Plutonium exposure incident at Idaho site

Wednesday, 9 November 2011 Up to seventeen workers were exposed to plutonium in an incident at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) on 8 November. The workers - all employed by Battelle Energy Alliance - were conducting work inside the decommissioned Zero Power Physics Reactor (ZPPR) when a container was opened for normal scheduled work resulting in their exposure to plutonium. Six of the seventeen workers have tested positive for contamination based on external surveying and all seventeen employees are undergoing full body scans to determine internal exposure. As a precaution, the workers have been offered treatments that will expedite the elimination of plutonium from the body to limit potential harm. "It may be weeks until the extent of the exposure is known," according to INL. There is no risk to the public or the environment as no contamination has been found outside of the ZPPR facility, it stressed. The ZPPR was a low-power reactor used to test mock-up cores for experimental purposes. It was shut down in 1992.