The devil is in the details

Radioactive emergency!

(or, why I really hate certain other people). I hope this makes sense to you non-science types because it was really quite traumatic. :(

Today was quite the day in the lab. It was the day of the first part of Evan's and my radioactive experiment, i.e. the day where we use the very bad and volatile radioactivity to label a peptide in a process that includes a step that makes an extra bad radioactive intermediate. (Look at the post two posts down and the links therein to get caught up.) I am teaching Evan the procedure, so mostly the plan for today was to watch him do the experiment.

We went upstairs to the hot room and started off by pre-scanning all of our equipment...lead aprons, lead bricks and other things to keep us safe. They were all contaminated and had been sitting around our lab as such for who knows how long. So...looks like somebody(ies) has been spilling radioactivity all over and not checking/cleaning up properly after themselves, and inadvertently subjecting a lot of people to a little radiation. As I'm sure you can imagine, we were more than slightly annoyed.

We next decided to pre-scan our work area. The experiment has to be done in a special area, in a special charcoal-filtered glove-box hood that is inside a regular chemical fume hood, to be extra protective against the volatility of the isotope. Our meter indicated that the inside of the inner glove-box hood was extremely contaminated as well, although then Evan made the astute observation that there was a bag of trash next to the glove-box hood but still in the outer fume hood. The bag of trash was lightly shielded and had a piece of tape on it that said a name, a date and the words 2mCi, which indicates a large amount of radioactive material. To tell you the truth, I thought it said ZnCl and didn't realize it was 2mCi until Evan said so. It didn't say 2mCi of what type of radioactivity, though we later deduced that it was likely 125I, the bad stuff that we also were working with. Anyway, after much scanning we determined that this particular bag of trash was SO HOT that it was making the entire hood read off the charts and that we were unable to get a background reading anywhere in the vicinity, even if we tried to block it with all of our lead bricks. Now let's remember...this is a basically unlabelled bag sitting outside of the inner hood (but in the outer hood) with almost no shielding and both hoods OFF.

Since we didn't know what was in the bag, we didn't really want to touch it, so we called Radioactive Man. I wasn't in the room when he got there, but when I saw him, he was quite angry and surprised at the amount of mystery radioactivity emanating from the bag. He disposed of everything and went off to yell at the person who left it (not a member of our lab, seeing as how they PUT THEIR NAME on the mystery bag) and left Evan and I to do our work. We continued to do the experiment (which came out perfectly, good job Evan) and then proceeded to clean up. We realized that the hot room was actually so hot (thanks to having vast amounts of overfilled, unshielded and uncloseable radioactive waste containers) that it was extremely difficult to get background readings anywhere and that our readings changed drastically when we were facing towards or away from the waste area. We did our best, but it was not a good situation and we wrote some nasty notes to the radiation safety office. Total time in the confines of this excessively radioactive room? 2.5 hours.

Later on while doing another part of the experiment (no longer in the hot room), we needed a different meter to help with the cleanup. I found multiple meters that had dead batteries and had to go through about half of the lab to find a working survey meter. More evidence that none of the other radioactivity users in our lab try to clean up after themselves....

I found the whole day rather upsetting. Why are so few people taking responsibility for working with dangerous stuff? They do realize that their carelessness means that everyone is getting exposures (and having two-headed babies) or that everyone will be barred from using radioactivity as a result, right? It is really frustrating, and also really annoying that these people also work with some dangerous viruses. I know that I'm still kind of generally cranky, but I still think this whole thing is ridiculous. For some reason I thought that there were more than two responsible people (me and Evan) in our lab. At least we got gold stars for turning in the mystery person today (although as we discussed, we both felt like tattle-tales about it).

Tomorrow afternoon we'll get to go in for thyroid scans to see whether we had large inhalational exposures (a theoretical possibility after all of the time with the mystery bag). I'm sure we'll be fine, but I think we're both a little apprehensive. And, of course, we'll turn in our radiation badges in a month or so to see if we had any other exposures. Woohoo. How exciting. (Especially since both measurements are after the fact, and really just mean "oops. you're screwed now.)

posted by Immunegirl @ 7:45 PM