The Radium Girls and the Manhattan Project's Special Work Permits: A B Reactor Exhibit

The "An Order for Safety" panel in the B Reactor's Health Physics Exhibit. The panel carries its own image credits.

Health physics is the science of protecting people and the environment from the harmful effects of radiation. The Manhattan Project created a new kind of workplace — and at the B Reactor, in Manhattan Project National Historical Park, an exhibit panel titled "An Order for Safety" tells how its safety rules began.

The Radium Girls

The case of the Radium Girls — women who painted watch dials with luminous radium paint in the 1920s — showed that radiation harms people.

• Many were injured or died from radiation poisoning, and their employers denied responsibility when they sought compensation.
• In 1928, five women from a New Jersey factory sued their employer; more lawsuits followed in 1937 and 1938. The courts ruled for the women — who by then had all died.

Along with early mishaps with radium and X-rays, their case became the starting point for handling radiation in an industrial workplace like the B Reactor. The Manhattan Project based its mandatory safety guidelines directly on radium safety standards. An official of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission later wrote that without the dial-painters, the project's managers might reasonably have rejected the extreme precautions that were urgently needed, and thousands of workers might have been — and might still be — in great danger.

The Special Work Permit

In 1944, Herbert Parker, drawing on the recommendations of the 1934 National Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection, introduced controls for radiation work — among them the Special Work Permit (SWP).

• An SWP is a standardized list telling workers how to do one specific task in a radiological zone: the protective clothing required, the time allowed, and the breaks needed.
• A health physicist wrote each SWP, and workers reviewed it before starting. Workers had to put on the listed gear before beginning.
• This kind of standard procedure became the basis of many nuclear safety protocols still used today.

On the panel

• A photograph of a worker in a fully hooded protective suit and goggles inside the plant.
• Photographs of workers reviewing their SWP, and of a worker in a dressing room stepping into a white overgarment.
• A cartoon of three radiation meters pleading with a worker to take them along, with the slogan "Forgotten meters measure no radiation" — and, at the bottom, "Health Physics — For Your Protection."

The B Reactor can be visited only on guided tours run by the Department of Energy.

Sources

Based on "B Reactor Health Physics Exhibit: An Order for Safety," Manhattan Project National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.