It will take at least until 2021 before the University of Washington can reopen a building contaminated with cesium-137 by a 2019 radiological source-removal gone wrong — and some of the facility might have to be torn down and rebuilt, a university official said Wednesday.
“The current timeline has remediation going basically to the end of the year, with [the Washington state] Department of Health doing their evaluation and release for unrestricted use in early January,” Philip Campbell, manager of the radiation safety section of environmental health and safety at the University of Washington, said in a webcast panel discussion at the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management’s (INMM) annual meeting.
The whole cleanup could take even longer than that, because some of the Harborview Medical Center research facility is so contaminated that it will have to be replaced.
“The reconstruction schedule currently runs to kind of the end of June 2021,” Campbell said. “So about another year. That doesn’t mean we can’t reoccupy the building before then, but we definitely can’t reoccupy until we get that clearance from [the] Department of Health.”
International Isotopes, an Idaho-based radiological source recovery specialist, was removing a blood irradiator with a 2,900-curie cesium-137 source from the Harborview Research and Training Facility on May 2 ,2019, under contract to Los Alamos National Laboratory management contractor Triad National Security.
The irradiator did not fit exactly right into the mobile hot cell the company brought to safely remove the device’s cesium source, and when International Isotopes personnel decided to go ahead with the job, anyway — cutting into the source with a saw to unseal it — the device leaked radiation.
The release of gamma radiation contaminated 13 workers and observers on-site, plus seven floors of the building itself. It prompted International Isotopes to exit the radiological source removal business after the Department of Energy canceled or suspended all of the company’s contracts for such services.
The incident precipitated some calamity at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semiautonomous DOE agency that oversees Los Alamos and manages the source-recovery program.
On Wednesday at the INMM virtual meeting , Nicholas Butler, deputy director for the NNSA’s Office of Radiological Security, remembered the words of a colleague on the scene at Harborview in 2019.
“Oh my god, it’s terrible,” Butler said, recalling the words of his colleague. “Everyone’s mad, no one knows what to do, we don’t know what to do, it’s complete chaos, it’s terrible.”
The accident prompted the NNSA to dock Triad some of its annual fee, according to the company’s first performance evaluation.
Officials speaking on the INMM panel on Wednesday estimated it will cost between $40 million and $60 million to remediate the site. The NNSA is paying for the work.
