NEWS BLIPS
Uranium Radiation Detected At Grand Canyon Museum Building
Editor's Note: This news item was retrieved and first published through AZ Central's website.
AZ Central reports on an unsafe level of radiation exposure going undetected at the Grand Canyon National Park's museum collection building for almost two decades. Tourists, employees, and children on tours to the Grand Canyon 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 5-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.
AZ Central writer Dennis Wagner relays in his article, "In a Feb. 11 email to Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, safety, health and wellness manager Elston Stephenson said he had repeatedly asked National Park executives to inform the public, only to get stonewalled." 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. "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 told the news outlet.
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