Re: Roger Caldwell Papers on Web

["Thomas E. Potter" <pottert@erols.com>]

I applaud Dan Strom for his excellent effort in establishing a Roger

Caldwell internet archive.  As Dan rightly notes, Roger was a pioneer.

But, because of his early death, and because of certain career

limitations, much of his work, while documented in a fashion, was never

as well disseminated as it might have been. Dan's effort will help

rectify that.



I worked for Roger Caldwell at NUMEC when I was in my twenties and just

starting out, and have always considered him a mentor, even though he

was only 5-6 years older than I was.  Roger was an outstanding young

health physicist, and I'm sure that, had he not died so young, just as

the academic phase of his career was starting, he would by now be an

outstanding old health physicist, like most of the other Elda Anderson

award winners of his era.



The NUMEC milieu in which Roger worked is almost indescribable, but has

been most effectively summarized succinctly by another colleague, Jerry

Roth, later of NRC, as "the Netscape of its day."  It was so in many

ways, not the least of which being the fairly spectacular

concave-downward parabolic trajectory of its corporate fortunes.  The

company attracted lots of bright and often very eccentric people who did

lots of interesting things and learned a lot in the process-sometimes

the hard way.  As a promotional device, the company printed and gave

away tons of a 75-page desk calendar that today seems almost bizarre.

It was chock full of nuclear data.  For example, one page was a table of

mass-absorption coefficients for photons in various materials.  The

calendar was one of the most treasured objects in contemporary nuclear

geekdom, and I still have my 1970 edition prominently displayed in my

office.  I can't imagine that the calendar ever brought in a dime's

worth of business, but it certainly captured the spirit of the place.

 

Roger fit into this situation nicely.  He was smart, energetic, and

curious.  Having come from Brookhaven, he was research oriented.  At

NUMEC he had a line management position in a commercial organization

where other duties were pressing and where research opportunities in his

field were limited.  But there were certainly lots of health physics

problems to solve.  And because they had to be solved; because they

typically involved scientific investigation to some extent; because the

solutions had to be documented; and because the results were typically

of some interest to the broader health physics community in a developing

industry, these problems often became micro-scale research projects.

Roger became adept at organizing and documenting them that way fairly

efficiently.  This became important professionally because, while NUMEC

would send you to professional meetings as management thought necessary

(i.e., not very often), the company would practically always send you if

you got a paper accepted.  And, in those days, meetings were about the

only opportunity to inform and to keep informed about what was going on

in the profession in near-real time.  Roger had lots of papers, and he

parlayed them into trips to lots of meetings.  His writing after the

meeting was strictly limited to trip reports, most often extensive

descriptions of other papers.  Some of these were so instructive that I

saved them.  At NUMEC Roger did not have time or resources for

publication of his own work.  Consequently, few of his papers were

published in the standard literature, and those that were got published

with no effort on his part.  Because of this, a very large part of the

publicly available documentation of his NUMEC work exists only in the

form of meeting handouts.



Roger's citation for the Elda Anderson award is in HP Vol 25, No. 3,

(Sept 1973) at pages 216-8.  I have only one small correction to Dan's

brief bio.  Roger left NUMEC in 1970 to return to the University of

Kansas to finish work for his PhD.  He finished in 1972 and then joined

the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.  



I am sending to Dan the following papers for inclusion in his Roger

Caldwell archive:



"Radioactivity in Coal Mine Drainage," R. D. Caldwell, R. F. Crosby, and

M. P. Lockard, 1968 HPS Midyear, proceedings published as Environmental

Surveillance in the Vicinity of Nuclear Facilities, William C. Reinig

ed., Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1970.



"Gamma Spectrum Measurements and the Interpretation of Absorbed Dose

during Plutonium Fuel Fabrication," Roger D. Caldwell and William C.

Judd, 1966 HPS Annual Meeting.



"Environmental Monitoring near a Multi-Stack Uranium Plant," Roger D.

Caldwell and Ronald F. Crosby, undated, but probably 1967, based on

reference list.



"Radiological Emergency Experience in an Industrial Plutonium Plant,"

Roger Caldwell, Thomas Potter, and Edward Schnell, undated but probably

prepared in 1969, based on reference list.



"The Solubility of Inhaled Particles," Roger Caldwell and Thomas Potter,

undated.



"Calibration of a Po-210/Be Neutron Source," Thomas Potter and Roger

Caldwell, undated.



"A Technique for the Disposal of Highly Contaminated Glove Boxes," T.

Potter, D. Sgarlata, R. Atkins, R. Caldwell, H. Glauberman, and E.

Katine, HPS 1968 Annual Meeting



I believe that Roger may also have had papers written with Allen Brodsky

and Neil Wald in this time frame, but I do not have copies of those.





Thomas Potter



-----------------

Dan Strom posted:



Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:51:22 -0800

From: "Strom, Daniel J" <strom@PNL.GOV>

Subject: Roger Caldwell Papers on Web





RADSAFErs,



I have posted the following information and links to a few .pdfs at

http://bidug.pnl.gov/reading.htm . Please let me know of corrections or

additions. Thanks.



Roger D. Caldwell Archives

*	Roger Dale Caldwell, Ph.D., was a pioneering health physicist

who worked in the Health and Safety Group at the Nuclear Materials and

Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania, during the 1960s

and into the 1970s. Roger struggled with the challenges of protecting

workers from intakes of uranium and plutonium and measuring how well

protection had succeeded using bioassay, air samples, and workplace

indicators. He showed that traditional indicators were not adequate, and

developed new means to monitor workers that were adequate.

*	He received the Health Physics Society's Elda E. Anderson Award

in 1973.

*	Roger Caldwell left NUMEC in the early 1970s and joined the

faculty of the Department of Radiation Health at the University of

Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Some of the papers linked

below were salvaged from the trash at Pitt in the early 1990s when the

department began relocating off-campus. Others listed can be found in

publications. The unpublished papers are reproduced here out of respect

for the legacy of this forward-thinking individual.

*	Roger Caldwell died in 1974 at the age of 39.

*	Please contact the webmaster if you have any other Roger

Caldwell papers to contribute to this archive.

*	Caldwell RD. The Detection of Insoluble Alpha Emitters in the

Lung <http://bidug.pnl.gov/references/Caldwell1966a.pdf> . AEC Bioassay

and Analytical Chemistry Conference, CONF-661018, Gatlinburg, Tennessee,

October, 1966.

*	Caldwell RD, Judd, WC. Alpha Spectrum Degradation by PuO2

Particles <http://bidug.pnl.gov/references/Caldwell1966.pdf> . Presented

at 1966 Annual Meeting of Health Physics Society, Houston, Texas.

Abstract in Health Physics 12:1193 (1966).

*	Caldwell RD, T Potter, and E Schnell. Bioassay Correlation with

Breathing Zone Sampling. UCRL-18140. 1967. Berkeley, California, U.C.

Berkeley. Proceedings of the 13th Meeting on Bioassay and Analytical

Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley.

*	Caldwell RD, Schnell E. Respirator Effectiveness in an Enriched

Uranium Plant <http://bidug.pnl.gov/references/Caldwell1968.pdf> .

Presented at the 1968 American Industrial Hygiene Conference, May 13-17,

1968, St. Louis, Missouri.

*	Caldwell RD. Large-Scale Processing of Plutonium: Radiation

Protection Under Commercial Conditions

<http://bidug.pnl.gov/references/Caldwell1970.pdf> . "For Presentation

Only" Probably about 1970, based on statement on page 2. Alas, the

slides are not available.

*	Caldwell RD. 1972. "Evaluation of Radiation Exposure." in Health

Physics Operational Monitoring, Vol. 1, eds. CA Willis and JS Handloser,

pp. 563-612. Gordon and Breach, New York.

*	Caldwell RD. Working Paper. Fecal Sampling for Uranium Exposure

<http://bidug.pnl.gov/references/Caldwell1972.pdf> . Date unknown; 1972

or later judging by references.



- ----------*----------



- - Dan Strom



The opinions expressed above, if any, are mine alone and have not been

reviewed or approved by Battelle, the Pacific Northwest National

Laboratory, or the U.S. Department of Energy.



Daniel J. Strom, Ph.D., CHP

Environmental Technology Directorate, Pacific Northwest National

Laboratory Mail Stop K3-56, PO BOX 999, Richland, Washington 99352-0999

USA

Overnight: Battelle for the U.S. DOE, 790 6th St., Richland WA 99352

ATTN: Dan Strom K3-56

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