“Good News!” I said to Dr. Tim Zieglerson, PhD, CHP the next day as I walked into his office. “My felony charge was reduced to a misdemeanor. Does that mean I can get my security clearance back?”
“No, no, no,” he said, not looking up from his computer “not yet. Let’s let this go on for a bit and see what happens.” He looked up, and eyed me thoughtfully. “Let me know when the whole thing is done, then tell me everything. Then you can ‘begin at the beginning, go on until you get to the end, then stop’ ” and he chuckled to himself. “Until then you are not going to get your security clearance back. I won’t authorize it. Security and I have already discussed it.”
That poor guy to me sometimes lacked common sense. I thought we had talked about this and that he said anything less than a felony was OK. Not that it’s perfectly OK, because a misdemeanor is still a crime, but it’s a lot less than a felony. Anyway, what was I to say? I was still out on bail facing three misdemeanor charges.
“Okay, well I was going to do the security checks today. I guess I’ll have to bring Valkyrie with me, because she has a security clearance.”
“Yes” he said “just bring Valkyrie. That’s working out fine, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I can do that. Or Pierre, but he’s busy. OK, thank you.”
Valkyrie is a good, competent, intelligent person. The only problem is she always acts like she’s doing me a big favor, when in fact it’s just her job. Somebody has to do it. If they don’t give me my security clearance back, then she has to either escort me or do it herself. That big source is too heavy for her to lift. So I got the cart and all the paperwork, preparing to security check the Death Rays.
The funny thing about the death rays was they were really no big secret. Even the USA Today had done a front page article about the Death Rays. Every hospital in the country had them. They were officially “Blood Bank Irradiators.” Little by little the Department of Energy was offering to buy out the Cesium-137 blood bank irradiators and replace them with X-Ray blood bank irradiators. The cesium-137 was highly radioactive, and in a salt form, which was considered a “dirty bomb” threat. The fear was that a Cs-137 capsule could be taken apart and blown up and dispersed in Times Square or some other public place, causing economic disruption. It would take a while to decontaminate the area.
Two of our sources were actually cobalt 60, which is a metal solid, and would be harder to turn into a dirty bomb, but they were still under secure controls. The Co-60 irradiators could be used as another type of weapon: the exposure device. An exposure device could just be left secretly on a bus or somewhere and it would irradiate everyone walking past it, getting on and off the bus for example, until it was discovered. That would be the method for the two Co-60 devices.
I went over to Valkyries office after I had gathered all my materials. “Hey, Valkyrie, it’s time to do the radiation death ray checks again. I need you to go with me and be my escort. When will you be available?”
She rolled her eyes to the back of her head as if I were asking her to borrow $100,000. She let out a big, huge sigh and said “Oh, maybe in about an hour.”
I just played the happy go lucky guy who just got his felony dropped to a misdemeanor act and said “Great! I’ll see you in about an hour. I’ll get the keys. I have everything else. And I’ll call security.” A Security Officer also came with us to alert the Security Office prior to each alarm.
The hour came and off we went. The first one on the way was indeed the blood bank irradiator. It was about 20 years old, but Cesium 137 has a 30 year half-life, so it was still pretty strong. Also, the company who serviced it came once a year and verified the strength of the source by putting some special radiation dosimetry into the machine and running it for a set amount of time.
The blood bank irradiator was a very busy place. It was manned 24 hours a day. The purpose of the blood bank irradiator was to solve what they call “Graft Versus Host Disease.” They would irradiate packs of blood for transfusion to kill the white blood cells. The red blood cells would not be affected; the white blood cells were easier to kill. Removing the white blood cells allowed for patients with a blood transfusion not to be attacked by the white blood cells of the donor blood. This was particularly helpful for patients who were undergoing any type of organ donation. They were under medication to suppress white blood cells so the donor organ wouldn’t be attacked as a foreign body and the organ rejected. In any event, we walked up to the Blood Bank Supervisor and said “Hey, we’re here to do our quarterly checks.” (This does seem strange as I write it: this was never scheduled in advance. We would just show up. It was just the way our weird little department did things.)
“Okay” he said “um, actually it’s being used right now, but it’ll be done in about 10 or 15 minutes.
“No problem” I said “we’ll start with our other checks first.” We had a whole bunch of checks to do, and I won’t go into them here because at some point it is kind of secret, and I should not discuss it, fictionalized account or not. Even though it was on the front page of the USA Today, the particulars I will not discuss.
We went on, after the blood bank radiator was done, to the several others. One was another blood bank irradiator that was very old and no longer used for blood. It was strong enough to be used for cell cultures, which could be exposed to radiation for a set amount of time and the effects observed. Another thing that could be done was to irradiate mice, and then determine the effects of the radiation on mice. There was even an irradiator in the dental area for dental research. They would irradiate dentures and other things such as cell cultures or whatever they felt they needed to irradiate.
The strongest irradiator was used for mice predominantly. My buddy Hans Koblenz worked on this one. Hans and I had children of about the same age. Each of my two kids was one year older than each of his two. Whenever we worked together, we would talk about our kids. My two boys played hockey and baseball. Hans had a boy and a girl. Both played LaCrosse, the boy played baseball, and the girl played volleyball. Hans himself was a big exercise and sports buff. He was very fit, whereas I was not unfit, but didn’t exercise regularly. Hans played squash and what he called “ball hockey,” which was floor hockey to the next level. He was even on some nationally ranked ball hockey team, and at one point went to Europe for an international competition. I enjoyed hearing all his athletic adventures, and when the guy started talking about them, he could go on for quite a while.
Valkyrie and I did the checks on the 10 irradiators, her eyes rolling periodically the whole time at the thought that she had to waste her time accompanying me on my rounds, just because I had gotten in trouble with the law. I was such a jerk. She didn’t seem to understand that if I did get fired over my bad behavior, then she’d get to do it by herself. Actually, she would probably have Pierre come with her, because the source was very heavy, and she couldn’t do it herself. It was about 90 millicuries of Cs-137, shielded in lead and a metal case. We had to make the radiation detector alarms go off, and so I would hold this heavy lead piece of radioactive material and open the lead door and expose the detector to simulate the source being stolen. It was a lot of work. But we did it and then it was done.
Just another day in the field of Radiation Safety.
Shocked in the Suburbs 