Are you the kind of scientist that hoards everything? Did you run across dusty old boxes of radiation safety-related records during Clean Sweep? If you can answer yes to either of those questions, the Division of Radiation Safety (DRS) would like to hear from you!
In a previous article, DRS described how and why they survey legacy labs that once used radioactive materials in the past. The purpose of these surveys is to be able to declare to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) which labs no longer handle radioactive materials and have been released from radioactive standards of today. By doing this, when an entire building is converted to an office space or torn down in its entirety, these surveys help ensure that the decommissioning procedure required by the NRC is fully followed.
The challenge for DRS is to know which labs have had historic usage of long-lived radioactive materials. The comprehensive database that DRS employs has a pretty complete picture of our program dating back to about 1990. Beyond that, DRS has some hard copy files of various aspects of the program which provide some detail about the years prior to 1990, but there are some gaps in confirmable knowledge back to when radioactive materials were first used on the NIH campus in the 1940s.
Adding to our lack of historical knowledge is the long-standing requirements of the NRC that required most records (e.g. lab surveys) be kept only three years. However, the NRC does expect licensees to know where radioactive materials have been used for the duration of the license.
Over the last year, DRS has been making a concerted effort to put together as complete a picture as possible regarding the use of radioactive materials at NIH. For most of that time, DRS has been looking at its own file cabinets and finding items such as:
- Spill/incident reports back to the 1950s
- Reports to the Radiation Safety Committee that mention locations of contamination surveys
- Waste disposal records from the 1950s that mention where some of the waste originated
Now, DRS is looking to expand the search beyond Building 21. The NCI-LION database has provided a few items of interest:
- A 1951 directory of Buildings 6 and 8 that listed each lab within and what it was used for
- NIH Almanacs back to 1965 that show campus maps
- Documents detailing the use of radium needles, likely housed in Building 6
DRS has a long history, once being a part of the Nuclear Medicine Department and further back it was once part of the old National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases (NIAMDD has since split into NIDDK and NIAMS). In the 1940s, DRS was just a section of Industrial Hygiene housed in Building 2.
If you have records relating to radiation safety or the DRS program that are older than 1990, we would like to hear from you at (301) 496-5774. Help us fill in the missing pieces to our puzzle!
