Low-Level Plutonium Sample Involved in NIST-Boulder Lab Incident

On Monday afternoon, June 9, researchers in a laboratory room at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado discovered that a vial holding about 1/4 of a gram of a plutonium-containing powder had cracked and that some particles had spilled from the vial. The laboratory room and an adjacent lab in NIST's Building 1 were immediately sealed off.