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There were no procedures in place for handling plutonium.

There was no plan in place for how to handle a plutonium spill.

As use of radioactive materials increased at NIST over the years, there was no commensurate strengthening of the radiation safety program.

Available training for staff was inadequate and insufficient.

Existing training requirements were ignored by researchers and not enforced by safety personnel.

The laboratory where the plutonium was handled was also used by other researchers who had no training or knowledge of the risks.

There were not adequate hazard postings on the laboratory door.

Poorly trained staff, the lack of an emergency protocol and inadequate hazard postings all contributed to the plutonium spill at the National Institute of Standards and Technology last month in Boulder, according to an internal investigation.

The report revealed new details about how a vial containing a quarter gram of plutonium cracked June 9. A couple of weeks later, NIST announced that a few of the researchers had ingested the plutonium, exposing their internal organs to dangerous radiation.

On Thursday, NIST said health experts has determined that the exposed scientists are not expected to suffer any significant health effects from the radiation in the future.

“The estimated doses, and the increased overall risk for cancer based on these estimates, are so small we don’t expect there to be any clinically significant impact on either the short- or long-term health of anyone exposed,” Edward Cetaruk, a doctor from the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center who was treating the researchers, said in a statement.

Michelle Law, radiation safety officer at CU, agreed that the amount of radiation that NIST claims the workers were exposed to — at most, 400 millirems — is relatively small.

In all, health physicists predict that the cancer risk for the exposed individuals will be raised by 0.04 percent because of their internal plutonium contamination, according to NIST.

In its internal investigation, NIST found that the vial was likely cracked when three scientists, including a postdoctoral student from CU, were performing an experiment using a spectroscopy system, which can be used to detect certain types of radiation.

After the vial cracked, one of the scientists — a foreign guest researcher — cleaned his hands in the sink, effectively washing a small amount of plutonium into Boulder’s wastewater treatment system. The guest researcher also left the laboratory with a contaminated notebook, which was then responsible for spreading the contamination to other labs.

During the incident, other NIST researchers who were working on unrelated projects entered and exited the lab without knowledge of the possible plutonium contamination.

The critical internal report revealed that the incident and the contamination that followed was caused by a litany of organizational failures, including the foreign researcher’s failure to recognize and report the event in a “timely, appropriate and accurate manner.” The report also blamed NIST for not providing accurate training or an emergency response plan.

U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, has arranged for a hearing on the incident in front of Congress on Tuesday. He responded to NIST’s latest statement Thursday.

For now, NIST has stopped all work with radioactive materials in Boulder and developed an incident response plan, which is now being implemented.

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