Accident at Nuclear Plant Spawns a Medical Mystery

From the LA Times
Accident at Nuclear Plant Spawns a Medical Mystery : Health: Questions are being raised about the effects of radiation exposures. Scientific answers are lacking.

LINDA ROACH MONROE | TIMES STAFF WRITER | 09/10/1990

RICHLAND, Wash. — On that Saturday morning in 1962, the men whose bodies formed the radiological front lines of the Cold War knew what it meant to see the eerie blue flash known as Cerenkov radiation.
“He saw the blue flash two times, and he knew that nobody had ever lived after seeing the blue flash. So in his mind he knew he was dead. He told me that,” said Dorothy Aardal of her husband, Harold.

A worker in a plutonium plant in southeastern Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Harold Aardal was just a few feet away from a vat in which a nuclear chain reaction had accidentally started. By the time Aardal was out of there, the buttons on his coveralls, the gold fillings in his teeth and even the blood in his body had become radioactive.

But Aardal didn’t die, then or later, from the radiation’s known effects. Neither did the two other men who in a few dozen seconds received radiation doses that were several times what a person normally receives in an entire lifetime.

Nor did Harold R. McCluskey, the Hanford worker who was known as “The Atomic Man” after another accident, in 1976, embedded radioactive americium in his skull. Like Aardal, “The Atomic Man” died of cardiovascular problems, more than a decade after the accident.