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NASA/MSFC Director Speaks Out on Radiation Safety
TOTKChief writes "In reference to the /. story about radiation safety at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, MSFC Center Director Art Stephenson has replied to those safety allegations outlined by The Huntsville Times. It's funny to note that the actions that Stephenson has taken are exactly those recommended by Jim Bult, who was fired for whistle blowing by the NASA contractor that he worked for. Depressing."
Most of the places that I've worked, safety has been twarted by employees. Provide good masks, and people complain that they are too hot to work in. Build a machine that's operation requiers both hands, and someone will put a coffee can on one of the switches so that they can loose a finger. When the day is done, people go home to a pack of cigarettes and drunk driving.
Checks will not help prevent this. People cover their asses, until someone looses theirs. Too much oversight grates and makes employees feel as if they are not trusted.
Condition reports and statistics are the only things that I've seen that work. See something wrong? Report it! Someone who knows will evaluate it and do something if needed. If they don't, a clear paper trail exists to win that lawsuit. Condition reports also form a statistical record that's better than you're gut feeling. When too many of them build up that are not easily dismissed, you can be sure you were right. At the end of the year, you really can tell how safe your plant is by the number of accidents that happened. My plant is safer than your plant becasue fewer people were hurt. What better measure is there? Where I work, splinters in people's fingers are logged!
Getting things done can be risky, but it does not have to be foolhardy. Equipment that cuts tough materials will tear off your hand. Equipment that lifts heavy objects can break things, throw things, or drop them on you. Safety equipment goes only so far. Good attitude and alertness from management and employees has to go the rest of the way.
Picture for a moment... the 100th layer of managment...
Your manager orders you to "Look busy" but never asigns you any work becouse his manager above him is some how missing from the chain so everyone under him is getting paid to do nothing and they like it that way.
I don't actually exist.
I prefer Barbarella to China Syndrome! Jane Fonda looked much better than a revolving red light. Dialog is about the same. Compare, "I must decend to the fantom zone", to, "This will kill half of Southern California."
Also try some independent research. Ask someone else with safety in their title. Check out the local newspaper. Learn more about reporting unsafe conditions in your company. You may not have to go tell some know nothing reporter looking for a scandal so his paper can sell adverts. Take it up the ladder. If you work for a company that does not care, getting fired is not so bad.
Sometimes these policies work. A good company needs your input on these types of things. Who else is going to know better than the person on the spot?
Ordinary materials can stop X-rays
Wrong, They can cut down the amount that gets through a given material, Xrays even penetrate lead however the level is so low that is is virtually immesurable without precise measuring equipment.
Facilities are designed so that the operator, and bystanders, will recieve less than a specified dose per YEAR if they never move and the equipment is never turned off.
For nuclear reactor faclities this is very true it is not the standard used by NASA, medical faclities or portable personal care equipment. Each of which has very different standards set by different organizations.
Lead is a nice attenuator of X-rays, but other materials, such as cinder blocks, masonite etc, can do the same job if enough material is used.
And how thick are the concrete filled walls at a nuclear reactor? Not all walls are as thick nor are they always filled. The main problem here is that NASA was most likely using something stronger than the ordinary medical xray and the safety procedures were being overrode. That's not a healthy thing. One encounter may not be harmful to the indivdual, but those procedures are set up to prevent that.
Jane Fonda in zero G will always be better
HCl isn't that bad, particularly when only the skin is exposed. H2SO4 can be nasty, and will turn a person's skin black. This is not due to the acidity, but rather affinity for water. If it is being rinsed with water, this shouldn't be a problem. A drop of thionyl chloride thus isn't too much of a danger. If it isn't rinsed off quickly, it will react with the water in one's skin to make those lovely acids, which would destroy lipids, etc. If one's eyes got splashed with thionyl chloride, it would react with the water there, giving off lots of heat, and blinding acid (much the same as tear gas only worse). Instead of quickly walking to the eyewash station to rinse, the victim would most likely claw thier eyes out because they would hurt so much. That's why one never works in a lab alone...
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
a) Why is the linear accelerator near the reception desk where packages are dropped off?
b) It's generally a Bad Thing when you don't bother marking the doors where high radiation equipment is.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I question a place where they mark the bathroom doors appropriately, but not the doors where lethal radiation is...
There isn't, it's only the frequency and energy level used that differentiates it...
PHB^8. Ugh.
NASA did not fire the guy, the contractor that he worked for did. Those are two very, very different things. The contractor thought the guy was making too many waves .. it seems odd that they'd think that, considering his job was to be a pain in the ass WRT radiation safety, but still.
I don't know what state he lives in, but in my state any employee is protected by a "whistle blower" law that says you can't be harassed, threatened, or retaliated against in any way for ratting out your employer's wrongdoings. I hope that he would explore his rights and sue the hell out of them.
I support Jim Bult all the way, and I hope that he wins his case. This is just typical of how upper management in this country looks at nothing but numbers. Just because nobody has gotten injured yet doesn't mean that it's not just itching to happen. But they don't care, numbers don't lie. It must be safe if nobody has gotten hurt, yet. How much would it really cost to check interlocks every month? Not nearly as much as it would cost to settle a multi million dollar lawsuite with the family, I'm sure.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
True, but since the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency, a gamma ray photon has about 10**11 times the energy of a microwave photon.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The thing is, you don't go that many more levels, and you're at Bill Clinton. One of my friends is a very new MSFC engineer (25 y-o), and there are only nine levels of management, maybe ten, between him and Bill. Compare this to the military, which has an endless management structure . . . =)
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-- Geof F. Morris
my dentist wears the lead apron.....
he doesn't give it to me....
hmmmmmmmmmm......
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The Safety people work in conjunction with the IT Security Department, and have a *pervasive* role, and do extremely irritating monthly inspections.
It irks me to see stories like this. How can there be the possibility of safety problems when you have someone as anal-retentive as the Evil Safety Woman coming by randomly throughout the month, and who can and *will* disrupt work activities over such mundane violations as an uncatalogued coffee maker or an extra extension cord?
NOYOUARENOT
so there
there there therer and there
I R00z j00!!!!!
Employees, contractors, contracts, etc. are all under Federal law when you're working for a Federal agency.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
emily -i love you
I R00z j00!!!!!
Not to mention that if you ever get cancer you can save a fortune in medical expenses. Who needs oncology when you can just work overtime?
(god, that was tastless)
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
It takes a lot of radiation to rise above safe levels.
That is if you strictly view this from a medical x-ray stand point. These are not your standard maedical xrays. They are about a 1000 times more powerful they have to photograph welds and structual componets for safety defects. And althou a medical xray is done almost with a camera like quickness. Structal xrays can be on for a long time in some cases xray video is done.
X ray rad is typically blocked by a resonably thick brick wall.
Wrong again in hospital settings all the walls must afford some level of lead shielding or must have a self contained piece of equipment with lead bariers that must be assembled. Xray levels through block walls are not low enough to count block wall as a safe barrier. One item is, lead.
The equipment used for testing items like this is huge in some cases and that is the stuff they are taking about the safety protocols on this kind of x-ray equipment are many and to be stricly enforced. One flash of an xray may not be harmful in and of itself but typicaly this equipment is taking thousnds of those flashes and often at much higher levels than normal medical xrays. If the equipment was in a room with a filled cinder block wall as it's barrier and the confrence room is on the other side of that wall(not a likely scenerio) and there is all all day staff meeeting in there. Xray machine works all day. A couple of hundred images. Those people are toast. Not nessacarily right then and there but easily within 5 years. If not due to some form of cancer and/or massive tumor outbreak, something similar.
The movie The China Syndrome was a great example of what happens with improper xrays of welds althou the movie didn't show what real weld xray exammining is like(hey it's hollywood). The premesis is the same as what is happening now with someone forging records.
There are a lot of safety procedures that go into doing this. They are time consuming and difficult but they are there for a couple of good reasons, liablity and bad PR.
You might not be a chemist, but I am, and your safety officer seems downright incompetent to me.
The reaction when the stuff contacts water (I'm leaving out the various reactions with organic compounds) converts one molecule of thionyl chloride and two molecules of water to two molecules of HCl and one molecule of sulfuric acid, with near 100% efficiency as I understand it.
Neither hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid are considered "weak" by any standards I've ever heard.
I can assure you that ALL sources are regulated. Medical facilites ARE made just as I said and so are accelerators bigger than a crt. Anyone operating a device that exposes the general public will be shut down and jailed. Industrial radiographers are the losest of the bunch, but even they are tightly controled in the US. All nuclear controls are federal.
Doses from all terestrial sources are very well understood, as are the means to sheild the public. It's not rocket science.
X-rays, and other low energy photons are easy to stop. A photon absorbed in a material is stoped. How well they are stoped is strictly regulated. It's easy to meet those regulations for lower energy X rays because they are less penetrating and deliver less dose.
This is unfair, you are not giving NASA its full due with respect to safety. Everyone knows that their real-estate is inspected by Russian building inspectors and passes with flying colours (colors to USians :-)
Ooo..that's convenient. It also makes it very difficult to trust somebody if they're not willing to provide more than lip service about their claims of "fair and impartial" treatment for whistleblowers.
Yeah, Chief could've been clearer about that when he posted the article. Too many people scream "radiation, eek!" and think of Chernobyl when they hear those words.
By exposing ourselves to high levels of radiation, we can rapidly increase the rate of genetic mutations in future generations. Sure most of them will be bad, and millions will die horrible deaths or lead lives as misshapen mutants, but those who survive will become an elite team of crime-fighting superheroes!
I saw it in X-Men, so it must be true.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
Doesn't look funny or depressing at all. I think Stephenson is sending a pretty strong message as to whose side he's on..
Just before someone confuses the issue, it's NOT about storing plutonium, or uranium, etc. It's about X-ray's.
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It takes a lot of radiation to rise above safe levels. Especially X rays radiation. X ray rad is typically blocked by a resonably thick brick wall. Now mind you, this equipment is much larger than a typical hospital X-ray machine, but all the same, unless you put your head under in in a effort to gain super-powers there probably isn't much reason to worry.
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Crudely Drawn Games
My greatest concern with this article is the allegation that communications relative to safety is discouraged. Nothing is further from the truth.
Nahh..we don't discourage it. We'll FIRE you for it, but we don't discourage it.
I simply do not know how I can be any clearer on this.
Try not firing people that point out safety problems.
NASA is a bungling sack of ancient history. A degenerate vat of a despicable sack of sloshy mule froth!
While attending one of the periodic briefings on business ethics given by my employer, a Fortune 50 corporation, I was told that corporate policy protected whistleblowers from retaliation. Any manager found guilty of retaliating against a whistleblower would be reprimanded or terminated. When the presenter asked for questions, I asked him if he could name one manager that had been reprimanded or terminated on the grounds of retaliation against a whistleblower. He said that he would get back to me with an answer. I am still waiting, many months later.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
X-ray's are more prone to kill off your ability to produce swimmers. There's a reason they make you wear that lead thing at the dentist.
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Better eight layers of management than half that with matrix management. I interviewed once for a position with one of the U.S. national laboratories, and in the interview the two other orthogonal management structures (in addition to line management) were described. I couldn't help but think that "matrix management" was bad terminology--perhaps "tensor management" instead?
A curious feature of matrix management is that it diffuses accountability to the point where nobody seems to be responsible for anything. No doubt this is by design.
''In this one instance you surpassed more than eight layers of management . . .''
Don't you find it frightening to think of an organization that has so many layers of management?
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.