Last year there was gun safety, then this year the Apple exploits/privacy safety, now radiation safety. Teens are on a roll.
Hope no one here spent time hanging out near the taxidermy exhibit.
Source:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/ne...useum-building-safety-manager-says/ar-BBTLyV5
Hope no one here spent time hanging out near the taxidermy exhibit.
For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
Although federal officials learned last year that the five-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park's safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.
"If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition," Stephenson wrote. "The radiation readings, at first blush, exceeds (sic) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's safe limits. … Identifying who was exposed, and your exposure level, gets tricky and is our next important task."
Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission measures radiation contamination in millisieverts per hour or per year. According to Stephenson, close exposures to the uranium buckets could have exposed adults to 400 times the health limit — and children to 4,000 times what is considered safe.
Davis declined to address Stephenson's assertion that thousands of people may have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, or his allegation that the Park Service violated the law by not issuing a public warning.
Stephenson said the uranium threat was discovered in March 2018 by the teenage son of a park employee who happened to be a Geiger counter enthusiast, and brought a device to the museum collection room.
Workers immediately moved the buckets to another location in the building, he said, but nothing else was done.
The technicians reached the Grand Canyon several days after his call, on June 18. Lacking protective clothing, they purchased dish-washing and gardening gloves, then used a broken mop handle to lift the buckets into a truck, Stephenson said.
Those details are corroborated by photographs Stephenson included in a 45-page slideshow created to document the radiation exposure and alleged cover-up.
Stephenson said technicians concealed the radiation readings from him and dumped the ore into Orphan Mine, an old uranium dig that is considered a potential Superfund site below the Rim, about two miles from Grand Canyon Village.
He said high-level officials in the Park Service developed a "secrecy pact" to conceal radiation exposure data despite his insistence that a "Right to Know" law mandates public disclosure.
The report indicated radiation levels at 13.9 millirems per hour where the buckets were stored, and 800 per hour on contact with the ore. Just five feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says a maximum safe dosage for the public, beyond natural radiation, is no more than 2 millirems per hour, or 100 per year.
The report's recommendations did not call for public notification, but suggested guidelines for handling and storing geology samples in the future.
"Of particular concern are 1000s of children attending 'shows' in very close proximity to the uranium," he wrote. Those presentations lasted a half hour or more, he said, yet radiation dosages could have exceeded federal safety standards within seconds.
Stephenson said he's heard nothing from superiors at the Park Service since he sent the warning letter.
"They're in cover-up mode," he said. "I've been cut off from any kind of information."
Source:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/ne...useum-building-safety-manager-says/ar-BBTLyV5
