Talk about poor timing. On March 17, 2003, shortly after noon, James H. Moy, a professor of molecular bio sciences and bioengineering with the University of Hawai‘i’s College of Tropical Agricul ture and Human Resources, left the Hawai‘i Research Irradiator on the university’s Manoa campus to head down to the lower campus for a workout. For 35 years, Moy had supervised all experiments and operations of the facility, one of several university irradiators built in the early 1960s as part of what was then the Atomic Energy Commission’s “atoms-for-peace” pro gram.
“I left the door unlocked,” he explained later, “so the electrician could go in and finish the job” of replacing fluorescent light tubes that had burned out a couple of weeks earlier. “If the door were locked, then he could not get in.”
It was Moy’s bad luck that the same day, an inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Com mission was on campus to review the university’s compliance with terms of NRC permits it held for several facilities – although not, says Moy, the irradiator permit. Still, the inspector expressed an interest in visiting the irradiation facility, according to an account that Moy made to the NRC. When he stopped by, he found the door to the irradiator un locked and unattended.
For this infraction, the university was issued a Notice of Violation (severity level III) on March 24, 2005. Moy received a similar notice.
By that time, the issue of safeguarding the UH irradiator was moot. The same week that the violation notice was issued, workers with Bechtel-Nevada, a private firm under contract to the U.S. government, were removing the cobalt-60 radioactive source from the univer sity in the tedious and costly process of decom missioning the facility.
According to a press release issued April 13, 2005, by the National Nuclear Security Ad ministration, “the removal is part of a national effort by NNSA’s U.S. Radiological Threat Reduction Program to recover and secure radiological materials that could be used to make a dirty bomb.” The cobalt arrived “at a secure NNSA facility on April 12 and has been permanently disposed,” the press release stated.
‘Nothing Happened’
In a telephone interview with Environment Hawai‘i, Moy repeatedly insisted that the 2003 incident was no big deal. “I didn’t lock the door” to the irradiator, he said, “but the door was kept closed.”
“Nothing happened” as a result of the notice of violation, he said, adding that he’d received “just sort of a reprimand.”
“Don’t try to publicize it,” he said. “It doesn’t concern anybody else.”
Moy said that the 2003 incident was not the first time he had left the door unlocked. “It’s been done before,” he said. “I couldn’t just be sitting there, waiting for him,” he said, referring to the maintenance engineer replac ing the fluorescent lights.
In a memo to Wayne Fujishige, director of auxilliary enterprises for the university, writ ten by Moy two days after the incident, Moy discounted the security risk posed by an un guarded cobalt-60 source. “In view of height ened national security, there is reason to in crease our alert but not necessary to the point of becoming panic,” he said. “Anybody who tries to go in the irradiator pool to try to steal the cobalt will die before he can get out of the room.”
“I will make sure that the door to the irradiator will be secure at all times from now on,” he concluded.
Moy didn’t have the chance to do that. Shortly after the NRC inspector’s visit, Moy, now a professor emeritus but still on 40 percent salary at UH, “was reprimanded – actually he was removed,” says Roy Takekawa, director of the university’s Office of Environ mental Health and Safety. At the same time, Takekawa said, the irradiator “moved from in-service to in-storage status, and our office took over control of facility.”
Even before the incident, the university had begun investigating the prospect of de commissioning the aging facility. The irra diator had limited research utility: according to Harry Ako, on CTAHR’s staff, the irradiator’s cobalt-60 source “had decayed away so much, it took forever to irradiate something if you had an experiment.” Ako said use of the irradiator had slacked off about five years ago. In addition, the presence of the irradiator on campus and the requirement for constant security made it more of a liability than an asset.
To carry out the decommissioning, Takekawa said, “we had to prove to the DOE” – successor to the Atomic Energy Commis sion – “that they still owned [the cobalt].” Otherwise, the university would have been stuck with the costs. Negotiations took a couple of years. Finally, last March 28, while the rest of the university was on spring break, the contractors for the National Nuclear Safety Administration of the federal Depart ment of Energy removed the cobalt and shipped it to the continental United States, where, contrary to the NNSA press release, it has not been “permanently disposed” of, but rather stored in a temporary deposit. (In a recent report, the Government Accountabil ity Office noted that the Department of Energy “has not yet provided a facility for the permanent disposal of greater-than-class-C waste” – such as that from the UH irradiator
– “but is collecting this material to address security concerns in the interim.”)
Secret Violations
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued no press release disclosing the univer sity violation. Visitors to the NRC’s web site will search in vain for the notice of violation on its list of enforcement actions. The only public references to the incident are buried in Moy’s 2003 memo and in a 2005 letter to the NRC in which Moy attempts to explain his safety record and asks to be given a warning without a citation, “or a citation with a lower level of severity.” (Severity levels I through V reflect the potential security risks, with level I being reserved for the gravest risks, and level V being for relatively minor infractions.)
Victor Dricks, the public affairs officer for NRC Region IV, said that the lack of public notice of the violation resulted from the nature of the violation itself. After the events of September 11, 2001, the NRC did not want to publicize details of violations that might reveal sites where security was lax, he said. The UH violation, he contin ued, “was one of these.”
“Since that facility no longer exists and the material has been returned to the De partment of Energy, I’ve asked staff to re-review [disclosure of] that document,” he said. As of press time, the NRC notice of violation against UH was still not part of the NRC’s public record.
Environment Hawai‘i has obtained a copy of the notice of violation issued to the univer sity, through the office of its interim vice president for research, James Gaines. The notice makes reference to conditions of the university’s NRC license to operate the irradia tor. Condition 15 of that license states, “The source room will be kept locked with a combi nation lock at all times when not in use… Operators must secure and lock access to the source room whenever they are not actually in the area… Guests … may enter the source room only in the company of the supervisor or an authorized operator.”
“Contrary to the above, on March 17, 2003, the licensee did not secure from unauthorized access licensed materials that were stored in its irradiator facility … and did not secure and lock access to the irradiator source room when operators were not actually in the area. Spe cifically, the facility Radiation Safety Officer [Moy] disabled the irradiator source room alarm and combination lock and then left the facility unattended, permitting an electrician to enter the irradiator source room alone in order to change out fluorescent light bulbs.”
A cover letter from Bruce S. Mallett, ad ministrator for Region IV of the NRC, stated that the agency had considered imposing a $3,000 fine, given the security breach. “Be cause this violation was deemed to have been committed willfully, the NRC considered whether credit was warranted for Identifica tion and Corrective Action in accordance with the civil penalty assessment process… [T]he university identified this violation in March 2003 and took both immediate and long-term corrective actions to remedy the violation. Thus, the NRC has determined that the university is deserving of credit for Identification and Corrective Action. This results in the issuance of a Notice of Violation with no associated civil penalty….
“However, the university is on notice that significant violations in the future could re sult in a civil penalty. In addition, issuance of this Severity Level III violation constitutes escalated enforcement action that may result in increased inspection effort.”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 16, Number 3 September 2005