The More Hall Annex, a dusty little building by the HUB, once housed an important part of uw history: a nuclear reactor.

Built in the 1960s, it was a feather in the cap of the University, as the UW was one of the institutes that was able to get one on campus, said Stanley Addison, the UW’s radiation safety officer.

With windows lining the walls, it allowed students walking by to take a look at ongoing experiments.

However, it has since been decommissioned and the nuclear reactor and control room were taken out. The building was locked in safe storage mode and fuel was taken out and returned to the federal government.

What remains is a hollow concrete structure and dusty walls.

“The nuclear industry was dying away in the 1980s. It was expensive for the College of Engineering to keep the reactor running,” Addison said. “Fears about terrorists getting the high-grade uranium used in the reactors was becoming widespread and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made laws regarding security of reactors. Also, less and less people were using the reactor for experiments, and there was a loss of income to the program from that.”

Although the UW no longer has a nuclear reactor on campus, it still has a team devoted to checking radiation levels.

As radiation safety officer, Addison and his team of 12 make sure labs on campus follow protocols and policies when it comes to use and disposal of radioactive material, as well as assist in clean-ups when necessary.

“We also have a lab rating system based on the amount and hazard of radioactive material,” he said. “Some labs we get to weekly, but some are monthly, some quarterly and some yearly.”

There are about 800 labs at the UW that use radioactive material; most of these are in the Health Sciences Building and 99 percent of the material is not harmful.

“Normal people get about 300 millirem per year, and medical examinations can add 100 or so to that to the ‘average’ person,” Addison said. “Workers can get 5000 millirem per year above the normal ‘average.’ This is still not considered dangerous. However, you would try to avoid it on a long-term basis.”

A millirem is the unit used to measure the effect of radiation on a person.

The largest use of radiation occurs in the hospital for treatment of cancer patients, Addison said.

“I guess a really dangerous amount would be around 100,000 or 200,000 millirem in a single exposure, but nobody working at the UW gets that,” Addison said. “However, some patients are given this amount for cancer therapy in order to save their lives.”

The three main things you can do to protect yourself from radiation are to reduce the time you are around the source, use proper shielding and stay away.

“For the types of radioactive material we use gloves, lab coat and booties are good enough protection,” Addison said. “People using X-rays machines use lead aprons.”

Distance drops the affects of radiation dramatically.

For instance, usually if you’re more than three to five inches out of the field of the X-ray there’s no radiation you can measure, but it’s still good to have the lead aprons.

In addition to keeping track of radiation levels on campus, Addison and his team are a resource for researchers.

“I think the main thing I do every day is answer questions for researchers regarding appropriate ways of doing things and informing them of new regulations and policies,” Addison said.

A radiation safety manual can be found online at the UW Environmental and Safety Web site.

Addison and his team also do a fair amount of testing.

“We use Geiger counters, but also supplement that with ‘wipes’ of the areas that we take on filter paper and count those ‘wipes’ in a more sensitive device called a liquid scintillation counter,” Addison said.

Geiger counters are used to measure radiation and give a click or pulse, with more clicks representing higher levels of radiation. Individual particles of radiation enter through an opening into the Geiger counter, which causes ionization of the gas inside the chamber.

Given that there is always background radiation, the counter always gives off some clicks.

Background radiation is mostly from radon gas and its byproducts that we breathe, Addison said. Some of the radiation also comes from cosmic and terrestrial radiation as well as from internal deposits, mainly from Potassium-40.

The more people intake, the more they excrete, so the level always stays about the same. However, since Potassium-40 stays in muscle mass, men in general are a little more “radioactive” than women.

Cosmic radiation comes from outer space, but a good deal is absorbed by the atmosphere, said Molly McGee, a UW compliance analyst in radiation safety.

Terrestrial radiation comes from soil, concrete, rocks and buildings and can be naturally occurring.

Walking around the UW with the Geiger counter, background radiation is all that often registers. However, there have been moments that have set it off.

Patients who have ingested Technetium-99m for nuclear medicine examinations will emit small, non-harmful levels of radiation.

Alex Grosso, a UW compliance analyst in radiation safety, also came across a large tar, stony rock in a classroom that gave off radiation.

It was sitting there for years, nobody knew what it was and it was giving off radiation, Grosso said. It now sits in a Plexiglas box that helps prevent some radiation from escaping.

A common worry today is the supposed correlation between cell phone use and cancer.

However, the amount of radiation cell phones put off is very small. You can even check this by looking at your cell phone manual, Grosso said. But the further you are away from a cell tower, the more radiation your phone will emit because it uses more power to get a signal. So more bars means less exposure.

Most of the radiation from a phone comes from the antenna tip and will only emit small levels of radiation when you are actually transmitting.

“I think the thing I often see is over-simplification of radiation issues,” Addison said. “Another misconception is taht any radiation is dangerous adn we should do everything possible to avoid it altogether, whereas we can’t really escape it since we all get about 300 millirem per year anyway. Would one additional millirem readly be that dangerous? Some in the general public would say ‘yes.’”

At the UW, the most common forms of radiation used include phosophorous-32 (14 day half-life), phosphorous-33, sulfer-35 (87 day half-life), iodine-131 (eight hour half-life), iodine-125, carbon-14 and hydrogen-3. Most of these will decay after a few days, weeks or months, with the exception of carbon-14 and hydrogen-3.

Carbon-14 has the longest half-life of 5,730 years, McGee said.

“Half-lives are the amount of time for half of a sample of a particular radioactive material to decay away,” Addison said. “It’s unique for each radioactive material. Note that if you keep taking half of half, etc. you never get to zero. However, usually 10 half-lives is enough for material to disappear.”

Radioactive material with half-lives shorter than 100 days are allowed to either decay in authorized lab areas or are picked up by the radiation safety staff.

Radioactive materials with half-lives longer than 100 days are picked up by radiation safety, packaged in boxes saying “Caution Radioactive Material” or “Custodians Do Not Collect Radioactive Waste.”

“What we cannot decay on site we send to Richland for disposal,” Addison said. “Some of the wastes that are mixed with flammable liquids are sent to Florida to be burned.”

Much of the radioactive waste isn’t liquid and is soaked either into rags, diatomaceous earth or vermiculite. Gloves, test tubes, pipette tips or anything that has come into contact with radioactive waste are also sent out for disposal.

The waste is compacted in a large garbage disposal and packaged in 55-gallon drums. Sometimes smaller drums are packed into the 55-gallon drums, cushioned with vermiculite to further help prevent spills.

In cases of a spill, labs will usually initiate the first part of the clean up, said Raymond Noble, a UW radiation safety technician. Diatomaceous earth is used to soak up liquids and is then swept up.

People may also be checked to make sure they aren’t transferring the radioactive material.

“We try to clean from ‘outside toward inside’ to keep from spreading the spill,” Addison said. “We monitor with the Geiger counter or other appropriate equipment frequently.”

[Reach reporter Doris Wu at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]