You have a nuclear-powered pacemaker. The hospital that keeps track of it is bankrupt. What now?
Document 2774 among the thousands in the bankruptcy case of Philadelphia’s historic Hahnemann University Hospital laid out a curious problem. How should the hospital manage its only patient still implanted with a plutonium-powered pacemaker?
That left Hahnemann—and now its liquidators—with the long-term responsibility to keep track of the device and eventually dispose of it, in order to meet the legal requirements of its license with Pennsylvania environmental regulators. Few if any nuclear-powered pacemakers have been implanted since the late-1980s, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but a few remain in people today. The devices usually look like small metal disks or squares and can fit in the palm of a hand.
“They told me when I pass away it has to be returned,” the New Jersey resident said. She said her doctor told her that government officials don’t want the plutonium falling into the wrong hands because it could pose a security risk. In 2020, the NRC fielded a call from a doctor asking how to dispose of a nuclear-powered pacemaker that, 42 years earlier, had been removed from his patient’s deceased spouse. The NRC believes that the hospital cleaned it, engraved a name on it and presented it as a keepsake to the surviving spouse, who kept it for decades.
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