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RadSafe Folks -- In January, the two local papers serving the Oak Ridge and Knoxville areas reported that in December, up to seven people at Oak Ridge National Laboratory received unexpected doses from testing of an "electron cyclotron resonance source". In one article, it was stated that the workers were "unwittingly" exposed to X rays and the situation was not discovered until later. It also said that "Workers did not think any radiation would be generated during low-power testing" and that an investigation found that "additional precautions -- including the use of radiation-detection equipment -- should have been taken". In another article, the manager/spokesperson stated that "Some of those electrons were hitting the walls of the chamber in a place where it was not expected". In a third article, he stated that "We had a breakdown in our safety procedures" (direct quote) and that "an adequate safety review was not performed prior to testing of the source". The article also said that he said that "serious safety issues like this one involve disciplinary actions" but he refused to discuss what those might be. I wrote a letter to the editor of one newspaper -- which they did not print -- in which I pointed out that I had reported to my managers years ago that the facility, the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility, had avoided procedurally required design and operational reviews when they shifted from nonradioactive to radioactive operations. My supervisor told her higher-ups that she supposed that the reviews were not done either because the facility was "busy" or because they didn't know the reviews were needed. But I pointed out emphatically to all these managers that my supervisor and I had met with the facility manager and two others months earlier and told them explicitly that the reviews were required before the facility design was complete and the facility "went hot", so they could not have thought the reviews were not needed. Our management then allowed the whole thing to drop. I never heard of any such reviews being done in the perhaps two more years that I was at ORNL. As we can see from the recent incident -- with the elevated dose rates going undetected for four separate testing sessions -- they haven't changed their ways. Indeed, the investigation is supposed to have concluded that the research entity (the Physics Division) "has not "struck a balance" between excellence of science and excellence in its safety program". Janet Westbrook |