I'm pretty sure the engineer at the nuclear plant I visited in elementary school drank a glass of water out of that pool to demonstrate how safe it was.
I hope I'm misremembering that but it's a pretty strong memory that totally locked in for me that that water is not necessarily dangerous.
Serious question, as daft as it might sound - do they have to chlorinate the water to stop stuff growing in it? I'd expect it'd be about "swimming pool" warm so just great for all sorts of manky algae growing.
The water is borated and heavily purified. You don’t want stuff growing inside, but at the same time you don’t want to have chlorinated water slowly corroding the metal components.
On the picture, the fuel rods are indeed protected by a huge quantity of water above them. But what happens below them ? They seem to be in direct contact with the ground...
Chlorinating the water would have adverse effects on material strength and longevity. Even irradiated and heated to 50c, I’ll bet there’s some extremophile bacteria in there somewhere.
Had a buddy on a nuclear sub drink water from the primary coolant loop when he joined the team.
While I do see this as a form of hazing which I am morally opposed to-
8oz (.237 liters) of primary coolant in a properly maintained pressurized water reactor might contain up to 13mrem of orally ingestible radiation, or approximately the radiation of a chest x-ray. (For comparison you get between 3-8 milirem on a 7 hour transatlantic flight)
Don’t make it your primary source of hydration and you’ll be ok. If the fuel is degraded or there is a leak (unlikely in properly maintained PWRs) the radiation dose is significantly higher.
That makes zero sense. Radiation is not a component of water; it is literally photons[0]. In the nanosecond after you fill the glass, all the radiation in it has left the volume.
I'd drink it. It's just extremely pure water, with a nuclear flashlight at the bottom of the pool - which no one could see, even if they had gamma-ray glasses on[1], because the water attenuates it so much.
[0] Or ions of hydrogen or helium, in the case of alpha and beta radiation.
[1] Which it turns out were way less cool than the Sea Monkeys(tm).
Radiation isn’t contained in the water as photons, but the coolant itself becomes radioactive through neutron activation. Even with intact fuel rods, oxygen in the water turns into N-16 with a half-life of about seven seconds, and trace metals like nickel and cobalt form isotopes such as Co-58 and Co-60. These emit strong gamma radiation while the reactor operates.
The primary coolant is not simply pure water; it contains boric acid, lithium hydroxide, dissolved hydrogen, and trace corrosion products like iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium. Under power level neutron flux, some of these elements become short- or medium-lived radionuclides. Once removed from the core, most of the activity decays within minutes, but during operation the water is measurably radioactive.
An eight-ounce sample taken from the loop at power would carry roughly the dose of a chest X-ray before it decayed away, due to these activated isotopes rather than residual photons [EPRI PWR Primary Water Chemistry Guidelines; NUREG-1437][0].
I was on site for the mid cycle outage of three mile island unit 1 around 2005. I did the data sync and transfer for the steam generator inspection, but got tutored by some old PHDs during the down time.
I mean, apparently the inventor of lead additive to gasoline used to pour the chemical over his hands to demonstrate how safe it was -- even though he knew it was actually quite toxic. So there are people who will knowingly give themselves small doses of poison to keep the money flowing.
It's because water blocks radioactivity. It's like the opposite of the Fallout games and their radioactive water: you would have to swim right down to the radioactive material and wrap yourself around it at which point you'd basically melt.
Water blocks alpha, beta and gamma rays, but the water itself can carry radioactive elements, which I'd guess was the source of this (relatively minor) contamination.
Reactor h2o itself does not carry radiation, but any extra molecules in tend to do it, thats the reason why the water is as clean you can get, over-distilled. This by itself means that it is not potable (btw for disposal to environment it gets re-salinated), so they told the story of professor drinking it must be an urban myth. It is bad even for skin expose (swimming in it), but hopefully that worker got just a few seconds expose and is well.
Source: training trip in a nuclear center.
I was reading accounts from the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. One of the survivors was blown out of the house and was stuck neck deep into water. Couldn't get free, so had to wait for rescue. They didn't get much of any radiation sickness afterwards.
“But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
Not from what I heard from a boss who visited a European nuclear plant.
The site contains the most dangerous poison on Earth, that is also a key component in the most feared weapon on Earth. Do you suppose in the UK they just put up signs saying "Sir or madam, kindly do not steal our plutonium"?
TFA says: “The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair. At 1632 EDT they were sent off site to seek medical attention.”
Nuclear plants follow a strict “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle. Any intake of reactor water or radiation exposure must be reported and evaluated no matter how small.
Well yeah. If someone falls in water at work, you get them checked out at the hospital. The paltry amount of radiation is kind of the least of your worries if there's even the smallest risk you got some water in your lungs.
People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
> People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).
I didn't expect this level of unfounded ignorant hysteria here. Have you really never gone swimming and inhaled some water? Did you go to the hospital?
> In the past, these terms were used to try to explain that some fatal drowning victims had very little water in their lungs at autopsy. Now it is understood that little water enters the lungs during drowning. Moreover, when water enters the lungs, it is rapidly absorbed when breathing starts again. The amount of water that enters the lung does not determine the amount of injury or determine the treatment of drowning. The amount of injury from drowning is due to how long the victim is without oxygen.
Even a tiny amount of water in your lungs is a trip to the hospital.
The amount of radiation that guy was exposed to is roughly the same as eating a banana, or driving through the middle of Aberdeen with your car windows down inhaling all the radon off the granite.
If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
My water rescue course is up to date. When's yours due for renewal?
As the saying goes, "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing". Your "water rescue course" taught you something that's clearly wrong, as we see with the sibling comment, while my common sense and just everyday life experience led me to the correct conclusion.
> If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
> Secondary drowning, sometimes called delayed drowning, is another term that is not medically accepted. The historical use of this term reflects the reality that some patients may worsen due to pulmonary edema after aspirating small amounts of water.
> Drowning starts with aspiration, and few or only mild symptoms may be present as soon as the person is removed from the water. Either the small amount of water in the lungs is absorbed and causes no complications or, rarely, the patient’s condition becomes progressively worse over the next few hours as the alveoli become inflamed and the alveolar-capillary membrane is disrupted. But people do not unexpectedly die of drowning days or weeks later with no preceding symptoms. The lungs and heart do not “fill up with water,” and water does not need to be pumped out of the lungs.
> There has never been a case published in the medical literature of a patient who underwent clinical evaluation, was initially without symptoms, and later deteriorated and died more than 8 hours after the incident. People who have drowned and have minimal symptoms get better (usually) or worse (rarely) within 4 to 8 hours. In a study of more than 41,000 lifeguard rescues, only 0.5% of symptomatic patients died.
Maybe don't set too much store by what some random "water rescue course" instructor tells you, especially if it sounds like complete bovine excrement.
Not only that, but CPM (Counts per min) is measurement device specific. Using a very sensitive pancake probe will generate much higher CPM than a geiger tube from the same source. You have to look at calibrated units (usV/hr for example). Of course uSv has it own problems given the exposure model.. but better than CPM!
I think both "sides" aren't looking great here. On one side you have someone quoting the article with a fact that doesn't mean what they think it means (the level of radiation reported is safe; the person in question is being sent for medical attention more for process's sake and an overabundance of caution), and the other side is being incredibly uncharitable and rude when it comes to calling people out for being ignorant of how this stuff works.
If we're talking broader "sides" the mistaken one does look pretty bad. Fantasising doom based on facts someone doesn't understand while having those facts clarified is a bad look. It'd be like me going through a thread politely hyperventilating about trace dihydrogen monoxide contamination the man was exposed to after this event was all over. One hand there is no reason to be rude about that sort of mistake, but on the other it is kind of a ... why the comment based on a very terse paragraph that they have to know they don't understand? When there are a lot of comments pointing out that there is no evidence to believe this report is a problem.
The paragraph says 300 CPM and the dude took a non-emergency trip to a medical centre. If someone doesn't know what 300 CPM means or what a non-emergency trip to a medical centre from an industrial site implies, the best message to be given is "don't comment or form an opinion, leave it to the people who are happy to look up CPM on Wikipedia before deciding to panic, people who've worked on industrial sites or maybe even experts". Not encouraging them to talk more.
His comment is gray because it’s still pearl clutching over facts the commenter doesn’t even understand. The worker was not sent for radiation because 300/min is background radiation levels you get from everyday things.
I love when people confidently state what is in someone else's head in service of explaining why that someone else is
"wrong". Talk about telling on yourself. (tl;dr: we do know this, but thanks!)
You’re right, you don’t know! When I worked on a nuclear aircraft carrier, I learned that the people working down in the reactor spaces got significantly less radiation exposure than the people working on the flight deck. My ship was ported in Japan when the Fukushima disaster happened, and we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly.
> "...we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly."
There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),
"He was issued iodine tablets—which are used to block radioactive iodine, a common byproduct of uranium fission, from being absorbed by the thyroid gland—and fitted for an NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit. He was also told not to drink water from the ship’s desalination system. [...] Torres, the senior petty officer, recounted, “One of the scariest things I’ve heard in my career was when the commanding officer came over the loudspeaker, and she said, ‘We’ve detected high levels of radiation in the drinking water; I’m securing all the water.’” That included making showers off limits."
Except in this case it's very easy to check; just drop a dosimeter in and compare it to readings from outside. And they do check, frequently, because if the water was somehow contaminated then they would have a very big problem on their hands.
It’s basically due to background radiation and the containment shield. The base radiation level within the nuclear plant complex is less than outside due to shielding, and water is VERY good at soaking up radiation. With safety margins considered, the top of the containment pool will have less radiation than the cosmic rays being blocked by the containment shield.
My experience so far has been that when people say "full stop", it usually makes a lot of sense to fact-check further what they said. In this case the notice says his hair is 300 counts per minute after decontamination. The typical background is under 100.
Your fact checking was not successful: there is no typical background expressed in counts. Background count rates vary globally by significant amounts, but importantly, they vary by device. Some devices may get a measly 10-20 counts per minute in a background, next to another device that could get 500. It also matters what kind of radiation the device is configured to detect.
At any rate 300 is widely recognizable as not an alarming value for a typical contamination detector in a typical configuration, but the report is likely slightly deficient because it does not specify how the measurement was taken. However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
Of course it varies for "civilian" devices from EBay.
They put that count into NRC report. It means that it has pretty specific calibrated meaning for that regulated environment.
>However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
report mentions 300 clearly as something above normal, whatever normal is there. And that is after decontamination. Clearly the source of contamination - the pool - is much higher than 300.
It is counts per minute in an undefined, arbitrary sensor. Which could have a alpha radiation transparent sensor (and hence show alpha particles), or be from a low sensitivity geiger counter which can only detect high energy gamma radiation (for say fallout/emergency use). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter
It could have a small sensor, and hence require high flux for a given CPM, or a physically large one - and catch more disintegrations per minute/CPM for the exact same actual amount of radiation.
As to why it is in a government document is why we’re all wondering what is going on. It certainly isn’t the only WTF thing the government is doing right now, is it?
you're just don't know what you're talking about. Google "nrc calibration cpm geiger". In short - they are calibrated either on dose or cpm with conversion factor.
I found nothing in the Google search results for that, or follow up search results, that indicate what you are saying is correct.
Mind linking to something concrete?
What I did find was numerous documents noting that Geiger counters needed to be calibrated to generate useful dose rates because CPM by itself is useless without a bunch of other work to characterize the sensor and radiation type.
I remember hearing somewhere that the biggest risk from swimming in a live reactor's coolant pool would be lead poisoning caused by the DoE guards and their lack of a sense of humour
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
It’s an incredibly high bar. Most places in a reactor are required by law to have lower radiation levels than you’d be exposed to standing outside in Denver.
