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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."
... 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.
They said they are rotating out workers once they reach "maximum lifetime exposure" of 100-250 mili-servients. Most workers are only staying for 24 hours before they are "retired" out and a fresh person brought in to replace them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
If I understood things correctly the Japanese authorities now allow radiation doses up to 250mSv for the workers.
To put this in perspective, natural background radiation is aproximately 1-3 mSv per year , while at 10.000mSv death is to be expected.
Anything above 100mSv is definitively carcinogenic, and above 1000mSv you will see serious bone marrow damage.
250mSv is probably not going to give you acute radiation sickness, but it certainly is not going to be good for you. In particular it will increase your risk for cancer.
Look at the people in line ups for food and supplies; calm and polite. No one shouting, shoving or being impatient.
Sounds like my job on a slow day as well. Sure, a server crashing is nowhere near the scale of disaster of a nuclear plant going belly up, but our normally lethargic techs spring into action the second we realize we have a problem.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
In my nearby plant, the nuclear engineers were found sleeping on the job during afternoons
Do you happen to live in Springfield?
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
*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.
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.
/. 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.
...
Since the very first hours YC, Ars, TheReg and
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
I completely agree, that people who risk their lives to save others are nothing else but heroes.
What I am confused about is what made such an act of heroism nessesary. With all the reports about Fukushima like http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/2011/03/17/wikileaks-cables-reveal-worry-over-japan-s-nuclear-plants-115875-22994842/ or http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8384966/Japan-nuclear-plant-disaster-engineer-retired-35-years-ago-over-Fukushima-safety-concerns.html I can not shake off the feeling that it was exactly calculated, that this plant will likely cost lives someday.
So now these workers (maybe) giving up their health or more, because someone wanted to make some more money. And what if things go completely fubar? There isn't even a way to punish a corporation for such a behaviour, because the damage is almost always higher than anyone can pay for.
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.
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.
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.
I won't mod you down, but I will counter with this - the problems causing this fire were in the design construction of the plant, likely occurring long before any of these guys worked there. You can't just unplug and move a nuclear reactor if the company running it won't pay the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to build a new, safer one somewhere else. The COMPANY failed, sure. But these are wage slaves, regular Joes (or Keiichis) who had no say in the day to day plant operations, but are now taking that responsibility on their shoulders anyway to save lives. As for your WW2 crack - For all our rhetoric about Iran and North Korea being rogue states that shouldn't have nuclear technology, we are the nation that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki glow in the dark, and remain the only nation that has ever used the power of the atom against an enemy. We are the nation that rounded up Japanese Americans into internment camps for no reason other than where their parents were born. Everybody does crappy things in war, and we shouldn't hold that against these people's grandchildren any more than we hope they hold our grandparents' crimes against us.
Why is this marked as Troll? Everywhere I look, I see people screaming OMG Nuclear Apocalypse!!!11!!111eleventy!1!
It is a fact that media has been whipping people into a frenzy by playing on their fears and ignorance about nooklear power. There have been NO deaths because of radiation. No radiation sickness either. Just a few people who have recieved enough radiation that it MIGHT make a statistical change in the likelihood in them getting cancer 20 years from now.
Meanwhile the death count has now climbed past 10k because of everything ELSE that has happened.
All the poster is doing is trying to bring sanity to a bad situation.
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.
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."
So really the Japanese government didn't raise the limit at all. They just said that what the workers at the plant is doing is "life saving or protection of large populations" and then the internationally agreed limit of exposure is 250 mSv.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
A few years ago, some people asserted that widespread looting was a natural consequence of disasters when civic services couldn't immediately save them.
Hm, I guess not?
I guess humans DON'T have to behave like animals, if they choose not to?
-Styopa
I highly reccomend this documentary.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/
It details the struggle to get the reactor under control, which cost (to date) thousands of lives.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
4000 or so. This is less than even the initial estimates of immediate short-term life loss from the quake and tsunami.
It is very cute when the definition of "safe" is "causes less deaths than the worst ever earthquake in the history of man".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();