Re: Working life of sealed industrial sources

[David Abbott <abbott@washops.llnl.gov>]

As I recall, IBM discovered a problem with their silicon chips, which they
discovered was due to alpha contamination.  They backtracked the alpha
source to clean room chemicals made by Ashland Chemical Company.  Ashland in
turn discovered that the antistatic air line nozzles they use for blowing
dry their bottles contained leaking Po-210 sources made by 3-M Company.
Ashland spent over $1M decontaminating one of their facilities (in Dallas
?).  3-M refused to pick up any of the costs until it was discovered that
the leaking sources were a generic problem caused by defective
manufacturing, and were also used by other not so trivial users such as
Anheuser-Busch (brewskies) and Abbott Laboratories (babyfood).  Something
else big dominated the press at the time, and this radiation story never
made the press.

At 10:14 AM 10/7/96 -0500, Michael P. Grissom wrote:
>Radsafers,
>
>I believe one of the more notorious failures may have been,
>as Wes Dunn noted earlier, more one of device.  That is, some
>years ago industrial air cleaners used Ra-226 sources in the
>nozzles (?) to de-ionize air.
>
>Rumor has it that source material was released into many 
>containers being "cleaned".  Unfortunately, the company was
>a major food processor and containers (filled with food) so 
>cleaned apparently did make it to market.
>
>Anyone recall the particulars?
>
>S.,
>
>MikeG.
>
>
>At 02:41 AM 10/7/96 -0500, you wrote:
>>Is anyone aware of any incidents of leakage of the radioactive
>>material from such sources (other than that due to accident etc) which
>>could be attributed to corrosion or other age related failure of the
>>encapsulation?  
>>
>>Radiation Health Section
>>Health Department of Western Australia
>>e-mail radgovwa@sage.wt.com.au
>
>-----------------------
>Michael P. Grissom
>Special Assistant, SLAC
>mikeg@slac.stanford.edu
>Phone:  (415) 926-2346
>Fax:    (415) 926-3030
>
>