Ooh, storytime!
In 1972 my father was a veterinary assistant in the Air Force, assigned to a research lab on the upper end of Groton Naval Base in Connecticut. One of his duties was taking care of the rats they used in animal testing. At the time, the military was seeing high rates of cancer and kidney failure in people who were working with solvents and other chemicals, so they were conducting experiments to try and understand why. When they subjected the rats to testing, they used radioactive isotopes to track the movement of chemicals in the body. They used the isotopes to irradiate the chemicals, and then exposed the rats to the chemicals. After a couple months the rats were euthanized and dissected. The organs were checked for radiation, and in this way they were able to tell which organs ended up absorbing the chemicals. That is how we now know that solvents attack the kidneys.
The radioactivity was very low-level and the rats could be handled as normal, but when they died their carcasses were considered nuclear material. The Navy had strict procedures for handling nuclear material. They have nuclear reactors on board ships and have policies and procedures in place for dealing with dangerous radioactive waste. The rats were clearly not dangerous, but at the time there was no give in the rules. Radioactive was radioactive, whether you were talking about spent fuel rods or rat carcasses. The rats were required to be loaded into 55 gallon drums, marked with the appropriate radioactive markings, and kept in the walk-in refrigerator until the drums were full. Once the drums were full they were to be taken and loaded onto the nuclear barge for shipping off to storage alongside more radioactive materials.
At the end of one experiment my dad and his fellow veterinary assistants loaded three 55 gallon barrels of dead rats into the back of the lab's truck and drove down to the docks at the lower end of the base. They pulled up to the nuclear waste barge and the dock chief approached them. He told them the barge was full and they couldn’t take the barrels. When they asked what to do with the barrels, the chief shrugged and said, “Set them over there. We have another barge coming in a couple days.”
Dead rat carcasses in a sealed container in the August sun heat decompose and create gas. A few days later the gas inside the barrels exceeded the sealing capacity of the drums. The drums exploded, spraying rotting radioactive rat carcasses across the dock.
The Navy considered any spillage of radioactive material to be a nuclear incident. The entire lower end of the base was shut down, with Marines at every building and intersection, enforcing a daytime curfew. It was late in the afternoon, right at shift change. Thousands of workers on the lower end of the base were restricted to their buildings. Keep in mind that in 1972, nearly nobody in Connecticut had air conditioning. It was hot, so the windows were open to catch the breeze… the breeze that was carrying the stench of 165 gallons of rotten rat corpses.
The soupy rat guts were spilled all over the dock, slipping into the bay. Sailors wearing environmental protective suits were sweating profusely while shoveling and mopping rotten rats into new drums and then scrubbing the dock afterwards. Floating rat carcasses had to be fished out of the water. The base stayed locked down and nobody could go home until the job was done. The upper base? Completely open, so my dad and his coworkers got off work and went home as normal.
The admiral was proud of the work done on his base, and his office was a block away so he could be near his ships. He had to sit and smell the stench the entire time. The very next day a new policy directive was penned. No matter how low the radiation level was of a barrel of dead rats, they always had priority on the disposal barge.
