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The High-Radiation Lives and Risks of Nuclear-Nomad Subcontractors
Harperdog writes "Gabrielle Hecht has an interesting piece on the subcontracted workers of the nuclear energy industry, in Japan and elsewhere. These workers face far more exposure to radiation than salaried workers; in Japan, 90% of the nuclear workforce is contracted. This is an eye-opening look at a practice that 'carries exceptional risks and implications. And until these are recognized and documented, complex social and physiological realities will continue to be hidden.' A good read, but I would like to know how the Fukushima 50 are doing."
If companies contract this work out, rather than have in house workers do it, they are much less responsible for the long term consequences. It simply makes good business sense. You can argue whether or not the contractors fully understand the risks that they are taking and the likely outcomes, but at the end of the day it's a free market system and if they are willing to put their lives and future on the line, then let them do it.
I was under the impression that in the U.S., at least, radiation dosage was tracked on a lifetime basis via a Nuclear Regulatory Commission database, REIRS, and anyone working at a nuclear facility, even on a contract basis, has to have the numbers from their dosage monitoring submitted to it. I don't think you can get away with laying them off and then someone else rehiring them while pretending they're a new person, because their dosage will get filed under the same social-security number in REIRS.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Having RFTA (yes, I know), I've discovered that the summary is quite misleading. The article claims that 90% of the Japanese nuclear workforce is sub-contractors. Timothy, "sub-contracted" and "contracted" don't mean the same thing.
Translation: Temporary contract workers do work that the plant workers won't do is riskier.
Let's file that one in the "You don't say!" category. It's like that throughout the entire processing industry. Need to hot tap onto a gas pipeline? Get a contractor. Need to go in a vessel that has an inert atmosphere? Too dangerous, get a contractor.
Industries are full of contracting companies who exist specifically to absorb high business risk and appear "disposable" to the plant. They are after all not the plant's employees. If they die it won't be "us" who has to pay compensation, it'll be "them".
I would like to know how the Fukushima 50 are doing
Fukushima 15 are (still) living a happy life with their family
Fukushima 25 are (still) living, at the hospital
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Trading workers lives for critical resources is nothing new. Coal miners are/were covered by the Federal Black Lung Benefits program. In other words, "yeah, this job is killing you, so we will pay you and your family off so you will continue to work."
"The Black Lung Benefits Program provides:
monthly payments and medical treatment benefits to coal miners totally disabled from pneumoconiosis (black lung) arising from their employment in or around the nation's coal mines;
monthly payments to eligible surviving dependents."
http://www.sogc.org/guidelines/documents/gui256CPG1104E.pdf
The BBC produced an excellent and troubling documentary about Japan's “contracted” labour within the nuclear industry. It also covers exposure to radiation in general in across the workforce. Search for "Nuclear Ginza"
I'm no expert, but the explanation I've seen about the health effects of radiation, would indicate the parent can't be right about people being in the hospital. . .
The way I've heard it explained is that there's basically four categories of effects you can get from radiation, based on dosage:
* High or Very high levels - severe radiation poisoning, die within hours or days, maybe a few weeks if you're unlucky - so wouldn't still be in the hospital.
* Moderate levels - something very similar to sunburn, might be in hospital for a short time for treatment, have increased risk of cancer developing, but that will take 5 - 25 years. People in this category would have been out of the hospital in maybe April or May of last year.
* Low levels - No immediate health effects. Increased risk of cancer in 5 - 25 years.
* Very low levels - No health effects, essentially no increased risk of cancer (maybe something like .01 percent increased risk, but so close to zero as to be effectively zero increase in risk of cancer).
None of those categories would still be in the hospital - you either die quickly, or die years later.
they're taking advantage of the poor and uneducated people. This isn't a complex situation. Nobody cares. They're disposable.
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A nuclear story mdsolar did not submit. At least it will put nuclear power in a positive light. We all know it needs that now since the SOTU did not even mention nuclear.....
from http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/2009/10/guenther-wallraff-returnsfrom-way-down.html
His summary is dead on (roughly translated from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_unten#Inhalt):
'Hidden complex social and physiological realities?' I think 'exploitation' and the strive for 'profits' sums it up nicely.
I was in the nuclear field in the Navy many years ago, and if one of us (highly trained, expensively trained, hard to hire otherwise, etc) received too much exposure, we became normal enlisted men, of no use to the nuclear area. So when any task with high radiation exposure, 'normals' were assigned. The assumption was that these men would never get this expose again. Really, there is no other way.
These are trained and skills construction tradespeople. I was a scheduler at nuke plant, the contract workers made $50 to $120 an hour. Why, you ask? ask yourself, for example, what kind of "pipefitter" works with 16" diameter stainless pipe, in a rad area. A very well trained expensive one, that's who.
Big Nuclear Company wants a workforce, doesn't want to pay for
A: Mistakes (oops George dropped the U235 on his foot again, now he's got his dosage and we've got a potential lawsuit)
B: Regulatory Costs.
C: Massive Health insurance Costs.
D: Etc, Etc.
So they hire their Cousin to start up a smaller company that can easily
A: Hire cheap (Possibly Illegal) Labor.
B: Pay them Peanuts.
C: Play games complying with regulators (We couldn't have known these radiation badges weren't ABC-123 Certified, Honest! We're just a small 'merican company!).
D: Play games complying with labor laws.
E: Buy the cheapest insurance possible.
F: Go bankrupt when A-E inevitbly implode.
G: Start up a brand spanking new company and do the same thing over again.
That's how outsourcing has worked since forever; if you want an IT workforce you can dump non-exempt work on and get lots of free overtime, then outsourcing is your best friend because you can yell at the outsourcing company (I'm not paying Overtime for these people, they don't Need overtime to do their jobs you said so yourself in X E-mail. And I don't care if the servers are 6 years old and the networking hit has an 8 year uptime, your guys are supposed to be good! etc and such insanity) so the outsourcer then yells at their staff and starts doing all kinds of illegal things (like forcing employee's to fill out a timecard sheet instead of punching in/out and requiring managerial approval for any OT, which in turn leads to employee's who get fed up, start searching for new work, documenting the work they are currently doing in preperation for a DOL Claim so when they jump ship they leave the company with a nice lawsuit).
If you want get around labor laws and protect yourself from criminal liability, outsourcing is your friend too. Used to work at a place with 400 illegals and no idea how to get them all deported; the HR lady there worked as a 1-man company named "3-G's management".
Inevitibly when outsorcing is used that way it leads to poor work and shoves the costs under the rug while inevitbly enriching people at the top. The end result is management gets in the habit of expecting things to be that way and they continue to cost shift until something breaks, badly.
We need a law; if someone works for you > X months, >Xhrs/week, from an outsourcer on W4 for the outsourcer, you have to hire them on W4.
Also keep in mind, for those who are contracting; if you're taking risks on a daily basis and are underpaid in the market, get yourself and your fellow employee's to take notes. One of the most effective means of fighting such a thing is to file a class action lawsuit. Companies have no excuse to not know what labor costs, so if you're badly underpaid and treated poorly either the outsourcer gets hit with a lawsuit and you get paid, or the outsourcer goes under and your class action is against the company who hired them. Corrupt Robber-Barron Management HATES when that happens because it's that kind of thing that gets them fired.
In the USA, In the 8 months or so prior to a refueling outage, through the first couple weeks of an outage, a huge amount of "construction" work is undertaken at a plant involving maintenance, inspections and repairs. A plant that has a couple hundred full time employees will bring on hundreds of contractors, sometimes a thousand or so total. These contractors make their very good living going from plant to plant for pre-outage and outage work. They make way more money than the average IT worker, I can tell you 7-10 years ago it was $50 to $120 an hour, and during the actual outage there would be 10 or 12 hour days for the first couple weeks, that's time and a half and usually gets to double time overtime per week. Those skilled tradesmen made serious coin. The plant issues dose meters and film badges and monitors the rad exposure of all workers, and *already knows* the dose for each area and type of work, there is no faking of exposure nor even possibility of doing so. The federal NRC has an office on site to oversee work, dose, compliance.
Quote from Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, U.S. Navy, (27 January 1900 – 8 July 1986) was known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy".
I'll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life — fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet—and probably in the entire system—reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin... Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it... I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. Have I given you an answer to your question?
nonsense, the nuclear industry does not permit dose anywhere near that which causes detectable harm. The only type of "nuclear worker" at greater risk for cancer is not at power plant, but miners, enrichment and weapons assembly plant workers.
On the hazards of nuclear power. Testimony to Congress (28 January 1982); published in Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
And it shows up if you search for it in google... the first hit for me is "wikiquote" even! fnj is a lazy troll.
It is very hard for anyone to submit a nuclear power story that is both positive and which does not reek of BS. Thorium anyone?
These "throwaway" workers hired on contracts are not part of some evil plot to overexpose workers at the expense of more important people. This practice is meant more or less as a method of dose averaging to avoid high dose levels being accumulated by single workers. The work is contracted out since most plants cannot justify a full fledged maintenance division, including equipment, maintenance and other factors and must contract that work out to specialized people. Moreover, a plant will likely shutdown once every few years to do this maintenance works so having full-time people doing that work is not a good idea. However, if you are a contractor you can be constantly working since at least one plant will be down at any given time where you can apply your services. In short, given the situation it just makes sense for the system to be that way.
As for the dangers or risk? These are well communicated and generally well understood. Plants are required by various international committees to offer rad training before any entry to a plant where risks, and exposures limitation practices are discussed in details. Workers will tend to willingly pretend their dose is lower in order to get more money, and this has more to do with greed than it does with exploitation. The salary of the workers can be well over 100$/hr and stopping that work because of your dose limit is something some workers just don't want to do.
Finally, specialized workers are in short supply for the nuclear industry so whenever a task can be done by unskilled labor (usually paid ~20-40$/hr, plus paid training and living expenses), it is. This does not stem from exploitation, simply from smart work planning and increased worker safety. These rules are also overseen by the NRC or other national regulatory bodies at all times to ensure compliance.
These are trained and skills construction tradespeople. I was a scheduler at nuke plant, the contract workers made $50 to $120 an hour. Why, you ask? ask yourself, for example, what kind of "pipefitter" works with 16" diameter stainless pipe, in a rad area. A very well trained expensive one, that's who.
Yep. My wife does payroll for a company that does work on reactors. Those guys make very good money; hourly rates of $30+, plus per diem and time-and-a-half/double-time as appropriate. The "poor, uneducated" workers GP was referring to easily make twice as much or more than I make as an experienced engineer.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The IAEA Status Report 2 November 2011 contains a table of worker exposures. In March 2011, 98 workers (out of 3742) received more than 100 mSv. But that was related to the initial disaster. By September 2011, 7 workers received between 20-50 mSv, the other 1039 workers received far less. The average dose to workers in September was only 1.80 mSv (people in Denver get 12 mSv a year).
Even if there are "hidden" unmeasured gypsy workers, their doses could not be highly in excess of permanent salaried workers, unless they go swimming the spent fuel pools. The radiation levels at Fukushima Daiichi is now far lower then it was in March, so it's very hard to accumulate high doses unless you enter the reactor buildings. It's likely those few who enter the reactors are the trained staff conducting surveys and they well monitored.
The Japanese introduced the GD-450 (glass badge) radiation dosimeter about 10 years ago, it's manufactured by Chiyoda Technol Corporation and is used throughout Japan's nuclear industry and hospitals etc. Dosimetry measurements are, from what I read, uploaded to a central computer (FGD-650 reader and server computer system). The badges contain the users ID printed on two stickers, one on the front and another on metal frame hidden inside the badge, presumably to prevent tampering.
They handed out 230,000 glass badges to civilians in Fukushima Provence last September, so clearly the centralised system can handle large numbers. For example, 36,767 glass badges handed out in Fukushima City revealed an average dose of 0.26 mSv over 3 months. I'm pretty sure this survey is run by the Japanese Ministry of Health, it would be easy to share the worker data if it's not already.
Refs:
The Large Scale Personal Monitoring Service Using The Latest Personal Monitor GLASS BADGE Norimichi Juto
IAEA Fukushima Daiichi Status Report 2 November 2011 (see table 3).
It's SAFE!!!!! For God's sake, it's SAAAAFE!!!!!!(......sobbing, tears.......)
"High" is relative. The "Fukushima 50" is something the foreign media made up, but the number of people who have been exposed to over 100msv is maybe around 30. Contractors, subsidiaries, or otherwise, all of the companies have guidelines of somewhere between 80-200 msv in a short time frame, even during emergencies, before workers get phased out.
Is that"high"? Well the normal guidelines are 100msv per year in case of emergencies, 250msv in case of saving lives, and 20msv otherwise. Most people working at nuclear power plants don't get even close to the 20. (i.e. they don't get any more than background radiation). In that context, it's high.
On the other hand, it takes 250msv in a short time to notice symptoms, and more than 1000 to cause serious health effects which one might not recover from. Given that a giant earthquake destroyed all the buildings in the area, and then a giant wave from the ocean destroyed the rest (including damage to the reactor buildings), a few hundred people getting 100 or 200 msv of radiation is nothing.
With that level of radiation, honestly, none of them are even likely to die of cancer 20 years from now (any more than they would have been). For the peopel who were from the Fukushima area, they are lucky they weren't crushed or swept away by the earthquake and flood.
I know that the news thinks anything with the word "Nuclear" is dramatic, but there haven't been any fatalities from the power plants, while there have been tens of thousands due to the quake and tsunami. Let's put the coverage where it belongs.
The Japan Nuclear Industry and Government Bodies know the drill.
Noda enjoys.
Many die.