The Non-Financial Ledger: What $45,000 Cannot Measure

Plutonium-239 is one of the most toxic substances human beings have ever created. A particle of it small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, if inhaled or ingested, can lodge in lung tissue and irradiate the surrounding cells for decades. It does not announce itself. There is no smell, no heat, no warning. You do not know it is there until the damage is already done. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,100 years. It will be radioactive long after every person alive today, and their children’s children’s children, have turned to dust.

That is what International Isotopes, Inc. decided to move without telling anyone who was supposed to be watching. Eight sources of this material, ranging in measured activity, crossed borders and changed hands between March and September of 2022 without a single federal authorization in place. The NRC’s oversight systems, which exist specifically to track where fissile materials are and who has them, were kept completely in the dark. No regulator knew. No safety check was triggered. No emergency protocol was standing by.

The people who live near Commerce Circle in Idaho Falls did not know. The workers who handled those sources may not have known the full legal picture of what they were touching. The unnamed government agency that ultimately received the material received it through a chain of custody that had a gap in it, a gap that federal law exists to prevent. The purpose of the licensing requirements is not bureaucratic box-ticking. It is to ensure that someone, somewhere, with the authority and the training to intervene, knows at every moment where weapons-capable radioactive material is and whether the people handling it are protected.

And this was not a first mistake in an otherwise clean record. By the time the NRC sent this letter, it was at minimum the fourth time escalated enforcement had been necessary. One of those prior incidents happened at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle on May 2, 2019, a hospital full of patients, nurses, technicians, and families. A contamination event. People who went to that building to receive medical care, or to provide it, were in a building where International Isotopes’ procedural failures and inadequate Radiation Safety Committee oversight had contributed to a radioactive contamination incident. The NRC documented it. The company received a formal enforcement action. And then they kept going, violating regulations in new ways, with the same underlying causes: inadequate procedures, weak oversight, and a misunderstanding of what the rules actually require.

A $45,000 fine is, to a company the NRC now classifies as a large industrial processor, a rounding error. It is less than the cost of a mid-range company vehicle. It is a number that asks nothing of anyone. It changes nothing about the structure of a business that has now, repeatedly, demonstrated it cannot or will not follow the laws that exist to keep radioactive materials from harming people who never consented to the risk.

That is the ledger that does not appear on the invoice.

The Violations: What They Actually Did

Federal nuclear law is specific and layered. International Isotopes broke two distinct layers of it simultaneously, over a period of six and a half months.

• Violation A (10 CFR Part 110): Federal law prohibits importing special nuclear material without authorization under a general or specific license. Between March 2 and September 15, 2022, International Isotopes imported eight plutonium-239 calibration and reference sources without that authorization. The activity levels ranged from 0.003 to 0.040 microcuries.
• Violation B (10 CFR Part 70): Federal law also prohibits receiving or transferring special nuclear material without an authorization in a Commission-issued license. International Isotopes received all eight sources and then transferred them to a government agency, neither action covered by their NRC License No. 11-27680-01MD.
• Combined classification: Severity Level III problem, meaning the NRC treats this as significant and warranting heightened regulatory attention, not the most severe level but explicitly described as significant enough to deny regulators “the opportunity to perform the necessary oversight.”
• The NRC determined the company should be reclassified for penalty purposes as an industrial processor, defined as a large firm engaged in manufacturing or distribution of source or byproduct material, which carries a base civil penalty of $45,000 for a Level III problem.
• How the violations were discovered: a staff member at the company asked internally whether the isotopes they were handling were covered by their license. That internal inquiry is what surfaced the problem. Regulators did not catch it proactively; the company stumbled onto its own violation.

The Pattern of Violations: Four Strikes, One Fine

The NRC’s enforcement letter does not describe this as an isolated incident. It documents a pattern spanning at least five years, involving different types of violations that share the same root causes: bad procedures, weak internal oversight, and consistent failure to understand or follow federal nuclear law.

• Prior violation 1 — Shipments to embargoed countries (ADAMS ML20246M272): International Isotopes made improper shipments of byproduct material to embargoed countries. This is a national security violation, not a paperwork error. Embargoed countries are designated as such because the U.S. government has determined that sending them controlled materials poses a risk to international security.
• Prior violation 2 — Hospital contamination event (ADAMS ML20294A080): On May 2, 2019, a contamination event occurred at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. The NRC attributed this to procedural failures and a lack of oversight by the company’s Radiation Safety Committee. A hospital, full of immunocompromised patients and medical workers, was affected by International Isotopes’ internal failures.
• Prior violation 3 — Sealed source manufacturing failure (ADAMS ML24004A223): The company failed to manufacture and distribute a sealed source in accordance with the Sealed Source and Device Registry certificate. This violation was cited in a separate enforcement letter dated January 25, 2024, just weeks before this one was finalized.
• Current violation 4 — Unauthorized plutonium-239 movement (EA-23-120): The violation at the center of this investigation. Eight plutonium-239 sources moved without federal authorization across a six-and-a-half-month window.
• The NRC explicitly states that all four sets of violations share the same causal factors: inadequate procedures, inadequate Radiation Safety Committee oversight, and misunderstanding of NRC requirements. This is not a company that made one bad call. These are structural failures that keep producing the same outcomes.

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Documents

These are direct quotes from the official NRC enforcement letter and Notice of Violation dated April 4, 2024. Nothing here is paraphrased or interpreted beyond what the text states.

“International Isotopes Inc., imported eight plutonium-239 calibration and reference sources ranging in activity from 0.003 microcuries to 0.040 microcuries… without authorization by a general license issued under 10 CFR Part 110.”
— Notice of Violation, Violation A, EA-23-120

• This confirms the violation was not a clerical error after the fact. The material was imported, physically, without the authorization that federal law requires to exist before the import happens.
• The date range, March 2 to September 15, 2022, means this was not a single shipment. It was a multi-transaction, multi-month pattern of unlicensed nuclear material movement.
• The NRC categorizes plutonium-239 as “special nuclear material,” the same category that includes weapons-grade fissile material. The word “calibration sources” describes the intended use, not the hazard level.

“International Isotopes Inc., received and transferred special nuclear material without an authorization in a license issued by the Commission pursuant to 10 CFR Part 70. Specifically, International Isotopes Inc., without authorization under its NRC License Number 11-27680-01MD, received eight plutonium-239 calibration and reference sources… and then transferred those same eight sources to a government agency.”
— Notice of Violation, Violation B, EA-23-120

• The phrase “then transferred those same eight sources to a government agency” is the part that should stop you cold. The chain of custody for weapons-capable nuclear material passed through a company that had no legal authority to be holding it, and was then handed off to a federal government entity with no regulatory oversight of that transaction.
• The license number cited (11-27680-01MD) is the company’s actual active NRC license. The NRC is explicitly stating that the license that existed did not cover what the company was doing. This is not a technicality. The company operated outside the legal boundaries of its own license.

“The NRC considers the violations to be significant because the improper import and failure to apply for and receive NRC approval to receive and transfer plutonium-239 calibration and reference sources denies the NRC the opportunity to perform the necessary oversight to ensure the material’s safe use.”
— NRC Enforcement Letter, EA-23-120, Section on Significance

• The NRC is admitting here that its oversight system failed. When a company imports and transfers special nuclear material without going through the authorization process, regulators are blind. They cannot inspect. They cannot verify safety. They cannot intervene if something goes wrong.
• This quote directly undermines any argument that the violation was harmless because the sources were small. The harm is not only in the physical isotopes; it is in the gap in federal oversight of nuclear material that the unauthorized transactions created.

“The normal application of the civil penalty assessment process does not result in a civil penalty for this enforcement action.”
— NRC Enforcement Letter, EA-23-120, Civil Penalty Assessment Section

• This sentence is buried in the middle of the letter and it is the most important one. Under standard NRC enforcement math, International Isotopes would have paid zero dollars for illegally importing and transferring plutonium-239. Zero.
• The $45,000 was imposed only because the NRC invoked enforcement discretion under Section 3.6 of the Enforcement Policy, citing the company’s prior violation history. Without that history, this would have been a warning with no financial consequence.
• This exposes the system’s fundamental design: a company with a clean record could potentially move nuclear material without authorization and face no financial penalty whatsoever, as long as it self-identifies the violation and takes corrective action.

“Because your facility has been the subject of escalated enforcement actions within the last two inspections… the NRC considered whether credit was warranted for Identification and Corrective Action… The NRC determined that Identification credit is warranted because your staff’s inquiry as to the isotopes authorized by your license prompted discovery.”
— NRC Enforcement Letter, EA-23-120

• The NRC is giving the company credit for discovering its own violation. The logic of the enforcement system is that self-discovery is better than getting caught, so it earns a penalty reduction. In this case, that reduction brought the penalty from $45,000 down to $0, before the prior-history override brought it back to $45,000.
• The phrase “your staff’s inquiry as to the isotopes authorized by your license” describes a moment when someone at the company apparently asked a basic question about what their license actually covered. That question, which any compliant operation should have been asking before the first import, is being credited as a mitigating factor.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The documented and potential public health consequences of unauthorized plutonium-239 movement extend beyond the company’s walls and into communities that had no knowledge of and no consent to the risks involved.

• The contamination event at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle on May 2, 2019 is the most direct documented public health harm attributed to International Isotopes’ systemic failures. Hospital patients, many of whom are immunocompromised, and healthcare workers were present in a facility where a radioactive contamination event attributed to the company’s procedural failures occurred.
• Workers at International Isotopes who handled the eight plutonium-239 sources between March and September 2022 did so within a regulatory gap. Without NRC authorization and oversight in place, standard verification that workers were properly protected, that procedures were approved, and that dose tracking was in order cannot be confirmed for that period.
• The government agency that received the transferred sources is not named in the enforcement document, which means the public cannot verify whether that receiving entity had proper safety protocols in place or whether its own workers were adequately protected upon receipt of material transferred outside NRC oversight.
• Plutonium-239 exposure risks include lung cancer from inhalation, bone cancer from ingestion, and long-term irradiation of internal tissue from even microscopic quantities. These are not theoretical. They are the reason 10 CFR Part 70 exists.
• The NRC documents that the same structural failure, inadequate Radiation Safety Committee oversight, was the causal factor in both the 2019 hospital contamination event and the 2022 plutonium import violation. The same root problem produced two separate public health risks across three years.

Economic Inequality

The enforcement system’s economic logic rewards corporations for self-reporting violations, and punishes communities for not having the resources, expertise, or access to discover violations themselves.

• The $45,000 civil penalty was levied against a company the NRC now reclassifies as a large industrial processor. For a company in the manufacturing and distribution of nuclear materials, this fine is not a deterrent. It is a cost of doing business smaller than most mid-range regulatory compliance software subscriptions.
• Under the NRC’s own standard penalty formula, the fine would have been $0. The credit system that produces that result, which rewards identification and corrective action, is structurally designed to benefit well-resourced companies that can afford to mount comprehensive corrective action programs and attend predecisional enforcement conferences with prepared presentation slides.
• Workers at the company and residents near its Idaho Falls facility at 4137 Commerce Circle have no mechanism under this enforcement framework to receive compensation, notification, or health monitoring as a direct result of this violation. The fine goes to the U.S. Treasury, not to the people nearest the risk.
• The communities near Harborview Medical Center in Seattle who may have been present during the 2019 contamination event have no way, based on publicly available documents, to determine what their exposure level was, whether they were notified, or whether the NRC’s enforcement action resulted in any remediation of harm to the people actually affected.
• The enforcement process itself, with its predecisional conferences, ADAMS document systems, ADR mediation options, and installment payment plans, is designed for and accessible to corporate legal teams. Community members who want to understand what happened at a nuclear facility near them must navigate the same bureaucratic infrastructure with no institutional support.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: Who to Contact and What to Demand

The people named in this enforcement action and the regulatory bodies with jurisdiction over International Isotopes’ conduct are documented below. Every contact listed here comes directly from the source material.

Named Individuals (Per NRC Enforcement Letter EA-23-120)

• Shahe Bagerdjian, Chief Executive Officer, International Isotopes, Inc. — The letter is addressed directly to him. He attended the predecisional enforcement conference on January 30, 2024.
• John Miller, Radiation Safety Officer, International Isotopes, Inc. — Named in the letter as attending both the exit meeting and the predecisional enforcement conference. The RSC (Radiation Safety Committee) he oversees is cited repeatedly as a systemic failure point.
• John D. Monninger, Regional Administrator, NRC Region IV — Signed the enforcement letter and authorized the civil penalty after consultation with the Director of the Office of Enforcement.
• Lizette Roldán-Otero, NRC Region IV — Listed as a point of contact for the ADR mediation process, reachable at 817-200-1455.
• Neil O’Keefe, NRC Region IV Staff — Listed as the contact for questions about this enforcement action, reachable at 817-200-1156.

Regulatory Watchlist

• NRC Office of Enforcement (OE): The office that authorized this penalty and has jurisdiction over all future violations. Public enforcement records are available at nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/enforcement/actions. ADAMS Accession No. ML24068A112 is the public record for this specific action.
• NRC Region IV (Arlington, TX): The regional office conducting inspections of International Isotopes. The inspection report is ADAMS No. ML23299A275. Written comments and public inquiries can be submitted through nrc.gov.
• Idaho Department of Health and Welfare — Radiation Control Program: The state radiation regulator was copied on this enforcement letter. Director Rikki Waller is the named contact.
• Idaho Department of Environmental Quality: Also copied on the enforcement letter. State Liaison Officer Landry Austin is the named contact.
• U.S. Department of Justice: If International Isotopes fails to pay the civil penalty, the NRC’s enforcement documents state the matter “may be referred to the Attorney General.” DOJ has the authority to pursue civil collection under Section 234c of the Atomic Energy Act, 42 U.S.C. 2282c.

What You Can Do

• Request the full inspection report through the NRC’s ADAMS public document system using Accession No. ML23299A275. The inspection report contains the detailed findings from the August 2023 inspection. It is public record. Read it and share it.
• Submit written public comment to the NRC Office of Enforcement and to NRC Region IV about the adequacy of the $45,000 penalty for a repeat nuclear safety violator. The enforcement action is a public record (EA-23-120) and public input is part of the regulatory record.
• Contact the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality to ask what state-level follow-up actions, if any, are being taken in response to this federal enforcement action. Both agencies were officially notified by the NRC.
• If you live or work near 4137 Commerce Circle, Idaho Falls, Idaho, connect with local environmental and public health advocacy organizations to request community-level health monitoring information and push for transparency about what materials are being handled at the facility and under what authorizations.
• Organize with workers in the nuclear materials supply chain to push for union-backed radiation safety oversight that does not depend solely on a company’s Radiation Safety Committee, the exact body the NRC has cited as a systemic failure point at this company across multiple enforcement actions.
• Demand congressional attention to the NRC’s civil penalty structure, which currently allows a self-identified violation of nuclear import law to result in a $0 fine for companies without prior enforcement history. Contact your U.S. House and Senate representatives and ask them to request a GAO review of NRC civil penalty adequacy for special nuclear material violations.