Yeah, we have stuff in the tens of thousands of R/hr, but it's all hot cells and lots of lead around here... :) I do have to move something this week that was reading 50 R at about 5 feet away.

You guys never get close to that stuff in a hot cell though that stuff is what we call LD 100/30 (Lethal Dose 100% die within 30 days) Radiation is nothing to mess with it is like electricity you have to have a real respect for it because you cant see it, taste it, or smell it but it can in certain situations ruin your day but for the average radiation worker they get less exposure on the job then you get off natural cosmic radiation in a year.

LOL never messed with any of that stuff, but I remember working in containment and having enough badges and docimeters hanging around my neck to affect my posture.
And that full body scan phone booth thing really bothered me for some reason.

I wear a dosimeter while I'm sitting at my desk.

gsmith:

We take radiation very seriously, but then again, where I work is sort of where it all started (ORNL). "Back in the day" even as an engineer I'd get 400 mR or so a year and think nothing of it. Nowadays we have swung so far the other direction that getting 3 or 4 mR on a job raises eyebrows. I am the lead engineer for remote handling. We spend a lot of time and money making things very safe. We have to replace components that weighs many tons and are reading thousands of R contact, so it is very serious stuff.

Have you ever dealt with a TN-RAM cask? We are using it to ship some extremely high-rad waste. Just curious.

I wrote a 1982 term paper in 11th grade on Nuclear Powerplant Safety, with the final review of TMI. I not only would live next to a Nuclear Poweplant, I would live next to, or on the grounds of, TMI. There is less radioactivity released from a nuclear powerplant than your smoke detector.

How many people have been killed in ANY accident at a commercial nuclear power plant in the US? The same answer is true today, as it was in 1982. Zero. No other power system in the US has that track record. 20% of our power is produced in Nuclear power, and it is the safest, cleanest power we have.

The Pepsi Syndrome!

The information I gleaned from some sources point to intentional sabotage at Idaho falls. Something about a love triangle...

Well exitwound, maybe I can help a bit with your question.
While there is very little I can add to the education you are getting on the nuclear industry, I do have very small bit of exposure. I was in a Pershing missile unit and went thru nuclear weapons school and a sub course on nuclear weapons EOD. Much later in life I was COO for a Bechtel JV which served the nuclear industry and provided nuclear grade components to a number of plants.

But back to your questions regarding TMI, At the time I was working on a migration project with our data center in Camp Hill, PA which is about 5 miles from TMI. I was on the phone daily with our team based in Camp Hill. On the date of the accident there was a lot of misinformation and confusion as to what was actually going on. We made plans to relocate all our people out of the immediate area in the event that proved necessary, which it did not. There was a lot of concern generated by the media and an effort to tamp down the fear by TMI information office. This created confusion and many alarmist capitalized on it. During the period immediately after the accident we made the determination that there was no widespread danger and stood down our wholesale evacuation plan. Some folks had their family members take a vacation to the inlaws, etc. As reported to me by my colleague there was no mass panic and for the most part life went on. After the event we heard stories of every headache, pimple and case of hemorrhoids attributed to TMI. There was a back and forth between the "there is no need for concern" and the "no longer safe to live here" crowds. The management of TMI made public relation mistakes to be sure. The environmental anti-nuclear side played it to the hilt for their advantage. There was fear mongering at its best and it took a real toll on the nuclear industry, which still hurts the industry today. Many of the people I worked with on that project are still alive, do not glow in the dark, and have had healthy children since. Some were still living in the Camp Hill area a few years ago.

Just an additional nuclear note, I lived in France from 1992-1996 and they are probable 80% nuclear, they also irradiate their milk rather than Pasteurize it, no refrigeration needed and it does not go bad.

And, yes I would live near a nuclear plant.

The containment building Chernobyl was a little less substantial than your warehouse, Wayne. Add to that, the water moderated reactors slow down, if you boil the water away. Not so much with Chernobyls carbon moderated reactor.

aspects of SL-1 is still classified to this day but I did ride with an engineer that was a first responder to the site that did give some hear say to that fact as one of the guys was still alive when they got to him, I had the autopsy reports for the 3 casualties from the accident but someone over the years decided they wanted them more than I did but they weren't pretty. The reactor building for Chernobyl was not real substanial because of the design of the reactor the primary containment was the vessel lid which weighed 100s of tons and the associated piping was sealed in its own containment structures when the reactor had its steam explosion it blew the bottom and the top off the vessel breaching primary containment. Wayne the problem with Chernobyl was bosses pushing the men that operated the reactor to perform a test when the prereqs weren't met and that was the result as for TMI it was simple the senior reactor operator and shift manager didn't believe the indications they saw and assumed it was something else indicating water level high when in fact it was going low its very complicated and the changes implemented since then mean that cannot happen again.
Now IROC I know you guys take radiation serious I am just ribbing you I have about 800 mrem for exposure this year but I also worked 6 outages this year I have not worked with those casks we typically use high level HIC's and I am not sure what the official designation is for the dry casks they use for the fuel as I haven't done any of that but I still am totally fascinated when I see the Cherenkov radiation (blue glow) even after 30 years.

Boba, your description of events matches nearly everything I've read. Indeed, the accidents were failed by the operators, not the technology itself. And it certainly IS tied to fear. The first thing people mention when they talk about nuclear power is Chernobyl, not how efficient it is, or its environmental impacts, or its cost...but what happens when it fails. And of all the plants built worldwide, there have only been two major accidents in 60 years, and ZERO deaths. It's fear of the unknown which is holding back the industry.

Chernobyl had plenty of deaths. Maybe the worst man-made disaster ever (outside of war of course.)

In the USA there have been no deaths. Unfortunately, there were PLENTY at Chernobyl. Many of them firefighters, sent to their deaths, never knowing they were going into a deadly radiation zone.

Not old enough for when it happened, but old enough that it was a well discussed topic in grade school science class. I would bet that most of today's 6th grade science teacher don't even make mention it.

I would have no problem with it. I see no risk of any US plant having an accident that would affect residents near the plant at all, thanks to stringent regulations and well design plants. I know personally two engineers who work in a nuclear plant and have considered working in the field myself.

I believe it has a future in America, and hopefully the world, but sadly not for another decade or two. I think current administrations are too worried about the waste disposal problems and public backlash to clearly make decisions on the matter, and most of the public is not at the education level to understand the amazing benefits of nuclear power as we have it today.

I find clean, widespread, and safely engineered nuclear power to be a major step in the advancement of this nation and view it as a potential to 'get ahead' of other countries, like China, who are still using abundant coal power.

Sure.

That is not entirely correct the failure on the part of the operators was they didn't trust all of there indications. The technology at the time did fail commercial nuclear construction was not as strict as Navy nuclear tecnology and as a result a situation arose that we trained on as a navy nuke operator, I will try to explain without getting too indepth but here goes the cause was a valve called a pilot operated relief valve malfunctioned and lifted lowering pressurizer pressure and water level as a result and didn't close when it should have, this was due to a loss of feedwater flow and the loss of the steam generators as a heat sink. As this PORV continued to exhaust to a tank called a PRT (pressure relief tank) the hydrogen in the system came out of solution and vented from the tank and collected in the top of containment along with a sizeable steam bubble that was another hazard that could of made this all worse but the safety systems worked properly and that was taken care of. Now what the operators saw in the control room they didn't have at the time reactor vessel level indication they only had pressurizer level indication and that is rendered by having too levels to the transmitter a variable leg which indicates the level in the PZR and a reference leg which is always at a given level to give a set pressure to the transmitter but due to the conditions in containment the ref. leg was not being filled properly and began to lower as it did this the level indication in the control room showed actually a rising level in the PZR, the stuck open valve was not seen and caused the operators to open a manually operated relief valve and compound the problem, lineups were changed that added to the Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA) and as a result they uncovered the core causing the meltdown. The problem was that there were other indications going on at the time that gave indications of the imminent problem ie. temp. indications and the operators were centered on the levels and disregarding the others. So the cause was a combination of system failure, inadequate indicators in the control room, and a lack of training for the operators. All of these aspects have been address in the industry and were called TMI mods to all the plants in the country.
Chernobyl is a whole nother story.

As another footnote to this thread, the plant I worked at (Browns Ferry) had one of the worst incidents in US commercial nuclear power (the Unit 1 fire). What could have been a catastrophic accident was - for the most part - a non-issue due to the safety systems in place.

That is not entirely correct I saw films of the soldiers getting briefed before going to do there patriotic duty and they were made aware of their conditions unfortunately they were walking into conditions that were worst case, irradiated material ejected from a burning core (the graphite moderator had ignited and was provided its own fuel for the fire) the General that was briefing the men was in a 5 rem/hr field which is bad for you laymen and it only got worse from there robots that they tried to use to push the chunks back into the core failed because the electronic circuitry used was not radiation hardened and failed before they could do the job so the men were briefed to go out grab 1 irradiated chunk of mat. and throw it in the core and leave unfortunately that was enough. The helicopter pilots that were trying to put out the fire were directly in the "shine" from an uncovered and burning core so they were in an unbelievable dose rate, the firefighters did what they do all over the world try to make thing safe even if it means their death, the major in charge of the fire brigade that responded actually lived many years after the accident and toured giving his accounts of what happened there. Just a side note I saw a characterization survey of the area and the dose rates at the surface of the cooling lake were near lethal levels. Experts speculate that the sarcophagus is near collapse and if it does the release of radioactivity would be worse than the original accident.

Yep Browns Ferry is now up and running. Because of public opinion it only took them approx. 20 years to come back up from that. IROC what year was that incident.

Schumi I agree with your comments the comment about china should be expanded to india and southeast asia, have you seen a sat. photo of the entire area there is a brown funk obscuring the geographical details of the area most of which is the emmissions from power plants that don't meet the same controls we have even though they signed the Kyoto accord right along with us.

Glad this came up, fascinating thread.

I remember TMI being on the news when I was 8. Seems like there was a bit of hysteria and it was a big deal. I can't remember if we were living in Japan at the time, or if we were in Florida, but either way, I was too young for much to stick.

I'd probably live near a nuke plant. My dad spent a little time on Fast-Attack nuclear subs when he was in the Navy.

I've done a little reading about Chernobyl. I should find a couple of books and do some more reading, this is interesting stuff.