CHICAGO (AP) — A physics teacher was taking inventory of chemicals in a storage room at Tri-City High School when she noticed a container that looked a little strange.
She peered closer and worried that it was radioactive. It turns out, it was.
“She was very alert about realizing that it could be a hazard,” said Randy Dwyer, principal of the central Illinois school.
The Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) started a program this month to help schools safely dispose of radioactive materials that are used to teach students. Agency officials collect the materials and send them to a radioactive waste disposal facility.
The Illinois program is one of several across the country — such as Connecticut, Colorado, and Vermont — that have sprung up since the federal government, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, recommended hunting down radioactive materials in schools, businesses and medical facilities.
The U.S. Department of Energy has collected radioactive materials from more than 10,000 sites, mostly in schools and businesses, since 1999.
School labs have used low-level radioactive materials safely for decades; specialists say they’re critical in teaching physics and chemistry. Sealed samples — often leftovers from past experiments — frequently are saved in closets and storerooms.
But as teachers retire and containers get shoved aside to make way for new samples, it’s easy for schools to lose track of what they’ve got, or to store them incorrectly, said Sandra West, an associate biology professor at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.
At Tri-City in Buffalo, Ill., Mr. Dwyer turned to IEMA for help with the strange containers at his school. IEMA officials removed three containers of radioactive material earlier this month.
“It wasn’t something where we had a biological hazard, but any is beyond the level of safety for our school,” Mr. Dwyer said. “Why have something laying around that could become a prank? We don’t want to be the headline of the national news.”
Schools’ radioactive discoveries aren’t limited to science labs.
In what one state official called a “classic example,” a Colorado high school kept a chunk of ore from a field trip in a display case for years.
The rock turned out to be radioactive, said Ken Niswonger, chief chemist at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which has collected materials from schools since 1999.
“The ore was quite hot,” Mr. Niswonger said. “Everyone who walked by got quite a high dose [of radiation] over 20 or 30 years.”
Still, most people overreact when they hear the word “radiation,” which comes from man-made and natural sources — such as the sun and Earth — and is safe if stored correctly, said Kevin Roark, spokesman for the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“People have a somewhat irrational fear of all things radioactive,” Mr. Roark said. “There’s a real educational purpose. You need that stuff to teach chemistry. And physics. But if you’re not using them correctly, then you shouldn’t have them.”
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