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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.
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?
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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.