In the omnibus spending bill signed this week, Congress appropriated $30 million for the National Nuclear Security Administration to continue cleaning up a downtown Seattle building that has been vacant for more than a year after an agency contractor botched the removal of a cesium-137 blood irradiator from the premises and contaminated the facility.
Together with the $20 million appropriated in fiscal 2020, that makes $50 million in emergency cleanup funding to tackle the contamination left over from the May 2, 2019 incident at the University of Washington’s Research and Training Facility at the Harborview Medical Center. Altogether, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) thinks the cleanup tab will run to $60 million or so.
This year’s Seattle-cesium cleanup funding came out of the NNSA’s Global Domestic Radiological Security, within the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation. The $20 million appropriated last year came out of the office’s Global Radiological Security account. The NNSA thinks the university could reoccupy the building in late summer 2021.
The accident in Seattle last year drew some scathing commentary from the NNSA-Los Alamos Joint Investigation Team and drove International Isotopes, the contractor that spilled the cesium, out of the source recovery business — but it did not shake Congress’ confidence in the popular program.
The 2021 omnibus has $45 million for the NNSA’s Cesium Irradiator Replacement Program, which according to NNSA has to date removed some 350 cesium sources from soft targets potentially vulnerable to bad actors seeking to weaponize radiological material.
