A pair of contractors have started cleaning up a University of Washington building contaminated weeks ago by cesium-137, but there is no public timetable for finishing the job or reoccupying the facility.
The contractors are International Isotopes, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Chase Environmental, of Louisville, Ky. They are assisting the Washington state Department of Health, the University of Washington, and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in developing an assessment plan “to ensure effective management of this incident and return the building to full operations as quickly as possible,” a state Health Department spokesperson said by email late last week.
That said, “there is currently no timeline for complete decontamination and reoccupation of the building,” the spokesperson told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on Thursday, just before the U.S. Memorial Day holiday.
The state agency regulates radiation sources in Washington and had, as of Thursday, “approved survey and decontamination work on certain floors of the building, which is now underway by the contractors,” the spokesperson wrote.
The state Health Department and the university, along with the NNSA, have formed a unified command to respond to the May 2 contamination incident, in which International Isotopes personnel accidentally broke open a blood irradiator machine containing the highly penetrative gamma emitter.
The Health Department told the Seattle Times that about 200 people will have to be relocated from the University of Washington’s Research and Training Building in Seattle to other facilities on campus. The relocation will take about a week, and the investigation of the incident could take months, the state agency told the Times.
International Isotopes was removing the machine from under the NNSA-funded Cesium Irradiator Replacement Project, which aims to replace potentially dangerous cesium blood irradiators with X-ray irradiators that serve the same function: sterilizing blood for transfusions.
The accident contaminated 13 people, 10 of whom went to the university’s Harborview Medical Center for treatment and were later released. It also spread contamination throughout all seven floors of the Research and Training Building, the Department of Health has said.
