A Nuclear Regulatory Commission event report filed this week describes an unshielded radium source, roughly 50 millicuries of Ra-226, that state investigators found sitting in the garage of a residence in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, giving off 400 millirem per hour at 30 centimeters. Investigators reached that garage only after Florida health officials responding to an unrelated public tip seized two lead “pig” containers from a Florida resident, one of them holding a second, already-shielded radium source. The North Carolina source was removed from the home and, as of Sept. 24, 2026, picked up for disposal by a licensed contractor.
The device is a nasopharyngeal radium applicator, a medical instrument that has not been used on a patient in the United States since the 1960s. Its reappearance decades later, unshielded in a residential garage rather than a hospital or licensed storage site, is the kind of orphan-source case that state and federal radiation regulators say still turns up with some regularity across the country.
Two lead pigs in Florida led back to Rocky Mount
The Florida Department of Health’s Bureau of Radiation Control responded to a call from the public and impounded two lead pigs in the Florida resident’s possession. One held an estimated 50 mCi Ra-226 nasopharyngeal radium applicator with a dose rate of 25 roentgen per hour on contact; the second pig was empty. Tracing the containers’ origin, Florida officials determined they had come from a residence in Rocky Mount owned by the Florida resident’s family, and passed that information to North Carolina’s Radioactive Materials Branch, whose licensing and inspection work is overseen by branch chief James Albright.
North Carolina investigators then located a second radium source, this one unshielded, inside the garage of the Rocky Mount property. The NRC’s event notification report puts the reading at “400 mR/hr at 30 cm, and 50 mR/hr at 1 meter” for the source North Carolina recovered, a separate reading from the 25 R/hr contact dose measured on the source already secured in Florida.
A device built to deliver 200 to 300 rem to tissue in ten minutes
Nasopharyngeal radium applicators were standard medical equipment from the 1940s through the 1960s, inserted into each nostril for five to 15 minutes at a time to treat ear and adenoid infections in what the Oak Ridge Associated Universities health physics museum estimates was several million patients, mostly children. Each applicator held roughly 50 milligrams-equivalent of Ra-226 inside a small monel-metal capsule — the same activity level as the source found in the Rocky Mount garage — and delivered 200 to 300 rem of radiation to tissue one centimeter away during a typical 10-minute treatment, a dose in the range that causes radiation burns rather than the mild warmth patients were told to expect.
That treatment history explains why an old applicator left in a garage, rather than returned to a hospital or a licensed disposal facility when the practice ended, still carries enough activity to injure skin on contact more than 60 years later. Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so an applicator manufactured in the 1950s has lost almost none of its original strength.
How North Carolina classified and disposed of the source
The NRC’s report classifies the recovered material as “Less than Cat 3,” the agency’s shorthand for a source below the third tier of a five-category international danger scale. Under that classification system, Category 1 and 2 sources can be fatal within minutes to days of close, unshielded exposure, while sources below Category 3 pose reduced but real risk requiring extended contact to cause even temporary injury. Only Category 1 and 2 sources fall under mandatory NRC security requirements, leaving lower-tier finds like this one to Agreement State programs such as North Carolina’s.
The report states plainly that “exposures to members of the public are unknown, and the licensee is unknown,” meaning investigators have not identified who originally owned the applicator or whether anyone in the Rocky Mount household was exposed before it was found. The source was removed from the residence and secured at the state’s Radioactive Materials Branch facility before being handed off on Sept. 24 to SpectronRX, a commercial radioactive-waste contractor, for shipment to disposal.
North Carolina’s role in this case tracks the broader pattern the NRC’s own radium backgrounder describes: most contamination and stray-source cases nationally trace back to early-20th-century commercial and medical radium products, many originally sold or used without the tracking requirements that apply to newer radioactive materials. The NRC did not gain full regulatory authority over radium-226 itself until 2009, decades after devices like this one had already been manufactured, sold and, in cases like this, forgotten in storage.
So far no reported illness has been tied to the Florida or North Carolina source, and regulators have given no timeline for identifying the applicator’s original owner or how long it sat in the garage before this year’s discovery.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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