Atomic man gets closure at nuclear weapons site
Fri, Feb 24th, 2012
by: James Conca, Contributor,
Forbes.com
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For the first time since a dramatic explosion 38 years ago, workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State will soon re-enter the McCluskey Room. The room is the site of a 1976 explosion that exposed a radiation worker named Harold McCluskey to a massive dose of radiation. He survived to become known as the Atomic Man.
At the time, McCluskey had been working on columns filled with special exchange resins in a glove box at the Plutonium Finishing Plant used to recover radioactive americium, a byproduct of plutonium production for weapons production.
The laboratory had been closed for five months as a result of a strike, and McCloskey was wary of resuming this particular work, remembering earlier warnings of working with resins that were unattended for that long a time. But his boss said to proceed. After adding nitric acid to columns containing americium (Am-241) and other radionuclides, the column exploded, spraying leaded glass, nitric acid and radioactive materials onto the face of McCluskey.
The radiochemistry laboratory, called the McCluskey Room, in the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington State where Harold McCluskey was contaminated in 1976, and into which workers are now re-entering to clean-up the mess left-over from that accident. Health physics technician Clay Rowan is shown here taking radiological measurements near racks of glove boxes similar to one that exploded onto Harold McCluskey that long time ago. Source: DOE
The radiochemistry laboratory, called the McCluskey Room, in the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington State where Harold McCluskey was contaminated in 1976, and into which workers are now re-entering to clean-up the mess left-over from that accident. Health physics technician Clay Rowan is shown here taking radiological measurements near racks of glove boxes similar to one that exploded onto Harold McCluskey that long time ago. Source: DOE
In seconds, McCluskey received 500 times the amount of radiation considered safe over an entire lifetime, thousands of times greater than anyone contaminated at Fukushima, and greater than many of those who responded to Chernobyl.
He was so radioactive that his body set off Geiger counters 50 feet away, according to Department of Energy and the Tri-City Herald accounts of the accident (Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald). Because of these levels of radioactivity, McCluskey came to be called the Atomic Man.
McCluskey was only five feet from the blast. His protective respirator was torn from his face, metal, glass and rubber were embedded in his skin, nitric acid seared his face and eyes, and radioactive particles coated some of his body and his airways. McCluskey had to be removed from the ambulance by remote control and transported to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank where he spent the next three weeks cut off from any personal contact.
During the next five-and-a-half months, it was touch and go for the radworker. McCluskey was physically scrubbed, cleaned up and given over 500 injections of trisodium zinc diethylenetriaminepentaacetate, an experimental drug at the time, that helped his body eliminate the radioactive material. The accident changed McCluskey’s life and ended his career, although everyone said he remained in good spirits throughout the recovery.
Since McCluskey received such high radiation doses from this accident (cumulative absorbed doses to the bone, bone surface, liver, and lung were 18, 520, 8, and 1.6 Gy, respectively – Toohey and Kathren 1995), it was surprising that he did not die from any radiation-induced cancer or other rad-health effect. He ended up dying at the age of 75 from congestive heart failure as a result of a long-standing coronary artery disease.
While shunning the spotlight, whenever McCluskey did speak about the incident, he considered it an industrial accident and said he continued to support nuclear power. The concentrated nitric acid appeared to have hurt him much more than the rad.
An investigation into the explosion confirmed that the resin mixture had become unstable exactly as McCluskey feared, and the government finally settled in 1977 for $275,000 plus lifetime medical expenses. This accident was one of those unusual events that provides a lot of critical data on human biological effects of radiation, so the government also wanted to study him after he died.
However, according to McCluskey’s wife, Ella, the government balked at paying the settlement. A former teacher and nurse, Ella cleverly told them they wouldn’t be able to do an autopsy when he died. They paid up pretty quick after that (People 1977). That autopsy showed McCluskey had no evidence of pre-cancerous or cancerous lesions.
The Atomic Man is back in the news because Hanford workers are planning to complete cleaning out the McCluskey Room at the Plutonium Finishing Plant after all these years as part of the total remediation of the the Plutonium Finishing Plant. It will be one of the most challenging clean-up operations in the Department’s history and will close the book on Atomic Man.
“About two-thirds of the Plutonium Finishing Plant is deactivated — cleaned out and ready for demolition,” said Jon Peschong, an assistant DOE manager in Richland. “Cleaning out the McCluskey Room will be a major step forward.”
This time, the radworkers will be in new protective gear that will make them look like the Marshmallow monster in GhostBusters. The billowy, air-filled one-piece white suits are topped with what looks like a clear, oversized bucket turned upside down over their heads. A big innovation of these suits, designed at the Idaho National Laboratory, is comfort, allowing workers to stay longer in these types of environments.
“It creates a micro-environment for workers,” said Mike Swartz, the vice president for the Plutonium Finishing Plant work for the CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company.
By 2016, the McCluskey Room is expected to be gone, following most of the Hanford site into history. But Atomic Man will live on in the legends of the site for a long, long time.
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