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Random Act Exposed nuclear nuisance - Non-electric exit signs glow by radioactivity By Jeff Pillets, The Sunday Record, Bergen, NJ, December 28, 1997 On the day before Halloween, a 14-year old boy at the Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center went into a rage and began tearing up a recreation room at the Monmouth County psychiatric hospital. At the height of his rampage, the troubled teenager ripped an emergency exit sign off the wall, flung it to the floor, and stomped it into a mass of twisted metal and shards of red plastic. In a few minutes, the frightening scene was over. But the episode and its aftermath have cost New Jersey taxpayers about a quarter million dollars. There could be criminal investigations in two states and changes that could affect dozens of New Jersey industries. That exit sign and at least 350,000 like it in American schools, hospitals, airplanes, malls and movie theaters are lit by the slow decay of a radioactive isotope – tritium. When he stomped on the exit sign, boy broke glass tubes inside it, liberating the odorless and colorless gas. The hospital was evacuated, and dozens of patients were tested. No one is expected to suffer long-term illness. Tritium is relatively harmless in short exposures to small doses. "These things are all around us, but we really don’t have a handle on them," said Gerry Nicholls, director of environmental safety and health for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. "To this day, we’re still not sure how many tritium signs there are in New Jersey, or where they are. We have no way of knowing how many have ended up n landfills, how many are sitting in vacant buildings, or how many have been carried home by curious kids." Figures compiled for The Record by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission show that there are 55,288 tritium-powered exit signs in New Jersey – more than any other state. Nationwide, the NRC says, there are 400,000 devices – signs, warning lights, gauges, meters, and other things – that run on tritium or related radioactive materials. The government estimates that manufacturers and owners have misplaced or forgotten about 4% to 6% of exit signs and other devices. That would put the total number of "atomic orphans" in the tens of thousands. "A lot of the devices jus get lost," Nicholls said. "Unfortunately, their radioactivity isn’t lost with them." The state may soon pay for its sloppy handling of tritium. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control says that even though it was warned not to, New Jersey sent 59 barrels of tritium-laced debris from the Brisbane center to be burned at a place designed to handle medical waste, not radioactive materials. Agency spokesman Tom Barry says his state is considering a criminal investigation of the New Jersey Department of Human Services, which sent the shipment. "I can’t imagine what they were thinking," he said. In coming weeks and months, the exit signs and other radioactive devices will get a lot more attention from other government officials:
Short of a ban, officials say the state might simply ask owners of such devices to replace them with conventionally powered sources
Permits and licenses under consideration The NRC says it has not ruled out requiring owners of tritium exit signs to apply for a permit and license. Other devices – such as density gauges and static eliminators used in the printing, explosives, and tobacco industries – may be subject to periodic inspection by regulators. "At this point, we can go in a number of direction," said Steve Baggett, section chief of the NRC’s Division of Sealed Sources and Devices. "But there’s no doubt there’s an accountability problem here that we’ve got to address," he said. "It’s important that we close the loophole now because incidents like we saw in New Jersey appear to be on the rise." Baggett said most of the low-level radioactive devices were never individually licensed by the government, as some radioactive devices must be, but were sold to the public under the terms of a general license granted to the companies that make and sell them. Under such a license, the manufacturer must follow a variety of rules and allow routine inspections by federal regulators. The holder of a general license also agrees to instruct consumers on how to use the devices and, most importantly, how to get rid of them when they need to be replaced. "That’s where the big problem comes in," said Baggett. "People simply forget they ever owned these things. Property changes hands. Companies close. "Before long, these things are floating around." Three of them surfaced in spectacular fashion in Union. In May, a 16-year old boy removed three tritium signs from a building under demolition on Commerce Avenue. Sitting in his poorly ventilated basement bedroom, he casually dismantled one while snacking on sunflower seeds. In minutes, he absorbed 500 millirems of radiation. That is about the same amount of all background radiation a normal person gets in a full year. Luckily, tritium is easily flushed from the body by drinking water. Experts say the boy will probably suffer no long-term illness. But New Jersey taxpayers ended up paying more than $96,000 to clean up the contaminated basement and ship the waste to a licensed incinerator in Oak Ridge, Tenn. About $50,000 in additional bills are expected. Few proven cases of long-term illness There are few documented cases of long-term illness from tritium exposure, although at least one study showed that people who work with such material over long periods complain of chronic dizziness, nausea and other maladies.
The NRC says, however, that the public health impact of radiation is very much the sum of all parts. Radiation from orphaned devices accumulating in landfills, junkyards, and scrap metal recyclers adds up. "That’s why tritium exit signs are regulated," said Baggett of the NRC. "They are hazardous in themselves, but much more hazardous taken together. We need to be concerned about them creeping into our general waste steam." After the Union incident, New Jersey DEP Commissioner Robert C. Shinn sent a blistering letter to the NRC for "losing control" over low-level radioactive devices. He called for an "investigation into this apparent gap in the NRC regulatory system" and added: "While this incident had minimal impact to public health and safety, mostly due to quick state action, there are many scenarios…where a more significant threat could not be averted by quick action," Shinn wrote. "You need to anticipate those, and put some mechanism in place to avert disaster." The NRC is working on solutions, and it plans to discuss tighter regulation of low-level devices at a Jan. 21 public meeting in Rockville, Md. The current regulations that require licensing only for manufacturers were established in 1959. NRC officials say it has become increasingly apparent since the early 1980’s that such a system is no longer adequate to keep track of the estimated 400,000 radioactive gauges, meters, and measuring tools that do not currently need individual permits. Reports started trickling in to regulators, for example, that scrap metal recyclers were alarmed to be finding odd-looking black boxes in compactors. College fraternity brothers were collecting exit signs as a lark. Prison inmates were breaking tritium signs during riots. "It was clear that something had to be done," said Baggett. "In the regulatory community, that’s how changes happen. Gradually. Problems emerge, and we respond to them." When electricity is not reliable Tritium, a form of hydrogen, has been used for decades in paints that make wristwatches and compasses glow in the dark. But the isotope has proven most useful in lighting emergency exit and warning signs in places ranging from jet airplanes to skyscraper stairwells to subterranean parking garages. Such signs cannot rely on regular electric power, which often goes off during emergencies. A few years ago, there was a proposal – since scrapped – to power airport runway lights with the element. But federal regulators began wondering if that much accessible tritium might prove appealing to the wrong people: Tritium, in pure enough form and in the proper concentration, can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. After meeting with intelligence experts and anti-terrorist groups, the U.S. government concluded that it would be theoretically possible to assemble a bomb trigger from tritium accessible in exit signs and other places. Yet, actually isolating and purifying the isotope, and assembling it into a weapon, would prove beyond the ability of terrorist groups, the government has concluded. "It’s possible, but phenomenally difficult," said Baggett. Today, U.S. manufacturers import virtually all the tritium they need from Canada and Russia. Exit sign maker and Self-Powered Lighting Inc. of West Nyack, N.Y., which provided the signs for the Brisbane center, bristle at the notion of more regulation. They say their signs have never hurt anyone while saving countless lives during fires, airline disasters, and power outages. The bottom or back of each sign is marked with a warning label and the universal symbol for radiation in eye-catching magenta and yellow, manufacturers say. Still, the warning label is not usually visible unless the whole sign is removed from the wall. The tritium itself is sealed within a series of glass tubes inside the sign. Each tube is lined with a thin layer of phosphor, a substance that glows when exposed to radiation. Radiation from the tritium is too weak to pass through the glass tube and plastic body of the sign. "The product is effective, that’s why it sells," said Bill Lynch, sales representative for Safety Light, which has sold an estimated 12 million tritium lights worldwide at $150 to $200 apiece. Effective or not, the reign of the tritium exit sign and other small radioactive devices that can easily get lost could be coming to an end in New Jersey. Nicholls, of the state DEP, said devices that run on batteries, alternative electricity sources, or which use light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, can be substituted. "The most important thing to remember about these devices is that people forget – people just forget about them," said Nicholls. "But they just keep on ticking and ticking and ticking." |
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