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Heroism Is Part of a Nuclear Worker's Job
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1988, Michael Friedlander was a newly minted shift technical adviser at a nuclear power plant near the Gulf Coast when Hurricane Gilbert, a Category 5 storm, was bearing down on the plant. They received word that all workers should leave except for critical plant personnel, and there was never a question: 'my team and I would stay, regardless of what happened.' 'The situation facing the 50 workers left at Fukushima is a nuclear operator's worst nightmare,' writes Friedlander. 'But the knowledge that a nuclear crisis could occur, and that we might be the only people standing in the way of a meltdown, defines every aspect of an operator's life.' The field attracts a very particular kind of person, says Friedlander, and the typical employee is more like a cross between a jet pilot and a firefighter: highly trained to keep a technically complex system running, but also prepared to be the first and usually only line of defense in an emergency. 'We will likely hear numerous stories of heroism over the next several days, of plant operators struggling to keep water flowing into the reactors, breathing hard against their respirators under the dim rays of a handheld flashlight in the cold, dark recesses of a critically damaged nuclear plant, knowing that at any moment another hydrogen explosion could occur.'"
The severity rating of the crisis has now been raised from 4 to 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and Japan's Prime Minister called the situation "very grave."
There have been hydrogen explosions in a plant that has uncooled, exposed nuclear waste directly next to the explosions. 30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal. The workers have been evacuated more than twice due to obscenely high radiation levels. I think you need to do your research.
I might be a little dramatic, but the increase in cancer occurrence is statistically noticeable at over 100 mSv/yr. The new limits in Japan are 250 mSv. The operators won't all get cancer and die, but staying has the potential to cost some operators a great deal many years down the road. It doesn't do any good to overstate the risk, but lets not sell them short either.
Actually, things have been getting progressively better for the last two days. Radiation levels are down, they have visually confirmed there is cooling water in No.4 reactors pool for spent fuel and more has been successfully added. However, for some reason, you don't seem to see those news under big headlines in the media ...
*faceplam*
I'm pretty pro-nuke/anti-hysteria, but this is just irresponsible. If you want the straight-up story, go to the IAEA page or see the analysis by Ars.
Exactly. 10 times higher than normal. Not 2 orders of magnitude, not 3. World average background radiation / year is 2.4 mSv. So effective yearly exposure at 10x normal is 24 mSv. Say these levels continue for another month, (1/12)*24 = 2 mSv.
A chest x-ray is 7 mSv.
So far there have been no reports of workers getting sick from radioactive exposure.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html?_r=1
Five workers have died since the quake and 22 more have been injured for various reasons, while two are missing. One worker was hospitalized after suddenly grasping his chest and finding himself unable to stand, and another needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation near a damaged reactor. Eleven workers were injured in a hydrogen explosion at reactor No. 3.
That's a little vague, though it does suggest at least one incident ("needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation"). (I suppose it could have been purely precautionary.)
http://mitnse.com/ is one of the best sources for information.
Well. I wonder. If the levels are that low as the guy thinks, why did the jp gov have to raise the allowed limit to 250mSv. I am sure the workers wear individual Dosimeters.
Disclaimer for below: I am a physicist, but did not think about nuclear reaction for a long time and am no expert on them; If somebody could do the caclulations properly, and dismiss the below as completly improper, i am glad to hear:
The cool down pond contains a MMol of radioactive substance, which should, depending on the composition (time of use) between 10^17 and 10^20 decays per second (i am no expert on this, therefore the large interval), which corresponds to kW to MW of emitted radiation (if the fuel pool evaporated 2000m^3 water in 1 week, the lower end may the right order of magnitude, corresponding to no active reaction going on), corresponding to emitted radiation in the oder of kW to 10s of kW. if we assume that .1% of this fuel is distributed in a 1000m^3 (e.g. the building), you have watts per second, and milliwatts and m^3. Assuming the worst part may be the inhaled alpha and beta radiators, and that you lung keeps 5liter, you end up with 5muW, corresponding roughly to 10mGray, or hundred mSv per hour (alpha and beta radiators), and you may want to add something for the gamma rays. If this would be thinned by a factor of 10, then you end up with the values reported close to the plants. So the problem would arise iff the fuel ponds catch fire and a significant amount if released into the atmosphere, you could end up with polluting 10^7-10^8m^3 into an unhealthy radiation level. That is .1(km)^3. So if the fuel storage evaporates over a week and the airflow is 1m/second you may emit a quite unhealthy smoke (that would be Tchernobyl). Lets hopefully assume that the burning would be slower and that the air stream would be thinned in a way that corresponds to size of the last plume when it arrived over tokyo, (100km^3 = 10^11m^3?), yielding 10^4W/10^11m^2, which is .1muW/second and m^3, corresonding to .3mW/m^3 and hour, so the order of magnitude will be .1-10mSv/Day if the fuel pool goes into fire. So the dosage over a week could definitely get into the harmful range, even at 300km away (you can check that estimation also vs. the measured radiation data at the reactor and lets say yokohama, which is roughly a ratio of 1/10000, meaning that if it would be 1Sv at the reactor we would reach the level calculated) if the wind conditions are awful and a lot of fuel burns/evaporates.
When i heard the amount of fuel stored in their plant under the open air, and that the radiation prevented them from working, i decided to take the plane to okinawa from tokyo. If they manage to cool the fuel pool in reactor 4 reliably (which contains the more active rods), then i will fly back (about the rest, even about a meltdown in the containment i am less worried), but i am definitely not a fan of getting the yearly radiation dose for a nuclear plant worker within a week.
So, no, no need to panic, but on the other hand if this would be too long over Tokyo, we can get new reliable Data on cancer caused byt radiation (in a 35Mio population, you can pick up change in rates on the order of a percent easily).
As i said: i am no expert on this, and i lack the most important information (specific composition of the fuel rods). But since i lack it, i may be pessimistic.
There have been hydrogen explosions in a plant that has uncooled, exposed nuclear waste directly next to the explosions. 30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal. The workers have been evacuated more than twice due to obscenely high radiation levels. I think you need to do your research.
1) The hydrogen explosions occurred outside the reinforced pressure vessels, where the nuclear fuel is. Essentially what happened was that the hydrogen was created because of the cooling failure; it was vented from the pressure vessels into the surrounding building, and since the building's own ventillation systems were nonfunctional the hydrogen basically blew the roof off. It was loud and impressive-looking, and will certainly be something safety engineers will look at in the future, but the hydrogen explosions themselves never threatened to cause a nuclear release in and of themselves, and have actually proven to be good because it provided a more direct way to deliver cooling water into the spent fuel pools.
2) Yes, radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant, 1/10 a lethal dose, which is really bad). As of today, radiation levels are down in the microsievarts range, which is less than you get from eating a few bananas. The "radiation cloud" barely contains any significant amount of radioactive material, probably so little that it will take specialized equipment to even detect any.
3) At the same time, four trains were derailed as a result of the earthquake, one of which appears to have vanished without a trace. Tens of thousands of people are dead; many times that number are injured or missing. But you don't hear about that; all you hear about is the "evil nucular meltdown". If the media weren't hyped up on nuclear fearmongering, this would rightly be a story about how well nuclear safety engineers are doing: despite two disasters which were both literally ten times worse than they were ordered to prepare for, there has not been a single death, and little to no release of radioactive material (radiation yes, radioactive contamination for the most part no.)
Go read the link in this comment:
The earthquake and the follow-on tsunami caused serious problems with several reactors. The problems built up over hours and days, requiring a lot of effort to mitigate them.. They are going to be expensive to fix, and to date have killed tens of people.
The earthquake also caused a dam to collapse, destroying 1800 houses in an essentially unstoppable catastrophe. Right now, nobody knows how many people were in those homes - if 1% of them were occupied, that dam has killed more people than all the reactors.
People on slashdot favor nuclear power because a lot of them have an engineering mindset - everything we do has tradeoffs, and nuclear in general has the best ones for big sources of electricity.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The fact that a 40 year old plant, with technology two generations behind new reactors, has been hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake, and a tsunami has not caused a disaster (obviously, yet) is very reassuring.
You talk about someone else being plain ignorant, in a post that is packed to the rafters with hyperbolic attempts to overstate the events so far. No one who knows anything about radiation is worried about radiation levels reaching 10x background. That's 0.05mSv per day, less than what you pick up every fortnight.
I think using an ongoing event like this as a pro- or anti-nuclear is wrong. There will be lessons to learn later, and if it finishes without a disaster, I personally will be more confident in the safety of current and future nuclear plants.
Let me get your facts straight:
> radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant,
You are aware, that the unit is "Sievert" not "sievart"?
Are you also aware, that, that radiation levels are measured in Sievert per unit time (usually hours) and Sievert is a unit for the radiation dose?
The levels at Fukushima are officially reported to have exceeded 1 Sievert per hour at certain times. This means you get the lethal dose in five hours.
> there has not been a single death
Except for the five dead workers and probably the two missing ones.
My grandfather was a nuclear chemist at Oak Ridge National Labratory from 1948 to 1976. During that time he often worked with various highly radioactive materials including uranium and plutonium. He died at the ripe old age of 97 from heart failure.
Radiation exposure does not necessarily mean slow death. In fact we have no scientific, verifiable knowledge of what low level radiation exposure does to us.
250 mSv isn't a "new limit". The international limit for radiation exposure for nuclear workers is 20 mSv per year, averaged over five years, with a limit of 50 mSv in any one year, however for workers performing emergency services EPA guidance on dose limits is 100 mSv when "protecting valuable property" and 250 mSv when the activity is "life saving or protection of large populations."
You can argue whether or not what they're doing is "life saving or protection of large populations", but saying it's a "new limit" is a bit disingenious. It's an internationally agreed limit that was in place well before this disaster.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley