Radiation risksEmployees exposed to radiation at nuclear waste disposal site

Thirteen employees at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant(WIPP),a nuclear waste burial site in New Mexico, have been exposed to  radioactive radiation after a leak in one of WIPP’s underground tunnels. Energy Department officials say it is too soon to determine the scope of health risks the employees will deal with.

Trust.org reports that the employees inhaled plutonium and americium, both of which can irradiate the body’s internal organs with subatomic particles for a lifetime. Americium concentrates in the bone, liver, and muscles and can expose surrounding tissues to radiation, increasing the body’s chance of developing cancer. Contamination levels depend on the workers’ proximity to the materials and the dose will be delivered over many years.

AccordingJoe Franco, manager of the Energy Department’s Carlsbad, New Mexico field office, calculating a lifetime dose of the toxins will require several urine and fecal samples, taken over time, to determine the rate the body eliminates the toxins. “Right now we have one single data point; there was one reading,” said Franco.

The drugs available to individuals who have absorbed radioactive materials themselves carry health risks, and this risk may outweigh the risks of the initial radiation exposure, especially if the level of contamination is low. These drugs contain chemicals that bind with radioactive materials, then speed up excretion.

Accordingto the New York Times, sensors in the salt mine, where nuclearwaste is buried, detected a leak at 11.30pm on Friday, 14 February 2014, a time when no one was in the mine (see also “Operations at a New Mexico nuclear waste repository suspended because of leaks,” HSNW, 19 February 2014). Automatic systems reduced the ventilation and powered the exhaust through high efficiency particulate filters, minimizing the flow of toxic materials to the surface. The next morning, officials realized that the surface was contaminated, which led to an external radioactive materials scan of employees at the plant before they were later sent home. The scans showed no contamination, but the Energy Department also conducted fecal and urine sample tests which later revealed which workers were contaminated. Fecal and urine tests can detect radioactive matter in smaller quantities.

Managers at the waste plant said the cause of the leak could have been the breach of drums containing radioactive materials in an underground waste-disposal area. “If you’re standing by a 55-gallon drum of plutonium and americium, not much problem. But when you get even a small portion of what’s in that drum in the air and you breathe it in, then you do have a problem,” said Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety program at the Southwest Research and Information Center.

This incident was the first of its kind at the facility since it opened in 1999 to store transuranic waste shipped from U.S. nuclear laboratories and weapons sites. “A lot of people are just jumping up and down and wanting us to shut down,” said Farok Sharif, president of the Nuclear Waste Partnershipthat runs the site. “But that’s not the case here. We’ve designed this facility to look at these types of accidents, and we’ve planned on making sure that we continue to protect our employees and we protect the environment. And our system worked as designed.”

The leak raises questions about the Energy Department’s $5 billion-a-year program for cleaning up waste from decades of nuclear-bomb making. Accordingto the AP, while the operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant are on hold, so are shipments of toxic waste, including 4,000 barrels of waste that Los Alamos National Laboratoryhas been ordered to remove from its complex by the end of June 2014. Waste from laboratories in Idaho, Illinois, and South Carolina is also on hold while operations at the New Mexico waste plant are under review.