PDA

View Full Version : Blunder Left Trail Of Lethal Radiation



Gold9472
02-18-2006, 07:28 PM
Blunder left trail of lethal radiation
Safety cap left off toxic cargo as it travelled 130 miles across Britain

http://www.timesonline.co.uk./article/0,,2-2046104,00.html

(Gold9472: I don't think they should be trusted with nuclear materials.)

By Andrew Norfolk
2/18/2006

A LETHAL beam of radiation was emitted from a casket containing highly radioactive waste on a three-and-a-half-hour road journey across England, it was disclosed yesterday.

Thousands of people were put at risk by the “cavalier” attitude of workers for the privatised company in charge of transporting the hospital waste.

Anyone standing one yard from the beam and in its direct path would have felt sick within ten minutes. After two hours they would have been dead.

Only by “pure chance” was no one directly exposed to the high concentration of cobalt-60 gamma rays that streamed from the container because of the failure to install a lead safety plug.

Radiation levels up to 1,000 times higher than a high dose rate were found a day after the trailer and its 2.6-tonne package reached their destination.

Details of the trail of radiation emitted on the 130-mile journey from Cookridge hospital, Leeds, to the Windscale waste processing at Sellafield, Cumbria, emerged at Leeds Crown Court. Fortunately, the narrowly focused beam was directed downwards. Had the rays escaped horizontally, they would have contaminated anyone within 330 yards of the vehicle.

Dr Michael Clark, of the Health Protection Agency’s radiation protection division, said that those in the vicinity of the trailer, and particularly its driver, were “very fortunate” to have escaped unharmed.

“The doses — and the dangers — drop off with distance, but this was a very large source, potentially lethal,” said Dr Clark. The court was told that it was impossible to assess the extent of exposure as the beam may have bounced off the ground during loading and contaminated employees.

The company at the centre of the scandal, which was formerly part of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, admitted six breaches of the regulations governing the transport of radioactive material.

AEA Technology (AEAT) was guilty of a series of failings that led to the incident, exposing its employees and other people “to unnecessary and potentially extremely high radiological risks”.

Two long-serving employees later resigned. The Recorder of Leeds, Judge Norman Jones QC, specifically criticised their behaviour.

The judge said: “The two people who were primarily involved have been allowed to become, with lack of proper oversight, relaxed and somewhat cavalier in their approach to what they should be doing.

“We have to remember that we are dealing with the movement over long distances of very, very dangerous material.”

Mark Harris, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive and the Department for Transport, said that the company used the wrong safety packaging, and had not noticed the missing safety plug.

It failed to take up an offer of training in the use of the packaging and important safety documents were signed by a member of staff who had no formal training in radiation protection, he said.

AEAT, which employs 1,670 staff and has an annual turnover of £238 million, was also blamed for refusing to answer questions and failing to disclose the findings of an internal inquiry.

“The risk created . . . was foreseeable and the degree of that risk was significant. There is no “safe” dose of ionising radiation. If no one was directly exposed to the beam, that was a matter of pure chance.”

The court heard that in November 2001 AEAT quoted a price of £245,000 to remove and dispose of various radioactive sources. One of these was a quantity of cobalt-60 from a teletherapy machine — used to treat cancer patients — at Cookridge Hospital.

Staff from AEAT and its sub-contractor, International Radiotherapy Services, arrived at the hospital on a Saturday in March 2002. They took the cobalt-60 from the machine before loading it into an inner flask and then into an outer container. Some monitoring of radiation levels was carried out, but no one checked the underside, where the shield plug was missing.

The package was loaded on to a low-axle trailer and at 4pm on Sunday, March 10, the journey began. The gamma ray beam was fired directly into the ground along the entire route.

The vehicle reached AEAT’s radioactive waste management plant at Windscale, Cumbria, at 7.30pm and was left in a secure compound overnight.

It was only on Monday afternoon that a health physics controller, who was using a radioactive contamination monitor on other items in the area, noticed a high background reading.

John Hand QC, for the defence, said that AEAT had responded by closing down one of its divisions for 12 months at a cost of £1million. It was restructured, and sold last year.

Mr Hand apologised and said that the company had an excellent safety record before the incident. “The public must have confidence in the safe disposal of this material and the defendent realises that what happened at Cookridge dents that confidence.”

Radioactive materials that are used in industry, hospitals and research laboratories are transported by road every day.

A study quoted by the Government suggests that more than 500,000 packages containing “field sources” are being shipped within Britain each year. The study concluded that the exposure of most transport workers was below 1 millisieverts and that doses to members of the public were “very low”.

The AEAT case is the first prosecution of a specialist company under the Radioactive Materials (Road Transport) Act 1991 for some years, because of the breach’s scale.

Sentencing was adjourned until Monday.