MIT Downplays Radioactivity Threat

MIT will be shipping in only small amounts of radioactive material despite a new license allowing levels as high as a million curies, MIT spokesman Walter Milne told the City Council last night.

Milne, who passed around a sample of material he said would be about the same size as the irradiated material shipped to MIT's Albany St. nuclear reactor, assured councilors that there was no danger of environemtnal contamination from the shipments, which he said would not exceed 10 or 20 curies.

Each of these small samples is radioactive to the degree of about a tenth of a curie," Milne said, adding that shipments would consist of about 120 of the samples at a time.

Councilors had grown worried about the possibility of large-scale shipments of radioactive materials this fall after they learned that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had granted MIT a license to store as much as a million curies worth of radioactivity at the reactor facility.

But Milne said yesterday stockpiles would be at most "in the tens or hundreds" of curies, and added that the shipments would arrive in specially lined lead boxes. "I would carry this material around in my breast procket," Milne said.

The material that will be shipped to MIT from Oak Ridge Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is highly irradiated metal for use in tests to find a safe material for the construction of fusion reactors.

MIT reactor operations director Lincoln Clark said recently that the MIT reactor, which has been in operation for more than two decades, is not powerful enough to irradiate metals easily for the testing.

The council voted to send letters protesting a lack of notification about the license to the NRC and also to consider an ordinance that would regulate all shipments of radioactive materials within the city.