Talk about poor timing. On March 17, 2003, shortly after noon, James H. Moy, a professor of molecular bio sciences and bioengineering with the Univer\u00adsity of Hawai\u2018i\u2019s College of Tropical Agricul ture and Human Resources, left the Hawai\u2018i Research Irradiator on the university\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201catoms-for-peace\u201d pro gram.<\/p>\n
\u201cI left the door unlocked,\u201d he explained later, \u201cso the electrician could go in and finish the job\u201d of replacing fluorescent light tubes that had burned out a couple of weeks earlier. \u201cIf the door were locked, then he could not get in.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Moy\u2019s bad luck that the same day, an inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Com mission was on campus to review the university\u2019s compliance with terms of NRC permits it held for several facilities \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
For this infraction, the university was issued a Notice of Violation (severity level III) on March 24, 2005. Moy received a similar notice.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
According to a press release issued April 13, 2005, by the National Nuclear Security Ad ministration, \u201cthe removal is part of a national effort by NNSA\u2019s U.S. Radiological Threat Reduction Program to recover and secure radiological materials that could be used to make a dirty bomb.\u201d The cobalt arrived \u201cat a secure NNSA facility on April 12 and has been permanently disposed,\u201d the press release stated.<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing Happened\u2019<\/b>
\nIn a telephone interview with Environment Hawai\u2018i, Moy repeatedly insisted that the 2003 incident was no big deal. \u201cI didn\u2019t lock the door\u201d to the irradiator, he said, \u201cbut the door was kept closed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing happened\u201d as a result of the notice of violation, he said, adding that he\u2019d received \u201cjust sort of a reprimand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t try to publicize it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t concern anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moy said that the 2003 incident was not the first time he had left the door unlocked. \u201cIt\u2019s been done before,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t just be sitting there, waiting for him,\u201d he said, referring to the maintenance engineer replac ing the fluorescent lights.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIn view of height ened national security, there is reason to in crease our alert but not necessary to the point of becoming panic,\u201d he said. \u201cAnybody who tries to go in the irradiator pool to try to steal the cobalt will die before he can get out of the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI will make sure that the door to the irradiator will be secure at all times from now on,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n
Moy didn\u2019t have the chance to do that. Shortly after the NRC inspector\u2019s visit, Moy, now a professor emeritus but still on 40 percent salary at UH, \u201cwas reprimanded \u2013 actually he was removed,\u201d says Roy Takekawa, director of the university\u2019s Office of Environ mental Health and Safety. At the same time, Takekawa said, the irradiator \u201cmoved from in-service to in-storage status, and our office took over control of facility.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s staff, the irradiator\u2019s cobalt-60 source \u201chad decayed away so much, it took forever to irradiate something if you had an experiment.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
To carry out the decommissioning, Takekawa said, \u201cwe had to prove to the DOE\u201d \u2013 successor to the Atomic Energy Commis sion \u2013 \u201cthat they still owned [the cobalt].\u201d 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 \u201cpermanently disposed\u201d of, but rather stored in a temporary deposit. (In a recent report, the Government Accountabil ity Office noted that the Department of Energy \u201chas not yet provided a facility for the permanent disposal of greater-than-class-C waste\u201d \u2013 such as that from the UH irradiator
\n\u2013 \u201cbut is collecting this material to address security concerns in the interim.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Secret Violations<\/b>
\nThe Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued no press release disclosing the univer sity violation. Visitors to the NRC\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cor a citation with a lower level of severity.\u201d (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.)<\/p>\n
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, \u201cwas one of these.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSince that facility no longer exists and the material has been returned to the De partment of Energy, I\u2019ve asked staff to re-review [disclosure of] that document,\u201d he said. As of press time, the NRC notice of violation against UH was still not part of the NRC\u2019s public record.<\/p>\n
Environment Hawai\u2018i 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\u2019s NRC license to operate the irradia tor. Condition 15 of that license states, \u201cThe source room will be kept locked with a combi nation lock at all times when not in use\u2026 Operators must secure and lock access to the source room whenever they are not actually in the area\u2026 Guests \u2026 may enter the source room only in the company of the supervisor or an authorized operator.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cContrary to the above, on March 17, 2003, the licensee did not secure from unauthorized access licensed materials that were stored in its irradiator facility \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cBe 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\u2026 [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\u2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
— Patricia Tummons<\/p>\n
Volume 16, Number 3 September 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-september-2005"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}