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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."
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.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Still, there aren't any reports of radiation sickness among the workers.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there has not been any severe exposures, but the only way to know what is going to happen to the workers is to wait and see.
And the evacuations are part of the reason for that, they are managing the exposure as much as they can.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
10 times normal radiation for a few weeks isn't enough to do damage, certainly not the amount of damage that millions of tons of carbon monoxide causes to everyone on the world all of the time. they are not saying it is perfectly safe, just that it is the safest real alternative. it took an earthquake 7 times bigger then the reactors were designed to withstand to break it, and even then, none of them have gone into full meltdown. Yes, there should have definitely been better protection and more levels of defense built, but even then, these reactors have caused less damage in their lifetimes than any coal burning power plant. the workers are getting amounts of radiation of 240 mSv, when NASA allows up to 1470, quoting a 3% increased risk of death at these levels. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070010704_2007005310.pdf (p19). the risks here are ridiculously low so far and the media hype it has been getting is ridiculous.
Did you ever think that maybe the "community" understands all of this more than you do? One thing I have noticed in the reporting of this incident (which is hardly unmitigated, this "HUGE effort of man power" seems to be doing a decent job of mitigating it) is that the speculation far outnumbers the facts. Around here, baseless speculation and overreactions won't get you modded up, so what you see here won't line up with what the media has been reporting. To the average person, things like "10 times normal" and "150 tons" sound like scary big numbers, but they are nothing without context (taken in context, the 10x increase in background radiation is fairly insignificant in the short term and the amount of boron isn't anywhere near as significant as its source - South Korea, which isn't exactly best friends with Japan). Add this to the general mentality that nuclear power is bad unless it can be proven safe while more "proven" (usually just meaning older) technologies are perfectly acceptable even when their failures cause massive tragedies and you'll get what you see here - people trying to put things in perspective and explain why something that seems horrible and scary isn't really any different from what we think of as being cute and cuddly. Nuclear power may not be 100% safe, but it is much less likely to hurt you than a teddy bear full of razor blades. When people tend to choose the teddy bear, they need to be reminded of the facts to keep the occasional well-mitigated disaster from causing them to lock themselves in their room tightly clutching Mr. Bloodyhugs.