
The scale showed an incorrect weight of 27,650 pounds.

The Oklahoma accident occurred after workers loaded a stainless steel cylinder with uranium hexafluoride and weighed it. "One happened in France and the other in Portsmouth, Ohio, when a cylinder fell from a crane and broke open when it struck the ground." He said uranium can impair kidney function and that doctors are examining the injured workers' kidneys for signs of damage.Ĭunningham described the accident as "totally unexpected," a freak mishap that may have been the first of its kind anywhere in the world: "We only know of two others involving uranium fuel cylinders, and neither of them involved a fatality," he said. "The uranium that leaked from the cylinder is very heavy and plates out solidifies too rapidly to be ingested in an accident like this," Cunningham said. Two of the five remained hospitalized yesterday. Richard Cunningham, safetydivision director at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said yesterday that Harrison and five other workers also may have inhaled "a small amount of uranium" but that their burns and respiratory distress were caused by the nonradioactive chemical.
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The acid was formed when an overloaded cylinder cracked and leaked 14 1/2 tons of radioactive uranium hexafluoride at the plant operated by Kerr-McGee for the Department of Energy.

near Webbers Falls, Okla., was killed by a lethal dose of hydrofluoric acid, not by radiation poisoning. James Harrison, an employe of Kerr-McGee Corp. The worker who died Saturday after an explosion at a nuclear-fuels processing plant in Oklahoma had inhaled a nonradioactive chemical so strong that industries use it to etch glass.
