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Site of 1976 "Atomic Man" Accident To Be Cleaned
mdsolar writes with news about the cleanup of the site that exposed Harold McCluskey to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded. Workers are finally preparing to enter one of the most dangerous rooms in the world — the site of a 1976 blast in the United States that exposed a technician to a massive dose of radiation and led to his nickname: the "Atomic Man." Harold McCluskey, then 64, was working in the room at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation when a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode. He was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard. Hanford, located in central Washington state, made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades. The room was used to recover radioactive americium, a byproduct of plutonium. Covered with blood, McCluskey was dragged from the room and put into an ambulance headed for the decontamination center. Because he was too hot to handle, he was removed by remote control and transported to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank. During the next five months, doctors laboriously extracted tiny bits of glass and razor-sharp pieces of metal embedded in his skin. Nurses scrubbed him down three times a day and shaved every inch of his body every day. The radioactive bathwater and thousands of towels became nuclear waste.
Funny, I would have thought 'the radioactive boy scout' would have had the most exposure to americium (stockpiled from smoke detectors). His house needed a similar clean up after.
His treatment sort of worked. He ended up with a lot of bad health effects, but kept alive until he was 75, eleven years later. You read about old people living near Chernobyl and now Fukushima. Perhaps their age related decline leads to fewer ways for radiation to be lethal. The quick onset of leukemia seems to affect children more, for example. http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/late...