In 1976 at the Hanford Site in Washington state, a 64-year-old chemical operations technician named Harold McCluskey was working on columns filled with special exchange resins in a glove box at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

The laboratory had been closed for five months as a result of a strike, and McCluskey was wary of resuming this particular work, remembering earlier warnings of working with resins that were unattended for that long a time. But his boss said to proceed. After adding nitric acid to columns containing americium (Am-241) and other radionuclides, the column exploded, spraying leaded glass, nitric acid, and radioactive materials into McCluskey’s face.

In seconds, he received 500 times the amount of radiation considered safe over an entire lifetime—thousands of times greater than the dose received by anyone contaminated at Fukushima, and greater than that of many who responded to Chernobyl. McCluskey became known as the Atomic Man, and the lab—never to be used again—was dubbed the McCluskey Room...

... Since McCluskey received such high radiation doses from this accident (cumulative absorbed doses to the bone, bone surface, liver, and lung were 18, 520, 8, and 1.6 Gy, respectively2), it was surprising that he did not die from any radiation-induced cancer or other rad-health effect. He passed away 11 years after the accident at the age of 75 from congestive heart failure—the result of long-standing coronary artery disease...

...An investigation into the explosion confirmed that the resin mixture had become unstable exactly as McCluskey had feared, and the government finally settled in 1977 for $275,000 plus lifetime medical expenses. This accident was one of those unusual events that provides a lot of critical data on human biological effects of radiation, so the government also wanted to study his body after he died.

According to McCluskey’s wife, Ella, the government balked at paying the settlement. A former teacher and nurse, Ella cleverly told them they wouldn’t be able to do an autopsy when he died. They paid up pretty quick after that...