With the arrival of a shipment in Los Alamos today, a landmark 15,000th radioactive item has been recovered from an urban area, logged in and secured safely away from potential misuse. The source was recovered by a Laboratory Off-site Source Recovery Project (OSRP) team representing the National Nuclear Security Administration. For eight years, OSRP staff have traveled the country, collecting thousands of radioactive sources from warehouses, tool sheds, schools, and offices where they are no longer needed for industry or research.
OSRP was initiated by the Department of Energy in 1999 as an environmental management project to recover and dispose of excess and unwanted sealed radioactive sources. The project was transferred in 2003 to the Office of Global Threat Reduction (known as NA-21) of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA).
The 15,000th source came from an industrial-gauge manufacturer near Los Angeles that had used the measurement device to measure plastic and paper thickness during production, one of 306 unwanted sealed sources containing Americium at this one location. The sources, small tungsten-shielded, teardrop-shaped items, each contain about 150 millicuries of Americium-241. The OSRP team verified and packaged the sources, then loaded them into a special drum for shipment to Los Alamos, where they are stored prior to approval of the drum for disposition at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Radioactive sealed sources packaged by NNSA’s OSRP include more than 15,000 curies of Americium-241, 10,000 curies of Plutonium-238, and 10,000 grams of Plutonium-239, collected from more than 600 sites. The sealed sources were once used in applications ranging from nuclear-powered cardiac pacemakers to gauges used in the manufacture of paper.
"The OSRP has achieved the goal of providing an end-of-life disposition pathway for the sealed-source life cycle in the U.S., including sources for which no disposal pathway previously existed,” said Project Leader Julia Whitworth. “The team’s efforts guarantee continued medical and other beneficial uses of sealed sources but solve the disposition problem of unwanted sources for future generations.”
In 2006, under the guidance of NA-21, OSRP also began recovering unwanted or unused U.S.-origin sealed sources distributed overseas. The team has so far repatriated U.S.-origin radioactive sources from Africa, Australia, and Uruguay with more international and domestic sites planned for this year. Other recent accomplishments include obtaining international authorization for use of its S300 shipping container and field-sealable special form capsules.
