A radioactive mouse was discovered and later killed about seven weeks ago at one of the Savannah River Site radioactive waste storage tank farms, according to an occurrence report submitted to the Department of Energy.
The quarterly report was submitted by Savannah River Remediation (SRR), liquid waste contractor for the DOE facility in South Carolina.
The mouse did not cause further contamination to employees or to the H Area Tank Farm work area. It is unclear how the mouse became radioactive, and SRR said this type of incident has never been reported before at Savannah River.
Dated April 5, the report says SRR personnel noticed the mouse on Feb. 24 at a radiological control office at the H Tank Farm, which encompasses 29 of the site’s 51 liquid waste storage tanks.
The mouse was exterminated and then surveyed by a radiological control inspector, who determined the rodent had 160,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm), the measurement for determining radioactivity. By comparison, if surface-level dpms exceed 5,000, the number must be reported to the Energy Department.
According to the report, the mouse was tagged and bagged for disposition, and the shift operations manager was notified, as well as radiological control management. At first, the incident was not deemed worthy to enter into DOE’s Occurrence Report and Processing System (ORPS). “However, subsequent review of this event along with benchmarking of similar events at other DOE sites lead to the decision to report this event,” SRR stated in its report.
The Savannah River Site houses two tank farms that today hold about 35 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production.
Of the 51 tanks, eight have been closed and 43 remain to be cleaned and grouted. All told, the SRS liquid waste mission is expected to last until 2039 and carries a life-cycle cost of $33 billion to $57 billion.
