Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Heroism Is Part of a Nuclear Worker's Job

Posted by Soulskill on from the especially-when-they-get-super-powers dept.

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."

18 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing but respect... by LordStormes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... for anybody who would put their lives on the line like this. The Japanese are better at this than anyone else on Earth - honor and duty above all else. I take my hat off to everybody within that radius still fighting to protect their countrymen.

    1. Re:Nothing but respect... by stabiesoft · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I wish I had mod points. The way they are conducting themselves should make them proud. No looting, people sharing what little they have, really, amazing. And yes, I expect those operators at the plant will likely die before their time due to cancer or even worse. Beyond that is amazing stories of nurses in hospitals & nursing homes and even the stories of everyone pitching in at the shelters.

    2. Re:Nothing but respect... by chemicaldave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And yes, I expect those operators at the plant will likely die before their time due to cancer or even worse

      Spread FUD much? So far there have been no reports of workers getting sick from radioactive exposure. Sure they are getting some exposure but nothing that will cause a significant increase in cancer risk. If any one of those workers smokes then the smoking will likely be thousands of times more likely to be lethal than the "radeeayshun" will.

      Do YOU spread FUD much? Really? Thousands of time more likely to be lethal than radiation? You should have just said nothing, because actual numbers of exposure are hard to come by. Smoking might increase your risk for cancer over a long time, but a short dose of high radiation could kill you or significantly increase your risk. I'm not saying the original post isn't FUD.

      Just a check on wikipedia indicates smoking 1.5 packs per day only gives 15-30 mSv/yr. And the limit for Fukushima workers has been raised to 250 mSv/yr. And considering shorter doses can be lethal, due to the body's inability to repair damaged DNA quickly as opposed to over time, it should be concerning that some locations were receiving exposure of up to 10 mSv/hr.

      My point is, you just pulled that statistic out of your ass.

    3. Re:Nothing but respect... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Do you know how high 10 times higher than normal is? Do you know what the human tolerance for radiation is? Do you know that we are exposed to cosmic background radiation every single day when you go outside, and that the radiation you are exposed to in an average airline flight is more than 10 times normal? I can't fucking stand the ignorance surrounding the most basic facts on radiation and health.

    4. Re:Nothing but respect... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It's actually unclear how many have developed radiation sickness because it's clear that TEPCO and the gov't are not reporting much of anything, but it sounds like at least three. Five are dead and 22 have been hospitalized for "various reasons."

    5. Re:Nothing but respect... by JoeMerchant · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's a nuclear facility on the Savannah River that's slightly larger than Rhode Island. It was quite active during the Cold War. I interviewed for a job there in about 1988, and met a local boy whose Daddy worked at the plant doing hot laundry. He told me "they took real good care of Momma when he passed," at age 44.

      Ionizing radiation is like bullets to a giant - lots and lots and lots of tiny bullets. If you're wearing a dosimeter, you're acknowledging that you're going into the line of fire.

      The Wrath of Kahn may have been a(n extremely) cheesy movie, but Spock captures the spirit of nuke facility workers everywhere - they are just as brave as any Jarhead that risks getting his limbs blown off by an IED, or stupid, hard to tell the difference most of the time, but when it hits the fan it doesn't matter - they all deserve respect for bravery.

    6. Re:Nothing but respect... by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That plant could go Nova and wipe out Tokyo and you and certain other posters on Slashdot would still be claiming that

      1. The spread of Nuclear Fallout worldwide would be substantially less than the hysterical media predicted
      2. Like Hiroshima, Tokyo would not be rendered completely uninhabitable and could still be rebuilt, and moreover
      3. The fact that the plants lasted so long after a titanic earthquake and tsunami before burning brighter than a thousand suns is proof of just how safe nuclear power is!!

      I'm only being half facetious. There's a brigade of posters on this site for whom nuclear plants can do no wrong under no circumstances, and who throw up any and all flack and argument to avoid the plain truth; To wit: That this is a nuclear disaster of the most serious proportions, which should have been completely and totally avoidable; and that its occurrence is a damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry as a whole, both technically, professionally, and publicly.

      Go on about bananas all you like. The credibility of safe nuclear power has been(justifiably) shot by this ongoing debacle at the Fukushima plant, and no amount of flimsy excuses are going to rectify that. If you want nuclear power to have a future within the next three decades, it would be better to start by admitting mistakes and making apologies.

      We now return you to the wider and more significant humanitarian crisis in Japan.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    7. Re:Nothing but respect... by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While I agree with you that the Fukushima team deserves admiration and praise, I don't think the Japanese are automatically better at honor and duty than everyone else. That notion almost diminishes the Fukushima team's personal bravery by attributing it to something like cultural determinism.

      Consider the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, was caught falsifying nuclear safety tests at Fukushima in 2004. They falsified information again in 2007 after an earthquake at a different plant. Where was management's sense of duty then? It was clearly misplaced, and short-sighted. That history doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this incident; it is quite possible that management has been exemplary since then. If management hasn't been responsible, that wouldn't diminish the heroism of the team on site at Fukushima one bit. It would simply illustrate one of the common features of heroism: a hero often the guy who has to step up when somebody else screws up.

      Holding some people responsible for making a mistake doesn't mean respecting the people who deal with that mistake any less. That's important to remember, because people who screw up like to cover themselves with the glory that rightfully belongs to others. And somebody screwed up here. It may have been an unavoidable mistake (when we designed this 40 years ago we did the best we could but now we could do better). It could been something that somebody chose to ignore because it would be very unwelcome news (we knew we really shouldn't be running these ancient reactor designs in places like this). Or might be an omission due to not having enough review of how things were done (safety drills should have revealed the problem restoring axillary power to the cooling system).

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:Nothing but respect... by prisoner-of-enigma · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the plain truth; To wit: That this is a nuclear disaster of the most serious proportions, which should have been completely and totally avoidable; and that its occurrence is a damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry as a whole, both technically, professionally, and publicly.

      And this is what passes for "truth" in the reality you inhabit?

      "should have been completely and totally avoidable"? I sincerely hope you're not an engineer because you should turn in whatever credentials you have if you are. Complex systems and structures are designed to certain tolerances. When those tolerances are exceeded, failures are not only likely, they are the expected outcome. You're conveniently ignoring that this quake is the fifth largest earthquake in all recorded history, followed up by a massive tsunami, affecting a plant built in 1971 with technology designed in the 1960's. And thus far not a single person's death can be directly attributed to anything radioactive at all, while tens of thousands lie dead or dying all around the plant due to the aforementioned quake and tsunami. Thousands more will likely die of wounds and disease before this is all over without ever getting a single mSv from this incident. Yet this is a "damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry" by your standards.

      You might as well have said it's a damning indictment of seawall construction around the entire island nation of Japan! After all, if they'd only built hundreds of kilometers of seawall hundreds of meters high and hundreds of meters thick, designed to resist an earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and hypervelocity asteroid/comet impacts, nobody would be dead! That does leave out the odd attack by hyper-aggressive, advanced aliens bent on enslaving and/or using us as a source of food, but I didn't want to seem like I'm advocating over the top measures. End sarcasm.

      The point is that everything can only be built so strong, and engineers can only anticipate so many different permutations. That does not mean you abandon doing anything where you can't engineer out 100% of the danger. If that were the case, we'd never have emerged from caves in the first place. Oh, wait...what about cave in's? Gosh, this whole "life" thing is kinda dangerous just existing, isn't it?

      --
      In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  2. Anotherr honorable note by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look at the people in line ups for food and supplies; calm and polite. No one shouting, shoving or being impatient.

  3. Heroism by EatAtJoes · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's no different in software engineering than in running a dangerous power plant:

    Heroism indicates failure.

    If you need heroism, someone or something has failed: your design; your management; your organization as a whole usually. I've been a "hero" numerous times and it did feel good -- but it's macho BS to think that this is how it should be. Making hard decisions up front -- managing expectations, avoiding feature creep, understanding your operating environment -- prevents it.

    In the case of power plants, it's holding the line on safety despite CONSTANT pressure to disregard it -- such as putting more spent fuel than the design allows in Unit 4's storage pond.

    All the claims that what's happening at Fukushima are somehow a vindication of nuclear power betray this love for malfunction. Think about all of the heroes we'll need if storage ponds in the US (Shearon Harris anyone?) go up in flames.

  4. maybe we need a better way of making electricity? by jollyreaper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One that doesn't have a catastrophic failure mode? Maybe we should be putting our money into that rather than war machines and dick pills?

    Is there any business operation anywhere on the planet that isn't operated as a giant catastrofuck? I mean seriously, everywhere you look it seems like lying, corner-cutting, and profit-raping. Are there any responsbile operators out there?

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
  5. I've had enough of this wanking by curious.corn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hei folks, ever since this whole clusterfuck broke out I'm having a really hard time getting around the attitude of most online techie communities.

    Since the very first hours YC, Ars, TheReg and /. have started patting themselves on the back about this being a "job well done", bashing "media hysteria" and calling names against "tree huggers" and "anti-nukes activists". It's wrong, it's biased, it's annoying as hell. Besides, the amount of manipulation and spin is frankly unacceptable from these sources that one would hope they knew better.

    Listen all : it's mission accomplished when the crew back on deck - Apollo 13 style - not when the PR wish it was - Iraq invasion style.
    Let's not loose our cool, scientific, matter-of-fact and "it ain't finished yet" attitude; have we turned ourselves in our own version of FOX?! ...

    --
    Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
  6. Bring on the nuclear power fans by gr8_phk · · Score: 1, Insightful

    During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...

    1. Re:Bring on the nuclear power fans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      An unmitigated disaster would literally require all of the radioactive material present at the plant to be dispersed into the environment in such a way that it made a certain range unlivable, while not dispersing any further.

      The fact that the reactor cores are becoming more stable provides quite a lot of mitigation, and the fact that there are not yet reports of problems with 4 of the 6 cooling pools also provides a great deal of mitigation. Restoring cooling to the other 2 spend fuel pools will also provide a great deal of mitigation.

      The weather is also providing a great deal of mitigation, blowing most of the contamination out into the ocean, where it is least harmful to people (that statement has a component of crazy, but he ocean is big and already has very low levels of radioactive material in it).

    2. Re:Bring on the nuclear power fans by TheEyes · · Score: 1, Insightful

      During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...

      During the earthquake, four trains derailed, killing hundreds of people. One of them is still missing, vanished without a trace. Dozens of bridges collapsed, killing thousands. Miles of beachfront property was washed away, causing billions in damage and possibly killing tens of thousands. In contrast, so far the nuclear situation hasn't resulted in a single death.

      And yet the media and all of you fearmongering blowhards are clamoring for a nuclear dark age, but nobody is suggesting we abolish trains or bridges, or mandate all houses be built ten miles inland. The reason is because of the public's disproportionate, irrational fear of nuclear radiation, and almost nothing to do with the current situation at Fukushima.

    3. Re:Bring on the nuclear power fans by gr8_phk · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

      I tried not to overstate anything. It is a disaster - at the very least for the company that owns it and the people who have died SO FAR. the radiation 10x background is 30km from the site - this was meant to illustrate that the effects are already non-local if not severe at that range. The levels on site are already 400mSv per hour in some places outside the buildings.

      I actually agree strongly with your last statements there and made a point of not previously stating my opinion on nuclear power (I'm on the fence). One thing I noticed right away is that these older designs do not have a "passive safe state" where they don't require active pumping and maintenance in order to not have a catastrophe. Just think - during the blackout a few years ago when half the US grid went down, many many nuclear plants had to shut down into that state. They all had to go through emergency shutdown and then sit with the cooling systems on generators with active human maintenance to remain safe. That does not make me feel safe, and it is not what I thought "shut down" meant. OTOH I see that modern designs can actually pump their own coolant using the reactor heat without an external power source - the list of improvements is much longer than that one thing. So I am somewhat hopeful. The issue I had was with slashdot downplaying the severity of what is happening and in one case holding it up as a success story.

  7. Re:It raises the question ... by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Running *ANY* power plant requires that level of dedication to duty. Being a police officer or a fireman also requires that level of dedication to duty. Being an air traffic controller requires that level of dedication to duty.

    I am guessing "Rambo Tribble" has never served in the military and simply has no idea what sort of things require any level of dedication to duty or even what it means. But our "day to day lives" are actually vigilantly guarded by such people and they are frequently taken for granted.

    I have served in many roles that required such dedication to duty. Among them, service in the US Navy and several positions in IT infrastructure services. Without people in place to maintain things, civilization as we know it would collapse -- all aspects of our infrastructures require a LOT of people with a lot of dedication. Ever have a day when the trash people failed to pick up when scheduled? How about the occasions when sewage systems are stopped?

    To suggest that something shouldn't be done if it requires such "heroes" is to suggest that civilization itself should be reconsidered because it's not easy enough.