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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."

12 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 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.

    5. 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!
    6. 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.
    7. 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. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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.