Colleges routinely mishandle radioactive material
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 16, 1995 9:00 p.m.
Colleges routinely mishandle radioactive material
Harvard U. cited eight times for violation of laws
By Jon Marcus
The Associated Press
BOSTON — Radioactive material is tossed into the trash and
buried in a landfill. Eight people are unknowingly exposed when
radioactive waste leaks from a container because someone forgot to
put the plug in. Labs with radioactive materials are left unlocked
and unsupervised.
These incidents, and similar ones, occurred not at an
irresponsible corporation or in a bad B-movie plot, but at Harvard,
Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and other
schools.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents obtained by The
Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act show that
Massachusetts universities have what a Nuclear Regulatory
Commission inspector called a "cavalier" attitude toward the
handling and disposal of radioactive material.
The inspector singled out one school in particular: Harvard,
which was cited at least eight times in the last 10 years for
violating NRC regulations.
The documents showed that radioactive material has been
illegally thrown into the trash at least seven times by four
different Massachusetts institutions in the last eight years.
Authorities suspect it now sits buried in municipal landfills
 though they don’t know where.
Four of these instances occurred at the Boston University
medical school, where a radiology instrument containing radioactive
material was accidently thrown into a trash compactor in December
1987 and hauled to a landfill south of Boston.
On Mar. 13, 1989, radioactive material was discovered missing
from a BU lab. Six months later, a vial containing radioactive
phosphorous was left in a hallway trash pile and disposed of in an
unknown landfill. And on Oct. 4, 1993, a housekeeping employee
threw another container of radioactive phosphorus into the
trash.
BU’s associate director of environmental health, James Bove,
called the problems isolated incidents and said procedures have
been changed.
Robert Hallisey, director of the state’s Radiation Control
Program, called college students and professors "lackadaisical"
about the issue.
"People are in deep denial about the potential hazard to
themselves and the potential harm that they are doing to completely
unknowing people," said Mary Olson, who was accidentally exposed to
radiation when she was a Yale University researcher.
NRC documents show that in addition to inadequately disposing of
radioactive waste, the universities violated safe handling rules
and had several accidents.
At Harvard, NRC officials found the doors to labs and storage
rooms propped open and researchers working with radiation while
wearing shorts, without required lab coats or monitoring
badges.
Students and professors at Boston College, Brandeis, Harvard and
UMass-Amherst were discovered eating sandwiches and drinking coffee
in labs where radioactive isotopes were present. Eating in a lab
where there is radioactive material is illegal, since radiation can
be rapidly absorbed into the body this way. Yet Brandeis lab
workers kept a coffee pot on a lab bench where radioactive
phosphorus was being used.
Robin Bell, the Brandeis radiation safety officer, said eating
in a lab "is plain and simple carelessness." Still, he added, "It’s
a problem you’ll find virtually everywhere that radiation is used
in universities."
