Tim’s Account of the Piscataway Radium Incident
Background
My fascination with radioactivity started very early. By the age of 10, I knew I needed a Geiger counter. I searched high and low for one, calling my science teachers and their friends, but to no avail. I did already have an insensitive, high-range CDV-715 ionization chamber, but that wasn’t going to do the job.
It wasn’t until eighth grade, at the age of 13, after I had transferred to Alma Preparatory School in Zarephath, New Jersey, that my long search finally came to an end. An old Civil Defense Geiger counter was placed into my hands: a Victoreen CDV-700 that had been stored away in a box, locked in a cabinet, for perhaps forty years. This kit also contained a CDV-720, another high-range ion chamber. I talked Mr. Cruver, my science teacher, into letting me take them home.
That was it! The Geiger counter never left my side.
I surveyed everything. I’d go for walks around my neighborhood looking for something—anything. I found a few radium-painted clocks and smoke detectors, but not much more.
Thursday, January 26, 1989
That afternoon, my radiological hunting advanced to big game.
I visited my former grade school, where my aunt was teaching, and while waiting for her, my friend and I scouted around the school with the trusty CDV-700. I can still remember the faint buzz of the high-voltage oscillator bleeding through into the audio circuit, interrupted every so often by the click of a cosmic ray or some stray bit of background radiation.
As we walked down one corridor, the frequency of the clicks began to increase. It didn’t take long to realize there was a source nearby.
We poked into different rooms and hallways, mapping out the radiation field. Finally, we pinpointed the source to what was known as the “old science closet.” Unfortunately, because it was late in the day, everyone who had a key to the room had already gone home.
I would have to come back.
Thursday, February 2, 1989
One week later, I returned to the school, having made arrangements with the science teacher to inspect the closet. He unlocked the door, and I stepped inside.
The field inside the room pegged the CDV-700.
Piece by piece, objects had to be removed from the room in a process of elimination to determine the source of this fantastic radiation. Eventually, we found it.
It was just a little metal rod, with an obvious handle at one end and a tip at the other. It was marked “Radium Chemical Company.”
Since my CDV-700’s maximum scale was only 50 mR/hr, I held the source by the handle and away from my body. Honestly, I didn’t think the source could be that bad. So I took it home.
A few minutes later, I arrived home—my mom was driving—and, coincidentally, my father pulled into the driveway after his day at work. Being the proud hunter, I naturally had to display my kill to him.
Dad wasn’t very thrilled, but he trusted me.
I took the source downstairs to my lab, which had been converted from my father’s old darkroom. I was curious to see whether I could make the needle of my CDV-720 ion chamber deflect even slightly, since I had never been able to do so with any of my test sources.
I turned the unit on and selected its most sensitive range: 0–5 R/hr.
To my jaw-dropping astonishment, the needle pegged at 5 R/hr.
Next, I switched the ion chamber to the 0–50 R/hr range. Near the tip of the device, the meter climbed to approximately 50 R/hr.
OH MY! What have I done?
Those were my precise thoughts.
I knew a lot—but not enough. At the time, I did not properly understand the inverse-square relationship governing radiation intensity with distance, and I immediately thought I had given myself a near-fatal dose of radiation.
Time to tell DAD. Gulp.
He actually took it pretty well.
He called the local authorities first. They were useless. Then he called the New Jersey Department of Health. They weren’t much more help; when my father told them the dose-rate measurements I had obtained, they apparently thought he was cranking them.
Eventually, Dad gave up for the night and decided to make more calls the next day.
Meanwhile, I decided to shield the source.
Using pliers, I bent the rod near the tip to decrease its overall linear length. I then placed it into a one-liter Nalgene container that I had filled with concrete, except for a small tube running along its central axis. I put the cap on the container and placed the whole thing inside a roughly 33-gallon drum of similar construction. The drum had a four-inch PVC pipe running down its center, with the remainder filled with concrete.
I had made these shielding containers for fun, never actually expecting to need them.
They turned out to be quite handy.
The shielding greatly reduced the radiation field from the source, although certainly not to background. With the source shielded as well as I could manage, I called it a night.
Friday, February 3, 1989
I went to school as usual the next morning, worrying all day about my exposure.
I kept tugging on my hair to see if it was starting to fall out. I pulled so hard that I think I actually did make some of it come out.
My mom picked me up from school at 2:50 that afternoon, and I immediately asked about Dad and whether he had managed to contact anyone.
She laughed.
Not an ordinary laugh, either. It was that certain kind of laugh.
Uh oh.
My throat sank into my gut.
She told me that several officials were already at the house and that they were going to have to take our house away in 55-gallon drums because it was heavily contaminated.
Oh no. Oh no!
She continued by saying that a task force was on its way to our house, just as we were on our way home.
You have to understand that my mom has seen one too many movies and likes to be dramatic.
But this time, she wasn’t embellishing very much.
Sure enough, the task force was on its way. Before that long evening was over, roughly ten DEP and EPA health physicists would enter our house.
When I arrived home that rainy Friday afternoon, I was greeted by a health physicist who sat me down at the kitchen table and proceeded to ask me many questions—over and over and over.
Meanwhile, a small group of health physicists gathered in the garage, where the concrete-filled drum had been wheeled. I wanted desperately to see what was happening out there. Finally, the health physicist interviewing me allowed me to watch from a considerable distance, in an effort to keep any additional dose to me as low as possible.
After wrapping the drum several times with thick lead sheet, they were ready to remove the source.
A couple of technicians from Teledyne Isotopes arrived with a van carrying a shielded drum lined with depleted uranium—a very dense material and excellent for gamma-ray shielding. They backed the van up to the garage and transferred the source into their superior container.
Then it was back to the kitchen table for me, where I faced still more questions from still more people.
At one point, one of the health physicists came upstairs from my basement laboratory with an astonished look on his face.
“Why, he has….”
And he proceeded to list much of the surplus scientific equipment I had accumulated in my lab.
After extensive questioning and reconstructing my entire trip home with the source—from the school until the moment I sealed it inside the shielding drum—the team of health physicists estimated my total radiation dose at approximately 275 millirem.
That was roughly comparable to the annual background radiation dose received by an average member of the public at the time—and substantially less than the near-fatal exposure I had spent the previous day imagining.
Aftermath
As the Teledyne technicians drove away with the source, the needles on the radiation meters fell back toward background.
Most importantly, there was no detectable radium contamination in the house. The radioactive material had remained contained within the tip of the device.
I was extremely lucky.
Radium-226 decays by alpha emission. The alpha particles are helium nuclei; after losing their energy within the source material and surrounding structure, they can acquire electrons and become helium atoms. Over many decades, helium produced within a sealed radium source can accumulate. Combined with corrosion, aging, and radiation damage to the source capsule, this creates the possibility that an old radium source can eventually lose its integrity.
Had that happened—had the tip ruptured and dispersed radium throughout the school, our car, my laboratory, or our house—the situation would have been vastly more serious.
I am extraordinarily thankful that it did not.
For years afterward, spray-paint markings remained on our garage floor where the health physicists had taken measurements to determine the activity contained within the source tip.
Their estimate was approximately 100 millicuries of Ra-226.
That estimate was also remarkably consistent with the dose rates I had measured with my old Civil Defense instruments.
In the 1920s, radium sold for approximately $113 per milligram. At that price, the quantity contained in that little source would have been worth roughly $11,300.
Not bad for a 13-year-old out hunting with a surplus Geiger counter.
And considerably more “big game” than I had intended to find.
The following is the executive summary from the official Piscataway Radium Incident:
