Slashdot Mirror
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."
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".
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"
From this we can determine that the half life of the Fukushima 50 is 994 days
Ferom TFA it seems the workers themselves are deliberately cricumventing the exposure measurements so they can earn more money before they are laid off for hitting their raditation quota.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
they're taking advantage of the poor and uneducated people. This isn't a complex situation. Nobody cares. They're disposable.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well, the truth is we don't know much about these ranges. The vast majority of the cases of whole body exposure are either survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or are among the early clean up workers at Chernobyl. I.E. amounts and types of exposure are for the most part poorly documented, as are subsequent care and outcomes. On top of that, it's a fairly small number as such things go, so it's hard to say clearly where the bottom of the 'Moderate' category is. There's just not enough data.
And I haven't adressed the difference between whole body dosages and point dosages like the women exposed to Radium while painting watch dials. Or hospital workers exposed to ongoing low dosages of X-rays over extended periods...
Making the problem even more difficult is the fact that the media (and Wikipedia, and Slashdot commentary) seem to treat all radiation more or less the same - when nothing could be further from the truth. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, neutron, X-ray... all ionizing radiation, all with subtly different effects. The same goes for length of exposure, whole body doses received over short periods are going to be different than those received over long periods, even if the absolute exposure is the same.
All we really know is Exposure Is Bad, and try to avoid these levels.
Here, we see the same problems as above - you're acting as if there are clear bright lines between the categories. There isn't. Most importantly, the boundary between (your) Low and Very Low levels is fuzzy and poorly understood.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Philosophically it's their choice. We're not talking about abortion here, but the freedom to risk one's own life and only their own life. The problem is, they become a huge medical liability on the tax payer later in life from the effects of radiation exposure. And that's regardless if they signed a medical weaver forfeiting future healthcare or not. There's just no way to guarantee that radiation is directly responsibly for some or all of the health issues, and society will not necessarily give up on them without first racking up some form of medical debt. Either way you slice it, society pays for their risky behavior.
Life is not for the lazy.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they had any comprehension of the risks (in a world where the news names a different common thing that will supposedly kill you nightly, if it doesn't make you feel sick NOW, many will discount it as more fear mongering).
Then there's their perception of options. For example, we can't REALLY say that people who jump 20 stories to their death in a building fire knew the risks and chose to do it so it's all OK. Instead, we lay blame for their deaths on whoever cut corners on the sprinkler system such that jumping seemed to be their only option.
If they have been so marginalized and squeezed so terribly financially that they routinely over-expose themselves to radiation just to get some work, we have already left the possibility of ethical and moral blamelessness far behind. If we knowingly allow it to continue, we are committing ourselves to the road to hell.
*ahem*
A total of 11,500 people have been confirmed dead since the quake on March 11. Another 16,400 are still missing and hundreds of thousands more are living in evacuation centres.
(source: wikipedia)
Unless the laws of physics have changed since I last checked ... none of them will even die of cancer at age 120. Chances are something like 1 in 1000.
How big where the doses of those 7 special cases ?
Over 20 workers had been injured by 18 March.[1] 3 workers were exposed and 2 were rushed to hospital having up to 180 mSv, which is less than the maximum 250 mSv that the government is allowing for workers at the plant.[11] Both workers, one in his twenties and one in his thirties, were from Kandenko and were regular workers at Fukushima II nuclear power plant.[9] Another worker was from a contract company of Kandenko.[52]
Presumably at the hospital large doses of iodine would have been immediately administered, followed by prolonged hot showers and fresh clothes, further massively reducing the risk (the risk of carrying radioactive particles along on your skin or clothes or in your stomach, resulting in a long-term concentrated radiation dose). Nobody got blocked or injured in a high radiation area.
This is radiation, so it's a chance game. 1 mS during a plane flight can prove fatal where people are known to have suffered close to 1000 mS in less than a day without any apparent ill effect (that last one is not the usual case though, usually some short-term symptoms set in at 250 mS. At 250 mS they're not fatal, that takes over 1000).