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If the levels of exposure were as low as they say, why were they abruptly sent home and not allowed to finish their work?
This one can't be swept up under the rug, because exposure to radiation can kill people!
I have a friend who works,or worked there-don't know if he still does.He used me as a reference when he initially put in his resume and they called me asking a LOT of questions-as you can imagine-even asking me if he were a drinker,or had any .. ANY issues that I knew of.Great detail was taken and they kept me on the phone going over the same questions-I think trying to maybe catch me in a lie... or just being very careful.
They also did a psychological eval on him and other tests.I guess they don't just let anyone work there.
Twenty-eight hours after the accident began, Lt. Gov. William W. Scranton appeared at a news briefing to say that Metropolitan Edison, the plant's owner, had assured the state that "everything is under control". Later that day, Scranton changed his statement, saying that the situation was "more complex than the company first led us to believe". There were conflicting statements about radiation releases. Schools were closed and residents were urged to stay indoors. Farmers were told to keep their animals under cover and on stored feed.
A misreading by one of the engineers on duty compounded with a series of equipment and instrument malfunctions led to a dangerous loss of water coolant from the reactor core. As a result, the reactor core was partially exposed, which led to some radioactive gases escaping into the containment section of the reactor building. Though some of this radiation was released into the surrounding area, no immediate deaths or injuries occurred.
~snip~
According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's independent Rogovin Commission Report, we were a mere half an hour away from an irreversible meltdown as described in The China Syndrome. In fact, over 90% of the reactor core was damaged, 52% had melted down, and the containment building in which the reactor is located as well as several other locations around the plant were contaminated. In the end officials were able to restore enough coolant to the reactor core to prevent a complete meltdown and the #2 reactor at TMI was shut down permanently.
At 6:56 a.m. a plant supervisor declared a site emergency, and less than half an hour later station manager Gary Miller announced a general emergency, defined as having the "potential for serious radiological consequences" to the general public.
Thirty years ago, the word "meltdown" was seared into the American consciousness when the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, PA melted the radioactive fuel rods in the core of the reactor and began leaking radiation into the environment in the early morning hours of March 28, 1979.
Radiation leaked from the damaged reactor for days as government regulators scrambled to get radiation monitoring equipment into surrounding communities. The Governor of Pennsylvania eventually ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and children. The accident at Three Mile Island sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin. Already staggering under the weight of over $100 billion dollars in cost overruns, the meltdown showed Americans that not only was nuclear power expensive - it was also dangerous. The nuclear industry turned a multi-million dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability overnight, and demonstrated that both the government and industry were thoroughly unprepared for the accident and its aftermath.
Don't know what to say about someone else's friend working there and undergoing extensive background testing. Maybe, because he just built the dam place, he was not subjected to these extreme measures???
The accident at Three Mile Island sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin.
the meltdown showed Americans that not only was nuclear power expensive
- it was also dangerous.
The nuclear industry turned a multi-million dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability overnight, and demonstrated that both the government and industry were thoroughly unprepared for the accident and its aftermath.
Before conducting any cutting, radiation health specialists would have surveyed the pipes to ensure there were no surprisingly high readings indicating a concentration of activated corrosion products, but it would never be a surprise to find that the inside of the piping had higher than background levels of contamination. The pipes in the primary coolant system carry very hot water through a system of metal pipes and through a nuclear reactor. Inevitably, there will be some amount of corrosion inside the pipes and some of that corrosion would have been exposed to neutrons in the core and become activated. Nukes have a rather cute name for the corrosion found inside primary pipes - we call it CRUD. (Which happens to be an acronym for Chalk River Unidentified Deposits.)
People working in the maintenance area would generally be suited up in anti-contamination clothing, wearing gloves and rubber overshoes, hoods and face/eye protection. There was most likely an area outside the work boundaries where people would not be suited up. The people who were not in anti-c's would have been the primary people of concern when the radiation monitor indicated that there was some airborne contamination.
All of the work was taking place inside the reactor containment building. According to the NRC Event posting, no contamination was found outside of the reactor building. The highest dose received by any worker was 40 mrem. To put that in context, the locally assigned annual limit for an occupational nuclear worker is 2,000 mrem. The legal annual limit is 5,000 mrem. It is not unusual for a nuclear worker to receive more than 40 mrem during routine maintenance work involving primary system piping. Heck, I got more than that during several reactor compartment inspection tours when I was not even doing any system work and I was careful to avoid hot spots.
atomicinsights.blogspot.com...
"The capacity factor of a power plant is the ratio of the actual output of a power plant over a period of time and its output if it had operated at full nameplate capacity the entire time."
Wikipedia.
TMI Safe: Normal Outage Work At Three Mile Island Resumes
Outage workers at Three Mile Island Unit 1 who were sent home Saturday evening returned to work Sunday and today and normal outage work has resumed. About 150 workers stationed in the containment building of TMI Unit 1, which was shut down nearly a month ago for a planned refueling outage and steam generator replacement, were sent home late Saturday afternoon when monitors detected small amounts of airborne radiological contamination inside the containment building.
“Things are back to normal,” Site Vice President Bill Noll said. “We are back performing outage activities as we had originally planned.”
Outage work not associated with the containment building involving more than 3,000 other plant and temporary workers continued throughout the weekend. No contamination was found outside the containment building and the event never posed a threat to the health or safety of employees or the public.
Nuclear Street.