The phrase “don’t worry, it’ll probably be fine” works out great for a lot of things. Unstable isotopes? Not so much.
Today’s Moment of Science…The Atomic Man.
Harold McCluskey celebrated his fortieth wedding anniversary and went to work the night shift at Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant on the evening of August 30th, 1976. The site where plutonium was enriched for the Manhattan Project, it just reopened after a five month long worker strike. McCluskey was a little apprehensive about starting his extraction of americium-241 (Am-241), a procedure conducted from behind a lead-lined glove box and layers of protective equipment.
Am-241 is a byproduct of plutonium that only exists in trace amounts naturally. You might have some in your house right now in your smoke alarm. It takes about a literal ton of spent nuclear fuel to get just a hundred grams of Am-241. At $1,500 per gram, it’s expensive nuclear fuckery.
The ion exchange resin column he was instructed to use had sat, packed with resin and over a hundred grams of Am-241, for five months. Degrading.
A man with a high school education and almost thirty years on this highly skilled technician job, McCluskey had reason to be concerned that day. He’d been warned years earlier that this type of resin column should be retired after about three months, lest your goal was a large-ish ‘bang.’ But his boss, perhaps thinking of how much the Am-241 in the column was worth, was like, “eh, it’s probably fine, resin schmezin, get to work.”
An investigation would later show that, for the exact reason he suspected, it was not fine.
When Harold McCluskey poured nitric acid into that column, he saw it start to react, yelling “the thing’s going to blow.” He turned away in time to give one side of his face the worst of the blast.
His respirator flew off.
He inhaled radioactive materials into his lungs.
Glass, acid, and radioactive metal flew into his face.
He’d just been exposed to the largest dose of americium ever recorded, at 500 times the ‘safe’ occupational standard.
It was the worst fucking Monday.
He was immediately taken to a decontamination facility, where the outlook was “you have to be goddamn kidding me.” Some of the medical team gave him a 50/50 chance of survival, and those were the ones who were willing to give an answer.
McCluskey spent five months in the facility, the first several weeks of which were an agonizing, confusing hell. The blast had temporarily blinded him and muffled his hearing. Any contact with the outside world was limited to nurses suited up in protective gear to clean him. In typical cases of radiation exposure, patients don’t become a danger to those around them. McClusky was different. He hadn’t simply been exposed, the radioactive metal was in his system.
Dude had Godzilla breath.
He breathed a quantifiable amount of radiation for over a month. Daily, he was scrubbed, shaved, debrided, and scrubbed some more to get any last bit of radioactive debris out of him. They treated him with well over 500 injections of trisodium zinc diethylenetriaminepentaacetate (DTPA), a chelator which somewhat successfully removed most of the Am-241 from his system.
What was his life like after the accident? It seems he became a social pariah. Nobody wanted to be near him because they thought he was radioactive. Eventually his priest blessed him and people were like “eh, fuck it, Pastor said he’s good.” So who knows, maybe thoughts and prayers helped.
Harold McCluskey died of coronary artery disease in 1987, eleven years after the accident at the age of 75, a pretty typical lifespan. His autopsy showed no sign of cancer. A few years before he died, he was described as looking much older than his age, and having no energy after a series of other health problems. He had major issues with the eye that was hit in the blast, but it’s been suggested that was due to the nitric acid more than the radiation. But really, it’s hard not to think the radiation contributed.
He never stopped setting off geiger counters.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, unfortunately shattering the idea of getting super powers from a radiation accident.
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