Miraculously surviving despite absorbing 500 times the standard amount of radiation, Harold R McCluskey spent the rest of his life estranged from his hometown.
A chemical explosion left Harold R McCluskey’s body covered with radioactive material and broken glass while he was on night shift at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, USA on August 30, 1976, according to the Long Room.
McCluskey, 64, survived the largest dose of radioactive material ever recorded in history and was nicknamed “Atomic Man”. What is more amazing is that he went on to live for another 11 years and died from causes unrelated to the accident and there was no sign of cancer in his body.
At the time, McCluskey was working as an operator of high-end chemical handling equipment. His mission was to collect americium, a synthetic by-product from the isotope plutonium. Americi is a highly radioactive material used in smoke detectors and bomb-making.
Harold R McCluskey in the ward. (Photo: Ministry of Energy).
The lab was closed for four months after a strike, and McCluskey was cautious about starting work again. Before that, he was warned to be careful when working with chemicals that had been left untouched for a long time. But McCluskey’s boss asked him to do the work.
McCluskey did as requested. While he was working in the room, a chemical reaction caused the isolation operating chamber to explode. From the time the explosion occurred to the destruction of the laboratory in March, the door of the room was completely sealed to isolate the radioactive activity taking place inside.
Michele Gerber, author of the 1997 book On The Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Site, details the chain of events preceding McCluske’s horrific accident. “He saw plumes of brown smoke accumulating in the isolation operating room. He realized he shouldn’t have stayed there and prepared to turn around as soon as the explosion occurred,” Gerber wrote.
McCluskey’s rubber respirator was torn. While panting, he inhaled radioactive fumes, his lungs covered with toxic americium . Shards of glass and broken metal pierced his skin. The splash of acid caused his eyes to sting and temporarily blind him.
Within minutes, McCluskey absorbed the largest amount of americium ever recorded in humans, 500 times the standard of practice , according to Dr Bryce Breitenstein, a physician at the Hanford Environmental Health Association who directly treated the treatment. for McCluskey.
Covered in blood, McCluskey was taken to the Hanford Emergency Decontamination Facility, a windowless building in Richland, Washington, where he remained for nearly three weeks in near-complete isolation. McCluskey’s wife and two daughters can only stand 10 meters away from him due to concerns about the amount of radiation still emitting from his body. Eventually, McCluskey and his wife moved into a camper van parked outside the facility.
“Out of 9 doctors, 4 thought I had a 50% chance of survival. The rest just shook their heads,” McCluskey told People magazine in 1984.
Monitored by a team of doctors wearing gas masks and protective suits, McCluskey could not see or hear them clearly. For five months, doctors used tweezers to pick up microscopic pieces of glass and metal that stuck into his skin.
The explosion originated in the isolated operating chamber. (Photo: Ministry of Energy).
Medical staff shower and shave McCluskey every day. They also gave him 600 doses of zinc DTPA , an experimental drug that helps him flush out radioactive waste.
“The process of deep detoxification is lengthy, fraught with difficulty, and never complete,” says Dr. Eugene Carbaugh.
When McCluskey returned home in January 1977, he had to deal with another pain. In his hometown of Prosser in Washington state, he was known as “The Atomic Man”.
Although the treatment removed most of the americium from his body, enough that the radiation detector didn’t sound when he held it close to his head, those around him still thought he was infectious.
McCluskey retired and for many years, he always wore a glove on one hand to prevent the risk of infection from the remaining radiation in his body.
McCluskey was treated as a marginalized person. Some friends even call and say “Harold, I love you so much but I may never visit your house”. In 1984, McCluskey shared that he rotated barbershops and shavers because he did not want to adversely affect their business.
After the accident, McCluskey had many radiation-related health problems such as kidney infections, four heart failure times and had to have cataract surgery in both eyes. He sued the federal government for damages after the accident, and in 1977, he won a 5,000 lawsuit against the US Department of Energy, which directly operated the Hanford facility.
The lab where McCluskey crashed was destroyed in March 2017. (Photo: Tobin Fricke).
McCluskey became the subject of many doctors’ research for the rest of his life. He died of pre-existing heart disease on August 17, 1987 at the age of 75. Autopsies found no signs of cancer. Had McCluskey lived longer, he could have contracted the disease, according to Carbaugh.
The Americium Recovery Facility Laboratory, later renamed McCluskey’s room by employees at Hanford, was never used again because authorities were concerned about the possibility of radioactive contamination in the air, said Mark Heeter, a spokesman. member at the Department of Energy, said.
In 2010, workers wearing anti-radiation gear began cleaning McCluskey’s room. They removed all contaminated equipment from the facility and dumped it at the Hanford landfill in New Mexico. They then sprayed a substance that helped the radioactive material settle to the ground. Once they took precautions, they officially demolished the facility nearly 6 years later.