Archivist: "And in this box, we have radioactive uranium."

Chicago Pile One Scientists; Enrico Fermi is the
first man in the front row. Albert Wattenberg is
the third man in the front row. (From the Atomic Archive)

"University of Illinois physicist Albert Wattenberg didn't go to the Chicago branch of the National Archives last year looking for trouble. But when he could barely lift an 8-inch metal rod from a box containing artifacts used by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues to build a nuclear pile under the University of Chicago football stadium, he new something was wrong. 'There's only one metal that heavy,' says Wattenberg, who was part of Fermi's team in the 1940s. 'It was obviously uranium.'

Wattenberg had literally put his fingers on a half-century of carelessness in preserving the beginnings of the nation's nuclear history. Thousands of artifacts contaminated by radionuclides during the testing and production of nuclear materials--laboratory notebooks, classified documents, components from experiments, and the like--were being stored along with nonradioactive material in files open to public inspection. Although the health hazards associated with these materials are small... the contamination is presenting the Department of Energy and the National Archives with a major cleanup problem." --Science, January 14, 1994, quoted on p121 in Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives 

The archivist who processed that box must have been using a "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) approach! "Hmmm... that's just a box of uranium pile artifacts. They certainly don't need item-level analysis. Next box, please!"