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The Twin County Joint Municipal Authority in Nuremberg. Sludge from the facility recently tested positive for a very low level of radiation.

The Twin County Joint Municipal Authority in Nuremberg. Sludge from the facility recently tested positive for a very low level of radiation.

Sewage sludge that a treatment plant for Nuremberg and Weston sent to an incinerator was rejected for radioactivity.

Eddie Gregory said a truck took sludge from Twin County Joint Municipal Authority, which he manages, to the incinerator of the Greater Hazleton Joint Sewer Authority in West Hazleton, where it tripped a detector set for a very low level of radiation three weeks ago.

The truck contained Iodine-131, which treats thyroid cancer and other disorders. Gregory surmises that a Twin County customer had received treatment.

At the gate of the Greater Hazleton authority plant in Valmont Industrial Park, an alarm sounds when a truck exceeds background radiation by 10 microrems per hour, which Director of Administration Gregory Olander said is a small dose.

Jim Fongheiser, a health physicist in West Chester, said someone could recline atop a truck emitting radiation at that level for 1,000 hours before receiving the dose of radiation delivered by an X-ray.

Fongheiser set up the radiation check at Greater Hazleton authority to comply with rules of Pennsylvania, one of few states to require radiation detectors at facilities like the authority’s, as well as landfills and transfer stations.

When the radiation alarm rings, workers with a hand-held detector check the truck’s tank, but also the cab because some drivers have recently received radiation treatment.

Fongheiser said a driver standing outside a truck while waiting six or seven vehicles from the front of the line once tripped a detector at a landfill where he consults.

The handheld detector that workers use at the Greater Hazleton authority measures levels of radiation but also identifies the radioactive substance.

That allows workers to distinguish between harmful isotopes that can take millennia to break down and short-lived isotopes used in medicine.

For Iodine-131, the half-life is eight days, which means half of the radioactive material becomes inert every eight days.

Fongheiser said some isotopes used in medicine have half-lives of hours.

When patients finish radiation treatment, they’re not dangerous to others.

“They can go to McDonald’s, ride the bus,” Fongheiser said.

When they go to the bathroom, they excrete a fraction of the radioactive material that they retained from treatment.

After the radiation detector went off at the Greater Hazleton authority, the truck returned to Twin County’s plant, which is in North Union Twp. and primarily serves the villages of Nuremberg and Weston in Schuylkill and Luzerne counties.

The sludge was moved into a storage tank at Twin County for three weeks while the radiation dissipated.

On Thursday, workers from the Greater Hazleton authority went to Twin County’s plant to retest the sludge. Tests found levels below 10 microrems, and the tank’s contents were trucked to West Hazleton for disposal.

Gregory said the initial load of sludge came from inside effluent tanks that he cleaned to remove algae and moss.

While Gregory hadn’t had material from the Twin County authority test positive for radiation before, Olander said the alarm rings at the Greater Hazleton authority once or twice a year.

Contact the writer: kjackson@standardspeaker.com; 570-501-3587

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