Donald Fluke: The Early Days Of Radiation Safety At Duke

The following excerpt was taken from an Oct. 23 talk sponsored by Occupational and Environmental Safety. Working before any university radiation safety office, Fluke describes how faculty members dealt with unusual situations. He also served as a director of an institute that trained high school teachers in radiation research. Below, he discusses that project.

It's of interest also to say how the position got funded, an important consideration at frugal Duke. The way I heard it, eventually, was that it was worked out over dinner at the Cosmos Club in Washington, and written on a napkin. There would be a three-way plan involving Duke, the NSF, and the AEC. Karl Wilbur was there, and probably Paul Gross, Duke's VP in the Division of Education, which was what we then called the Provost. '

The plan on that napkin was that Duke would hold a summer institute for high school teachers, teaching them the biological uses of radioisotopes. The NSF would pay the teachers, and the AEC would pay the teaching staff (and me as the director) and provide a substantial kit of equipment for Duke to send back home with each of the teachers on permanent loan. It would be hard to conceive of such a venture now -- imagine, radioisotopes in the high school setting -- but the 1950's were the time of Atoms for Peace, of the prospect of nuclear power "too cheap to meter," the first nuclear-powered freighter, and talk of a sea-level canal across Nicaragua by atomic explosives. We taught rad safety, but it wasn't the thing uppermost in everyone's mind, let's say.

A Geiger counter was the centerpiece of each kit, but we did a lot with No-screen film and gross radio-autography, too, photosynthetic carbon-14 uptake into leaves and Zn-65 or other radioisotope uptake through roots into plant vascular spaces. We could get striking autographs and more detail than we could readily explain. We used bean plants mostly, but other plants and seedlings as well. One favorite demonstration, with a radiation source potent enough, was to show the successive effects in each pair of leaves as the seedling recapitulates the developmental stages during early germination and growth. And the teachers could do this back home by asking us to irradiate seeds for them, or by taking back a supply they had irradiated for themselves during the institute

We did have one memorable lapse of rad safety along about the third institute. I was not there for the last couple of weeks while the institute was more involved in the field opportunities of the marine environment. When I returned after the institute to wind things up I found that three vials of remaining stock radioisotopes, were not in their place in the fume hood. Clearly, they had gone home with one or more of the teachers, in spite of my efforts early in the Institute to instill the detailed concerns for licensing.

They were all good people and surely all knew what was permissible, but somehow it happened. So I got out a letter to all of them, what a good institute and all, and oh by the way did you by any chance take one of the stock vials home with you? If so, call me so we can arrange how to ship it back, so we can stay within the law. I also mentioned this incident in my immediate director's report, which was mostly for exchange of information among the institutes.

But somebody at the AEC clipped it and forwarded this brief mention to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was promptly on my case by telephone and then by a visiting delegation of operatives. I was "persuaded" to call the teachers, which I had been concerned how to do without spooking them. And I did promptly find who had the vials and did arrange for their return. Each arriving operative asked me to recount my story one more time, while they compared notes. And then since the vials had been out of my possession I indulged an excess of caution and measured the fluid volume in relation to the expected remainder, to show completeness of recovery. But alas, some probable evaporation was enough to compromise the comparison. I was beginning to think that this dreadful occurrence would preoccupy me for the rest of my career, but then a piece of luck intervened, bad for some hapless individual or individuals at Savannah River, but for me, a reprieve. They had had an undoubtedly worse lapse of control and all the trench coats packed up and left, and that was the end of that. And I learned a thing or two, including the advisability of keeping radioactivity of record from being compromised by checking residual fluid volume, ever.

Donald Fluke is professor emeritus of zoology.