that neither of us are likely informed enough to empirically support our assertions here. We're merely sharing our rather vague impressions.
That's fair. A lot of what happens here can probably be described as anecdotes sparring with other anecdotes.
Theranos and its ilk were all no surprise to me. The entire venture ecosystem is perfectly designed to catch charlatans, not experts.
If you make peace with this you will be much happier.
"man that seems really dumb to have a removal process that involves a cutting tool being anywhere near the capsule!"
> Comments are pointers, not destinations.
And from site guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Maybe we are blathering about something we know nothing about to the point where we just sound ridiculous to someone who does know, eh? Rather than shaking his head in exasperation and moving on, OP takes a moment to try to let us know that we're wasting our time.
If we really care, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find and perhaps read some authoritative document describing best practices for radioactive waste management, eh?
Some battles just aren't worth it.
It doesn't mean you have to get into tedious arguments with ignorant, indignant comments. (It's interesting how often those two go together.) It's enough to post a substantive top-level comment explaining what you know from the point of view of someone in the business. In the end, those tend to get upvoted; there's one at the top of this thread right now. And as moderator/gardeners we do what we can to give those more interesting plants a fighting chance vis-à-vis the weeds.
I wonder if a "badge" system could help HN. Validate professional work experience with a moderation team ("astrophysicist" because I have published papers there, or "radiation control tech" or "worked in the movie industrie" or "work at google" or whatever). You could even have more than one badge (say "work at google" and "race sailboats for sport"). And when you post a comment there is a list of all your badges below the text field an you can select one to be displayed noticeable above your comment to indicate "I have professional knowledge of this". Of course you can still post a comment without selecting any of your badges because "radiation controll tech" says nothing when discussing cookie recipes, but is an important thing to not when discussing a radioactive spill.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250627 is a fine example of how to do this, by someone who has expertise and is close to the current situation. If you post like that instead, you satisfy readers' curiosity, which is the purpose of this site. Admittedly it's more work, but it sounds like you have something a lot to offer here.
What else but a shallow dismissal for people who are ignorant but hold forth on some technical issue? The Internet is right there, they could just as easily do their own homework as post something uninformed.
People always hold forth on things they're not expert in. That's humans being human. We can't change that. What is possible is for those who know more to share some of what they know with those who want to learn. Doing that leads to much better discussion.
Well do an AMA. I have questions for you. What do you think of the Safety Officer not having any idea what was going on when the Hazmat team showed up? His not having a plan of what to do. The crew not wearing safety equipment. The Hazmat guy having to be the one to suggest shutting down the HVAC. Do you think this company handled this well at any point in the removal operation or subsequent events? What should happen to them? Should they be liable for the clean up costs? Should they be decertified? What sort of training did anyone on their crew have to allow this all to go down this way? If even one person at the company knew what they were doing, wouldn't they have raised some objections or sent a memo at some point? If everyone at this company has no idea what they are doing, should the DoE be paying them millions to deal with radioactive waste removal and transport?