Palisades MI reactor. Currently shut down and de-fueled but a restart of this reactor is apparently underway, with new fuel assemblies being delivered.[1]
Or maybe people just don’t that water mitigates radiation really well? You can be very pro-nuclear and still be concerned about radioactive contamination if you don’t know that radioactivity is dramatically reduced by just a few feet of water.
According to Randall Munroe, you'd actually experience less radiation about a metre under the water in a spent fuel pool then you do walking down the street.
On a tangent, I kinda love the fact that I've learned more about nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, and relativistic speeds from a poorly drawn webcomic than I have from any other source. (Ok KSP might actually have xkcd beat on orbital mechanics)
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.
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.
A lot of us grew up in the time of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Combined with a lot of media about radioactivity's dangers (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/nyregion/babies-teeth-and...). I think that has strongly affected people's perception of risk.
“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.”
As a person who knows way too much about way too many things. I am fully aware of this myself, however, the headline was shifted in a way that makes you perceive there's a problem caused by said person falling into water. So yes, logic tells you no problem but haven't recognition tells you they're trying to announce a problem. At the same time there was no problem.
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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!)
I mean, if you actually think there's a pool of "lava" that's dangerously radioactive at the surface, while people are walking right next to it, you might be a bit "stoopid". The whole reason water is used is that it shields from radioactivity pretty well
I feel like you’re citing the primary source material for the vast majority of us. Like, “let me find the thing that original taught me how to think about radiation pools. Ah yes, this xkcd. Yep, here’s the manual.”
The fuel is (almost) harmless, it's the fission products that make reactors dangerous. Many of those are water-soluble. Of course the fuel elements should be encased, but drinking pool water is probably not a great idea anyway.
You know the article that people love around around here, ‘Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail’… well it does, and most people don’t realize how little of it they’re even aware of.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. They literally wrote up a safety report and transported them off-site.
Wow, people are really clueless about how to avoid reacting angrily. It's funny to append "they were wearing a life vest" to "they had a nuclear safety accident"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
> dunno if the life vest bit comment of yours was sarcastic, but it is a funny remark for sure :-)
It was a quote of the linked article:
"Holtec International, which owns the closed nuclear facility, reported the worker was a contractor who was wearing all required personal protective equipment, including a life vest while working near the pool without a barrier in place."
Rather more like "Guy fell over looking into the volcano but fortunately there's a metal fence". The most immediate danger to you is that you'll drown because radioactive water is water and you can't breathe. So the life vest avoids this. In contrast volcanic lava absolutely can kill you before you drown, no problem.
Yes, radioactivity isn't good. You should not, for example, drink this water, or swim in it once a week for good luck. But, it isn't magic death fluid, the worker will have been decontaminated - destroying clothing, washing skin and so on, and the additional exposure means they might get more monitoring, but they're probably fine.
> If you’re concerned about staying within safe radiation levels, Ken Jorgustin explains on the Modern Survival Blog that it would take 432 days at a CPM of 100 to up your chance of getting cancer to odds of 1 in 1,000
> The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair.
This event will result in acute hair loss. From shaving machine.
Not sure how fortunate that metal fence would be. Apparently those things conduct heat. "Fortunately guy who fell in volcano landed on the white hot chain link safety fence deep inside and was grilled to death over a span of several minutes. His last thoughts were on how lucky he was that at least he hadn't fallen in a reactor pool without a life vest."
Wait, when the guy falls on the dangerously hot fence, why the fuck doesn't anybody pull them away? The nuclear reactor pool guy presumably didn't just float there until he got the idea to haul himself out, everybody else went "Shit! Bob fell into the water, quick help me get him out".
In addition to that they increased their likelihood to get cancer earlier than they would otherwise. Many things have this effect, for example alcohol. In the end everyone get cancer eventually, some just die before from
other causes.
Unlikely in this case. Water is amazingly as a shielding medium, and unless the water was contaminated (very unlikely, as it’s easily detected and heavily monitored) he likely got lower than background levels while in the pool itself.
Unfortunately, it also provided no useful information quantifying the statements.
Maybe there is a problem elsewhere, maybe the pool is contaminated, maybe the sensor used is very sensitive and 300 cpm is not as concerning as it would seem.
It sure would be nice to have actual data, wouldn’t it?
The reactor cavity water is usually moderately radioactive from activation and small leaks. Not life-threatening but certainly a long term health risk, especially when ingested. That is why the person was advised to seek medical attention.
Regulatory bodies have adopted the LNT (linear no threshold) model and for good reasons. Every exposure increases your likelihood to get cancer eventually. Many things do, such is life, and radiation is one of them.
It was deactivated and being refueled, so likely something leaked somewhere. But that should be a lot more than a ‘we dunno’ if so - it’s not like it’s not going to be clear from isotopic analysis eh? Or hopefully they at least have some decent spectrum on it.
And it should show up in realtime monitoring of the water, unless they just turned that off.
If you work near water you should be wearing a life vest. Especially if it's an area that may be hard to get to or where other dangers are around or if you're alone.
Your radiation exposure next to a coal power plant (thorium in ash) is significantly higher than a nuclear power plant (background radiation). I imagine this is much the same.
to make this point extra extra explicit: a life vest is also a "stay very close to the surface" vest. It prevents the worker going down like when you jump into a pool.
The usual reason for this is it keeps your mouth from being far from the air. In this case it also helps because the radioactive stuff is close to the bottom. And exposure depends on distance from the bottom.
This is bad but cavity water radiation is usually very weak. Ingestion could be bad but its not like he swallowed a uranium isotope which would be catastrophic.
PDE5 (viagra, cyalis) improve the health of the cardiovascular system, thus improve kidney health and I greatly enjoy them.
This is well researched and just like with semaglutide I believe a big part of the population should take daily tadalafil.
Better cardiovascular health, more erections and many positive downstream effects (lower E:T ratio, weight loss) that are beyond the scope of this comment.
Better than exercise is a better normal lifestyle. Trying to compensate in an hour what went wrong most of the day or week, and with your diet, is far from optimal.
From a personal experience, so it's just a guess, a contributor may be fluid movement in the body. Fluid in blood vessels are pumped directly, but must fluid is not in blood vessels. The heart has a diminishing effect outside the vessels (capillaries have small holes to let water and small molecules through into extracellular space, and then to collect it back, rest goes through the lymphatic system which also drains back into the bloodstream). Muscle and body movement helps. From what I experienced and experimented, just walking did a lot more than running. I focus on this specifically due to personal health experiences that I don't want to go into that let me feel a clear difference, where intensive running did hardly anything but then just walking did, an experiment I performed during a period of my life when "getting stuff out from all over my body" mattered.
Personally, I choose to run only when my brain/body tell me to, when I feel like it. Definitely not when I would have to fight myself to get going. (If your body/brain tells you the opposite then it is what it is, personal feel over generic advice)
Exercise is a better normal lifestyle. Standing isn’t of sitting isn’t going to fix much, given the key finding in most relevant studies is that frequent movement is necessary (albeit it’s easier and more natural when already standing).
Doctors have been telling us that for decades now and still noone does it despite overwhelming evidence. I guess the average Joe will always need a cheap workaround drug rather than putting themselves at any level of physical discomfort.
Every person has a limit of how much time and energy they can put into exercise. If they can go beyond that with a pill (with no other cost), why wouldn't you want everyone to take it?
Medication frequently (though not always) provides benefits that may be achieved at least in part by non-medical means: lifestyle (adequate sleep, low stress, reduced exposure to contaminants and pollutants), diet (preferring healthier to unhealthier foods, generally), and exercise (itself comprised of multiple modalities, including cardio, strength training, fine motor control, and others).
The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.
Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.
This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.
"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
> This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools".
Agreed - low dose daily cialis/tadalafil (e.g. 5mg/day) is very common among elite athletes, bodybuilders, etc. As are GLP-1's despite elite athletes rarely being overweight.
Tadalafil is taken for its endothelial benefits (erections are a convenient side effect), and GLP's for its nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitization effects.
Medications are very often most effective when paired with good lifestyle habits, rather than one of the other.
It also depends on what your goals are, obviously.
At a baseline, healthy vitals (blood pressure, blood sugar, heart function, preservation of bone mass/density, and lean/muscle mass, avoiding accumulation of excess fat, particularly visceral / mid-section fat).
Beyond that, if goals are for specific performance targets, in some athletic or competitive activity, you'll want to tune your training toward that. Again, the baseline is remarkably consistent, it's the high-performer tuning which varies.
Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks. If you're lucky, it's only wasted money. If you're not, it's markedly worse.
> Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks.
The biggest hurdle I've encountered personally is primary care doctors deal with very sick people every day (terrible diet, terrible body composition, terrible alcohol/drug habits, etc). And that's who they optimize their care for.
If you show up to a PCP and you're in shape, all vitals on point, all bloodwork looking good, the last thing the PCP wants to do is prescribe anything because "you don't need it" and "you're not sick".
Most doctors simply don't care about helping you optimize your health once you've reached "healthier than average" status.
This leads a lot of people to doing their own research, and finding health clinics outside of insurance that cater to health optimization, anti-aging, and non-standard treatments (like prescribing GLP's to people who aren't overweight, or Cialis for people who don't have ED). These clinics also aren't very good because, while they are indeed doctors or NPs, they make money off selling you prescriptions, so they are biased and usually push medications you might not really need or want. (Which again emphasizes the importance of self-education and doing your own research).
For drugs like GLP-1's, there are a whole lot of anecdotal benefits outside of weight loss. The problem with the drug industry is once a drug is approved for its most profitable use case, drug makers don't bother to pursue additional FDA approvals for additional indications because the headache isn't worth the (marginal) extra revenue.
I very much wish there were a category of doctors specializing in treating healthy people looking to optimize their health further.
You might also look into nutrition and dietetics and exercise physiology. If you're looking at cognitive function, neuropsychology and possibly some psychotherapy specialisations.
"Wellness coaching" is starting to get into the woo / overly-self-interested / conflicted domain, though there are probably a few good apples. I'd proceed with extreme caution however. There are plenty of docs who're more than happy to provide what a patient asks (and is willing to pay top dollar) for.
It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.
The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.
> It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.
Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.
Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.
Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?
Doing resistance training will mechanically stress the ligaments, bones and muscles which results in your body reinforcing and strengthening them. This is important to do on a localized level, as hypertrophy of the heart is not good whereas hypertrophy of the leg muscles is. You cant do this in pill form (at least yet)
In the context of running, physiological benefits I’m familiar with include improvements to bone density and joint health, increased capillarisation and therefore blood flow in the muscles and improved energy efficiency in cells.
I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.
It turns out that there's a wealth of evidence which shows that appropriate introductions of stress (cardio training, resistance training, fine-motor-control practice) do in fact lead to improvements: greater heart health, better pulmonary function, increased strength, greater bone density, improved blood sugar regulation, decreased overall stress response, and more.
Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.
Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.
This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.
One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.
Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).
Do you not have any negative side effects? When I tried I felt this tightness and weird headache that I don't otherwise ever experience, brain fog and also nasal symptoms.
unfortunately i was surprised that even the generic is kinda pricey to take every day. At the smallest available dose it was 5 usd a pill (last i checked in China)
I just checked my text from Walmart last week saying my
Tadalafil was ready for pickup. It was literally $25.60 for a 30 day supply of 10mg and I currently don't have insurance. 100% out of pocket.
interesting. thanks for letting me know. in Taiwan it was also not cheap (and requires a prescription and doctor visit) Guess Ill keep looking around. id sort of given up using it regularly
Copying the abstract here, just in case anybody don't have access:
Emily Austin, Hilary S. Myron, Richard K. Summerbell, Constance A. Mackenzie,
Acute renal injury cause by confirmed Psilocybe cubensis mushroom ingestion,
Medical Mycology Case Reports, Volume 23, 2019, Pages 55-57, ISSN 2211-7539,
Abstract: Psilocybe mushrooms are consumed for their hallucinogenic properties. Fortunately, there are relatively few adverse effects associated with their consumption. This is the first reported case of acute kidney injury (AKI) secondary to confirmed ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. A 15-year-old male developed symptomatic AKI 36 h post-ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. He was admitted to hospital with hypertension, nausea and abdominal pain and a creatinine of 450 mmol/L. A sample of the crop of mushrooms was confirmed by mass spectrometry to contain psilocin. On day 5 post-admission, he was discharged home. Outpatient follow-up confirmed complete resolution of his renal function.
Kind of a cool read. They're not really sure why the P. cubensis was nephrotoxic. The sample they put through mass spec didn't contain the compound (Orellanine) that the clinical presentation lined up with, and none of the other youths who ate from that crop of mushrooms had subsequent problems.
I wonder if there was an accidental polyculture issue, either with a different mushroom or a freak mutation that caused that particular shroom to synthesize toxic compounds. When growing directly from spores, you get mixed genetics, so your various mushrooms will grow slightly differently (if you want consistent genetics you grow clones from an isolate via agar plate or tissue sample from fruiting body).
I wouldn't even call it bad. Reactor pools have basically zero radiation at the surface. The water is constantly filtered and kept very pure to remove contaminants that can be activated by neutrons.
Even drinking it I would think would be completely fine. The water itself doesn't get activated.
That's what I was thinking, but it does look like 300 cpm for a few hours is essentially nothing, or it looks real bad, I can't tell.
I found this:
Days to receive chronic dose for increase cancer risk of 1 in a 1,000
432 (at 100 CPM)
86 (at 500 CPM)
Ok so 300 for an hour (we'll assume the hair is cut off and the exposure either stops or 90% reduces) means no problem. Don't do that every day that's all.
But it's from a prepper site that doesn't cite their own sources.
Which uses rem instead of cpm. An on-line converter of unknown quality says 300 cpm is 500 rem, and the pdf from the .gov site says 500 rem is "death probable in 2-3 weeks", but I think that chart is saying that's whole body & no therapy. Where this is probably mostly hair that can be just cut off totally let alone washed, and so the elevated exposure is probably both low and short duration, and medical therapy (whatever that means, if any in this case) on top.
I can't tell, could be the same as just visting a country with a slightly higher background that isn't a problem for anyone, to dead in a month. Leaning towards no problem just because of the short time and apparently mostly external and removable source.
However, it's not nothing either. It's maybe no problem for this person only because they avoided ingesting the water and the water was very quickly washed off and presumably their hair was cut off and all clothes etc removed as fast as possible. It's clearly at least "rather hot" and you can't just play in it and have prolonged exposure and ingestion. It doesn't seem to be "basically zero".
The report doesn't read like something involving 500 rem and potential death in 3 weeks. It says "Non Emergency". Can you link to this converter? It seems to be a rather key step that got handwaved. Wiki says [0] there isn't a standard on what a "count" counts.
This website [0] gives the same numbers (300 CPM -> 500 REM). Seems like a candidate for what was used at the very least, and nothing else obviously appeared to claim a similar CPM -> REM conversion capability.
Assuming this website was used, it looks like it does a naive multiplication by 5/3, which seems... simplistic? The rest of the page doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either. No indication of how the conversion factor was derived and there's a bunch of links to other CPM -> <radiation-related unit> calculators. On top of that, the landing page for the root domain boasts about AI capabilities and their AI page prominently features "Elevate Your Content Creation" and "Generate high-quality AI content with ease!"
I'd love to know how they got to 5/3. It also offers CPM to half-life conversion which has to be at least poorly labelled. That would imply that if two piles of different radioactive substances emit the same amount of radiation (obviously different masses in each pile) they have the same half life. That isn't the case, half life depends on what the substance is which is radiating, not the measured amount of radiation emitted.
Given their CPM to half-life conversion amounts to dividing by 60 (not to mention the nonsensical units), I'm not sure I'd place much faith in the website at all.
The pool. But it isn't necessarily a problem - your hair, right now, is radioactive. Presumably wouldn't trip a measuring device because it'd be background levels.
The linked report doesn't say how radioactive his hair is or give any indication of whether the person in question is threatened by this reading. Could be bad, could be nothing, we just know it is higher than normal.
For reference, this is about the same in your hair that you’d get from a few hours in a pub in the 90s, never mind working in one - surprising amount of radiation in cigarette smoke from polonium and lead-210.
It does say that. Can you translate that into a measurement of radioactivity & medical risk? I don't think it is obvious.
EDIT The report below it seems to literally be "nothing interesting happened". The thresholds here for something to be reportable are very low. Frankly I don't know why this story is upvoted so much but I'm not about to make a bigger deal about it than one sentence.
How? Neutrons slamming into water would break it apart, turn it into hydrogen and oxygen, and possibly activate the hydrogen into deuterium or tritium. But once it's hydrogen (or an isotope of it) it'll turn gaseous and be filtered off.
Not necessarily nuclear (since chemical and industrial accidents are much, muhc more likely), but highly recommended if you're interested in such incidents and their causes.
Basically often it could be better to have an incident in a nuclear plant than in some building construction site... But the attention delta is incredibly high. 300 CPM sounds low, I hope they will be fine.
I’ve heard of people falling into the spent fuel pool but never the reactor pool. Usually there are strict FME barriers in place and one cannot even look over into the pool without violating the FME. I wonder what led to the event? Definitely an OSHA recordable!
This is not true at all. I have personally looked into a reactor pool. I remember thinking how easy it would be to literally just jump in. I mean, I'd trip about a thousand alarms and probably end up in prison, but....
Incidents like this show that “nuclear safety” is as much cultural as technical. Even the best systems fail when people and organizations stop treating the environment with the respect it demands.
This harmless incident shows us nothing aside from why nuclear is so expensive.
There is essentially zero risk to the operation of the plant (or this worker!) from such an event.
Imagine if oil and gas facilities were required for any worker fall to have federal government workers visit onsite, draft a report for review, have it examined by expensive niche lawyers with rounds of revisions, and then have it published it publicly.
This is just a silly example of the hysterical safety-ism involving anything nuclear-related in the US.
Yes, working in any job related to energy carries risks. Just ask a roughneck, lineman, or wind turbine installer.
Aussie surfer here, the stings typically are uncomfortable. Some of the deadlier ones can be close to painless and only result in itching and result in you dying from respiratory failure 24 hours later. Others are downright painful with even strong opiate based pain killers struggling to cut through the pain.
Also it's in a way normalised to happen in a few places with beaches. There are vinegar stations every 100m or so. Basically a "yes, it will happen to a few of you".
Townsville's Strand has a number of them for example. (Really bad lighting, but I believe it's that green board: https://maps.app.goo.gl/x7gggCjGwxVqDBx79?g_st=ac) I went down the Qld coast a couple of weeks ago and they're still very common.
Is the deadly itchy one of those tiny box jellyfish? More than sharks or crocs, this is why I was an absolute coward and decided not to get in the water in Queensland. There are lots of ways to die, but I'd prefer not to blame myself in my last moments.
There's no significant immediate threat to life or well-being. It's simply not an emergency. We're all constantly exposed to some ionizing radiation. It's a question of how much.
In this case, not much. It's still an exposure event and absolutely worth giving medical attention to assess continued exposure levels from ingested contamination and generally be overly cautious. But that doesn't mean it's ultimately going to be a significant factor in this workers risk for radiation induced disease. It's certainly better than living in the vicinity of coal mining and processing plants.
It isn't an emergency. It was an accident that required medical attention.
If you fell in a lake and accidentally ingested some wayer known to contain some pathagen dangerous to humans, you might seek medical care, but I don't think most people would consider that an emergency. This is similar.
They bite (and suck) with their (elongated and specialized) mouthparts. Insects don’t have noses (they breathe through their skin and smell primarily with their antennae).
Oh I thought I couldn't hate them anymore and I learn this. My leg currently has large hives on it from multiple bites, the antihistamines I have are doing bugger all.
Spiders bite with their fangs, much like vampires bite with their fangs, they don't sting. I might call the tarantula "hair" that makes you itch a sting, but I would feel a bit silly calling it that.
> According to federal reports, the contractor ingested some of the reactor water before being yanked out, scrubbed down, and checked for radiation. They walked away with only minor injuries and about 300 counts per minute of radiation detected in their hair.
> That sounds like a lot, but apparently it isn't terribly serious. He underwent a decontamination scrubdown and was back on the job by Wednesday.
300CPM above background is considered very low - likely why they classified this as non-emergency - the only reason it was reported was per NRC cfr that states any time there is transportation of a radioactively contained person offsite, it must be notified.
For reference, in Canada, that is considered trace contamination and not dose. You would experience 300-800 CPM on a commercial airliner during the entirety of your flight, for comparison.
edit: adding to this that the site in question, Palisades, is shut-down and is under decommissioning and was not operating at the time - so while the water would have had some radioactivity due to exposure to the formerly active core, it was not like falling into an operating reactor or into moderating heavy water... also something that cannot happen with a pressurized reactor such as this one.
I thought 50-130 CPM above background was considered trace exposure. But yeah I didn't realize it was a decommissioned core... idk there are so many red flags in this story.
EDIT: 300-600 CPM above background radiation levels is for EXTERNAL environmental monitoring, not for POST-DECONTAMINATION readings on a contaminated person.
I'm sure your father is a very accomplished gentleman. But I was asking why your armchair analysis is better than the experts who actually know what happened here?
I maintain the complete archive of every publication my father did from 1969 to 2019 and continue to update the archive based on new publications. I use the data to train Nuclear Radiochemistry AI Agents and while I do not have my father's credentials, I actively use this dataset to learn about his field, and from my limited knowledge here I felt the need to comment. After all, what is skepticism if we can't share and teach each other what we know, right?
> I use the data to train Nuclear Radiochemistry AI Agents and [...]
As someone who is not involved in this ongoing discussion, I have to just say that invoking LLM agents when asked for credentials is not going to go in your favor.
My use case for data that exists that is pre-AI scientifically vetted work is completely divorced from the specifics of this conversation actually. If I want to do paper-maché sculptures with printouts of these papers, and I still commented on this post, would that be better or worse for you, here?
I was just sharing background. I want to make good models that can help scientists do work. Your personal feelings about LLMs and their capabilities feels quite distinct from the focus on this post, and the chain of comments that have led us here.
So you don't have the necessary credentials, and you still wouldn't be qualified to comment even if you did have them unless you had access to the internal data. But no worries, I'm sure you'd be OK getting surgery from a surgeon's son who never went to medical school nor read your chart.
I would take the advice of a surgeons son, who is also somewhat active in the field, that something sounds fishy about a operation, to further look into it. That is very different from letting him perform the surgery.
There is incentive to play down accidents. No idea what happened here, I actually rather think it recived publicity because falling into a nuclear reactor pool sounds way more dramatic than it is, but ... not my area. Still was happy to get arthurcolle's input.
There is also incentive for people to inflate their sense of importance by weighing in on topics they're not qualified on, especially if it's motivated by a sense of familial pride. You can see elsewhere on this thread that arthurcolle self-admits a lack of familiarity with basic interpretation of CPM.
Misinformation, whether ill-intentioned or not, does real and tangible harm to our society. Misinformation about the supposed dangers of nuclear power, as arthurcolle is spreading, are especially harmful because they form the foundation are the biggest obstacle to safe, clean, cheap, and abundant energy that could radically improve our lives at the systemic level.
Off topic, but the idea that the “violence” of ideas, where the only thing in play is your point of view, is somehow equatable to physical violence, where physical integrity is at risk, is one of the least endearing features of the 21st century so far.
I cannot overstate how dangerous to human prosperity this false equivalence is. It is a first-tier ideological scourge that we entertain at great peril both to critical thought and the notion of objective truth itself.
On the other hand, it’s an excellent proxy to clarify that an idea, position, or sometimes even an entire ideology or its sycophant exist for entertainment purposes only and must not, on their own merits, be taken seriously.
Are we really so isolated from the brutality of nature to think that the inconvenient beating of a butterfly’s wings is the same category of experience as being disemboweled and eaten alive by a hungry beast?
Or is it that the whole ideological sham of the violence of ideas is merely a cowardice, a poverty of ingenuity, a plea for clemency by virtue of infantilism?
The pen, or the thought given flight, is mightier than the sword.
That does not make an idea a sword. It is in character , spirit, reach, and endurance a very different type of thing. A sword can be forged from an idea, but an idea will never spring forth from a blade.
Hell in a hand basket, get off my lawn, and uphill both ways to school. Lol.
Yep you know better than the people who have the credentials you don't and the access to internal data you don't. I don't see what's holding you back from doing surgery, qualifications and context are no barrier to the application of your self-imagined expertise.
I don't claim to know better. But restarting a $1.5B plant after 2 years of inactivity and having a worker fall into a vat of radioactive water and still being at 300 CPM after a decontamination procedure is not normal.
Phrases such as massive red flag and bureaucratic nonsense were claims you knew better.
Who claimed the event was normal? A worker falling in non contaminated water would not be normal. Many things are bot normal and not emergencies. False dichotomy and straw man are logical fallacies.
Were the plant cost and status meant to support your claim 300 counts per minute was a red flag? They appeared irrelevant.
If I'm not, then we're not grounded in the same consensus-driven objective reality, making this conversation meaningless, and therefore not worth your time to reply further.
I care enough that I would trust assessment of their health and condition only to qualified professionals with access to the relevant information, just like anyone else that I care about
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I actually feel like I shared fairly demure commentary and then presented my background with full transparency. I care mostly about the health of this worker, and less about the opinions of a 1 minute old account.
My account is a couple years old, and I’ll agree with what fekxpurrrt said — you expressed doubt without evidence, people challenged your doubt, and you’ve never really satisfied their objections. The experts do know more than you. A brief Wikipedia investigation corroborates what the experts have said. They seem trustworthy, it’s unclear why your doubt should be taken seriously.
Everyone is wrong sometimes. When you realize you’re wrong, do you update your beliefs to be correct, or do you double down?
> The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense
FTA: “This is an eight-hour notification, non-emergency, for the transportation of a contaminated person offsite“
I read that as that the “non-emergency” classification isn’t for the victim or the “fell into a nuclear reactor pool”, but for the effects on those outside the facility of sending the victim off site.
A CPM value means nothing without additional context. Counts vary based on detector type and size, radiation type, energy, distance and geometry, all sorts of things. They're not comparable except in identical contexts.
This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.
As a general rule, falling into a reactor pool is probably fine, as long as you don't reach the bottom. (But please don't try it.)
> On August 31st, 2010, a diver was servicing the spent fuel pool at the Leibstadt nuclear reactor in Switzerland. He spotted an unidentified length of tubing on the bottom of the pool and radioed his supervisor to ask what to do. He was told to put it in his tool basket, which he did. Due to bubble noise in the pool, he didn’t hear his radiation alarm.
When the tool basket was lifted from the water, the room’s radiation alarms went off. The basket was dropped back in the water and the diver left the pool. The diver’s dosimeter badges showed that he’d received a higher-than-normal whole-body dose, and the dose in his right hand was extremely high.
The object turned out to be protective tubing from a radiation monitor in the reactor core, made highly radioactive by neutron flux. It had been accidentally sheared off while a capsule was being closed in 2006. It sank to a remote corner of the pool floor, where it sat unnoticed for four years.
The tubing was so radioactive that if he’d tucked it into a tool belt or shoulder bag, where it sat close to his body, he could’ve been killed. As it was, the water protected him, and only his hand—a body part more resistant to radiation than the delicate internal organs—received a heavy dose
One of my favourite bits (and a fine example of Randall's sublime humour), comes right at the end:
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.”
> A CPM value means nothing without additional context
Here to confirm this. If you're googling "CPM" you'll find charts that say different things. That's why you need to read carefully. Better, just chill, it is okay that you don't know. It's nuclear physics. It's not a subject you're expected to know about.
For CPM, what matters is "CPM of <WHAT>"
CPM just tells you the number of particle detection. It does not tell you the particle type (e.g. alpha, beta, gamma) nor the energy level (i.e. eV). Without context, it is meaningless.
As an example, I can confidently say you are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you[0]. 1CPM or 1e20CPM, who cares. Conversely, 1 CPM can be deadly. You definitely don't want to be hit by a single ReV (10^27) proton (good luck producing that though). Context matters.
> This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.
Which still needs context.
Sievert is joule per kilogram. So energy divided per mass, much like pressure is force over area. But determining biological impact still takes interpretation. You have weight factors by particle types (e.g. alpha = 2x beta) and there is also weighting factor for internal/external dose and locations like soft tissue (e.g. higher weighting for dose at throat vs dose at hands).
This is why it is incredibly important to use caution when interpreting radiation values. If you don't have training in this it is incredibly easy to unknowingly make major errors. The little details can dramatically change the outcome. Context is critical.
I'm not here to tell you how to actually do the calculation (you'll need a lot more info), I'm here to tell you that it's not easy and you're likely doing it wrong. The experts are not dumb. You're just missing context and a first order approximation is nowhere near enough for an accurate conclusion. It's nuclear physics lol
It shouldn't need be said, but nuclear physics is, in fact, complicated.
> [Y]ou are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you.
I mean, if you actually had a neutrino detector that produced 10e10 CPM over your cross-section, then it would matter for you, because particle physicists would kidnap you to learn the secret :)
Honestly, the military would probably come after you first. Or maybe an oil company? Frankly because if you could detect neutrinos at that resolution you would be able to produce a really good mapping of... just about anything. From the inside of the Earth to the inside of a secret military facility on the opposite side of the planet. Not to mention you've also invented a communication device that is essentially unjammable[0].
Sufficient to say that you'd be very popular, but in probably the least fun way possible.
Thank you for the followup (familiar with the XKCD)
Dumb question from a true non-expert:
So CPM varies with all those factors you mention, but wouldn't the site HP team know exactly what detector they used, the geometry, distance, etc.? They could convert to dose if they wanted, right?
Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv? Seems like that would be more useful for any medical team, any set of potential regulators or regulatory bodies as well as just general public understanding (drawing on my father's work here as he always emphasized the tension between "public fears radiation unnecessarily" and "industry safety protocols are inconsistent")
Follow-up: Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event? Or does staying with CPM keep things conveniently vague?
Because from my limited understanding, if they did a proper survey, they have everything needed to calculate dose.
> Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv?
It is a technical document. It is meant to communicate between experts, not to the public.
> Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event?
It's not nefarious, it is the measurement that they had. CPM is an easier measurement to get. And keep in mind that these notices are just a small part of the communication going on. They're meant to be brief.
To get the actual effective dosage you'll need a lot more information and calculations. The CPM can give you a decent estimate, if you already know context, but it is meaningless if you don't. So to an expert in that space it's a good quick estimate, but to an average person it isn't (even to above average people).
In context is also being used as a stepping stone for quick evaluation. They sent the guy to the hospital and he'll get a better estimate of dosage there. I'm sure they also were doing those calculations prior to sending him out. It may just be customary to use CPM units. That part I don't know. Here's the page they reference though[0] (there's only a single (xii) so easy to find).
[disclosure] I have training in nuclear physics, including in radiation dosages (I worked on developing shielding materials), but I have not worked on a reactor (though I've seen reactors and Cherenkov Radiation :) so the customs of the bureaucracy are beyond my wheelhouse. But from my experience I'm not surprised by this. I would expect a lot more documentation and accurate measurements are being passed through other channels.
Looking at these bulletins, they appear to be quick summaries of pretty much any nuclear related incident that happens in the US, no matter how minor. I would assume that these are mostly intended for public transparency, and as for a quick reference point for regulatory action. Introductory slide on a PowerPoint sort of material.
In that context, I'd guess that the 300 CPM figure is just a signpost that says "we measured the worker to make sure that he was safe to release to a hospital."
Is the information intended to be given out to the public in a manner in which the general public can interpret? No. It's encoded lol. But you can hear that on the radio and if you're trained (could go to a public library to train yourself) and yeah it makes sense. It is specifically intended to be concise and communicate only the absolute minimum amount of necessary information.
For another example, look at arXiv. Is it public? Yes. Are the papers published there written for the general public? No. They are written for peers.
So yes, it is "public transparency", but not for transparency to people who aren't train in nuclear physics. (Which is what I previously said)
>Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event?
Basically, the procedures for certain environments differ. If you want to gather dosage data, you use a dosimeter. If you want a binary Yes/No method of detecting contamination, you use a geiger counter and determine if the count rate is above a certain range (depending on background radiation and other factors).
The 300CPM metric just indicates whether they're clean or not after they've been scrubbed down. It doesn't measure the dose they took.
I would imagine the on-site team would know, yes. I don't know why the report only gives a measurement in CPM, but just because the person was sent off-site doesn't mean the levels were dangerous. Thresholds at nuclear facilities tend to be very low for safety.
The USNRC is currently not operating normally due to the government shutdown. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
300 CPM on its own is both meaningless and not high.
CPM is a raw stat from the sensor. There’s many different designs of dosimeters and they all read differently so you have to ask “what brand and model did you use?” You then apply a function to the data to normalize it into a real unit.
But CPM is the cool thing that makes the click-click-click sound. (The absolute rate of clicks also is not useful.)
CPM is a measure of rate, GBq is a total amount. And 300 CPM is basically nothing. People live their entire lives in places where the natural background radiation is higher than that with no increased chance of cancer.
Unless I'm misinterpreting what you mean, I believe if it was reflected in the hair in the immediate aftermath, it wouldn't reflect internal circulation because hair does not grow that fast. It would have been from exposure to the pool rather than any amount ingested.
External contamination is not comparable to internal, at all. Bq is a terrible unit to understand radioactive danger. Doses are usually detected in Grey, then converted into Sievert because Grey didn't take into account the difference between Alpha radiation and the others. And even then, when someone is truly contaminated, we calculate effective dose per organ.
The poor guy who fell in the pool probably didn't take any Alpha ray, wasn't taking all the radiation on a specific place, and while in my country we would calculate the dose he took before sending him back to work, he would probably work again in the same nuclear sector (this isn't the case for anyone, I know someone who dive to get the radioactive/explosive/poisonous trash we put in the water in the 50s until the 90s, he now cannot work on any radioactive trash.)
Why didn't they shave off the hair and measure again before sending off to medical? They have the opportunity to report lower numbers, and would enable identifying non-hair-adsorbed radiatioactive matter on the subject. It sounds so easy and actionable it boggles the mind that it's not part of the protocol.
I thought this as well but given some other comments the measures numbers are open to interpretation/ spread.
Also it could be considered a violation of the person's body if done without his consent.
and one could argue that showering without consent is also a violation of the person's body... consider an accident where a person is actually super hot with radioactive contamination, does the person have the right to exit the facility without shower and spread the radioactive particulates at will?
the thing is that this type of "violation" can easily be prevented by including the obligatory showering or shaving as part of the contract, so either they consent or they didn't end up in a position where they can be exposed to radioactive matter.
So this can not explain why the hair wasn't shaved.
“worker fell off roof installing solar panels” — just getting ahead of the ‘anti-nuclear’ folks on here. Energy installations all come with risks, albeit nuclear long tail accidents are mutli-generational and externalised to people not involved in managing the risk
I greatly appreciate the nuclear industry. Nuclear field engineering was my first "real" job out of college and they really committ to safety. Transparency in this industry is inspiring because everyone involved knows that one screw up and that's the end of the US nuclear industry. Good luck getting oil and gas to be accountable and as transparent about incidents. I carry the culture into the rest of my work and appreciate being involved. Wish events like this didn't happen but it is not of significant danger and I find it great that they communicate even "smaller" issues.
I've lived through three major nuclear incidents, and what they had in common, regardless of the political systems of the US, The Soviet Union or Japan, was not the transparency, it was the lying. It started immediately after each incident.
I'm essentially pro-nuclear, I just don't trust people who run it.
Totally valid perspective. I only became part of the industry after Fukushima. I only knew an industry by its disasters. I will say, having gone through the training programs we studied the nuclear incidents and spent a year in training before going to the plants. I just don't see parallel experiences looking back like that. The people in nuclear (at least from what I saw) want the industry to be safe and successful.
You describe incidents which become political. At some point the normal rules are being ignored by those on the top of the information food chain. That says nothing about the rules of the game, but does say a lot about the people involved.
> What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
> Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
My question is what happened between when they went in the water and when they got off-site medical treatment. 7 hours seems like a long time. Is there on-site medical that would be doing something during that time?
Anecdote: My house mate in grad school was working in a national lab when an experiment caught fire and the fire consumed a certain amount of radioactive material. (Tiny little buttons used for calibrating detectors). He was on shift and was the person who discovered the fire and pulled the alarm.
Among other things, he had to sit inside an enclosure made of scintillator material for a period of time, to make sure he wasn't contaminated. Then he also got blood tests for heavy metals etc. They pretty much went by the book for all of these tests.
Also, the facility is the only place that's equipped for this kind of situation.
It’s a process to come into a high radiation area, as well as, a process to come out; I’m sure the worker was not injured so they processed he/she out and decontaminated the individual and did a whole body count. Then release him to medical for evaluation…which in itself is a process.
Like what is a reactor cavity? HN title makes it sound like they fell into the reactor but maybe this is some sort of moat or something? what did they fall into and why?
Scrolling up and down the list, just how onerous is this reporting regulation? It seems almost cartoonishly excessive, even for critical safety applications.
Literally no amount of incident reporting is excessive when it comes to nuclear power. Not just because of the safety of the plant itself, but because so much is reliant on it.
It's important to identify even small defects or incidents so that patterns can be noticed before they turn into larger issues. You see the same breaker tripping at 3x the rate of other ones, and even though maybe nothing was damaged you now know there's something to investigate.
> Sea-drilling rigs (oil) have far more potential for environmental damage than modern nuclear plants
Key word: "modern". A key aspect of a modern nuclear plant, that supports its high level of safety, is the required incident reporting and followup.
The relevant issue is not really about a single worker being injured or dying. It's about detecting safety issues which could lead to a catastrophe far beyond what a sea oil drilling rig can, at least when it comes to human life and habitability of the surrounding area.
For example, after Chernobyl, much of Europe had to deal with contamination from cesium 137.
The entire planet's geological history shows when the nuclear age started, because humans are irresponsible in aggregate. (See also global warming.)
> Aaaand it’s this alarmist attitude ...
You're providing an object lesson in why humans can't really be trusted to operate systems like this over the long term.
> You're providing an object lesson in why humans can't really be trusted to operate systems like this over the long term.
Ironically so are you. The coal we burn puts far more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants do. Yet we make sure nuclear isn't viable and burn coal like crazy. We do this only because of the type of risk telescoping you are doing. If you do a rational risk assessment, you will see that even operating nuclear plants as shown in the Simpsons would have less risk than what we are doing now. There is a risk to doing nothing. You are missing that part in your assessment.
> It's about detecting safety issues which could lead to a catastrophe far beyond what a sea oil drilling rig can
A worker falling into a reactor pool (which is just room temp water with very little risk) is not a catastrophe, yet due to the absurd safetyism surrounding nuclear it requires a federal report.
We don’t require this level of cost insanity for far more deadly worker events at oil, gas, solar or wind facilities.
There is no systemic risk from worker falls. MAYBE the plant in question should address hand railing heights from pre-ADA construction. It certainly shouldn’t require multiple federal government employees to create a report on it and be publicly listed in federal register and reported on by hundreds of news outlets.
Having the infrastructure for reporting incidents is the expensive part.
Doing it often doesn’t really add to the cost. More reporting is helpful because it explicitly makes it clear even operational issues can have lessons to be learned from. It also keeps the reporting system running and operationally well maintained.
Why is this interesting? Workers gets injured all the time and sometimes even die on various accidents in all industries and nobody ever talk about it. Is this anti-nuclear propaganda?
I guess that U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is required to report any unusual events in the plants in the US, which would be reasonable. A worker falling into a nuclear reactor pool is unusual. The report itself doesn't seem like it's anti-nuclear in any way, and it clearly states "no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel".
If you're asking why it's interesting for HN, I think it's actually because people are fascinated with nuclear, in a positive way.
Knowing nothing about nuclear reactor design, why would there ever be a dangerous pool that people could walk by that wasn’t covered? Hard to believe it’s like some kind of Bond villain complex with open pools everywhere. This must have been in the course of some kind of servicing that required opening something that normally stays closed?
Because it's generally speaking, not that dangerous. Water is very good at blocking radiation. That's part of the reason why the pool is filled with it to begin with.
I personally consider an area dangerous if I need to undergo radiation decontamination after entering it, continue emitting radiation after decontamination, and need to seek medical attention. Maybe the nuclear regulatory bodies have differen definitions?
Bananas emit detectable radiation, so you should probably choose different thresholds of what causes you to consider something dangerous.
They will still try to decontaminate you of any radioactive materials they can scrub off as a matter of course, but 300 counts per minute, while noticeably higher than background radiation levels, is pretty benign in the grand scheme of things. The fact that you can still count individual radioactive emissions is incredibly good news compared to how bad things could be.
Especially since the reactor will have been shutdown for some time by definition, if the reactor cavity is open enough to fall into. Hopefully the low rate of radioactivity evidenced by the counts on the person's hair is matched by the level of radioactivity in the water.
And on that note, medical attention would also be provided as a matter of course after a fall like this, but it seems to me that the physical injury of falling some distance and possibly hitting metal on the way down is going to be more of a danger than the radiation, especially compared to the sources of radiation people naturally run into (especially cigarette smoke, whether primary or secondhand).
It's not open to the public, but workers have to go into dangerous places to do maintenance. The refueling process, for example, requires removing spent fuel rods and inserting new ones, and for that the core has to be opened. It's not running, i.e. fissioning, but it's still radioactive material (water included).
It seems reasonable and prudent to go through decontamination after this sort of thing, but if the worker had just gone home to their family soaking wet without changing, there would still have been close enough to zero risk to anyone (again, cleaning up and making sure this is the case is a very reasonable thing to do).
This sort of place is safe enough to bring your kid into without significant precautions (I got to do this as a kid—it was really cool). The biggest risk by far is drowning.
I get the feeling that you don't know how complicated calculating radiation exposure is. There are plenty of interest in fear mongering against nuclear. Almost all the people talking about how much radiation 300 CPM is have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Some confuse total measurement units for rates; others are using just the wrong units; still others are talking about levels that are 1000x or 1000000x higher than 300 CPM.
Or to put it another way, 300 CPM (which is a rate) is less than how much radiation you get when on a flight, or how much radiation you get at higher elevations. Even giving a simple explanation of how to calculate Greys (the actual measure you are looking for) takes up the better part of a page. Hell, your bones are radioactive. Yet there are plenty of people posting that somehow the risk to this guy is radioactivity. In reality, his biggest problem is probably going to be finding a new job.
CPM doesn't mean anything, it's useless to compare it to anything without more information.
For his job, depends on the dose he took. In my country he would have been on benefits until the dose was calculated, then if possible, reintegrated in the team, or directed towards a new job if not (paid formation and everything). I've studied with a diver who couldn't work with radioactive trash anymore, he wasn't meant to be a SWE in the end, he now dive for unexploded WW2 stuff in the north sea/Baltic I think
In a way you are right, but in another way you are wrong. Background radiation is mostly gamma which is generally the most dangerous kind. Radiation at a nuclear plant is mostly alpha and beta which are less dangerous at the same CPM rates. So technically you are right, you have to calculate the absorption, but in practice you are wrong because at that rate, there is no way he absorbed enough radiation to be dangerous.
Yeah I stopped really looking at replies when I realized it was just a bunch of people telling me that falling in a nuclear reactor pool isn’t that bad and to go read the XKCD again if I don’t get it.
I think you're softly implying things are more dangerous than they actually are, possibly due to not understanding just how insanely risk averse the nuclear industry is in the US. You could jog around a reactor chamber every morning and under a "normal person's" risk tolerance, you would never, ever be exposed to any danger. That worker who fell in the reactor pool seems like they got a radiation exposure equal to approximately a dozen chest x-rays (it's ambiguous though because they don't specify what tool was yeilding 300 counts per minute, nor do they give the total mSv).
The NRC would make you attend training and get decontaminated if you had to cross a street if they operated the roads.
numbers matter. A human naturally gives off 0.2mSv/year. so basically you are emitting radiation right now, just very slowly. They had 300 counts per minute which would e around 6200 mSv year. But how much is that? the limit in a year for some body parts goes up to 500mSv year for workers. But that's if their body are getting that much radiation for the whole year.
TL;DR you're always getting some ionizing radiation, how much matters.
> They had 300 counts per minute which would e around 6200 mSv year
Are you sure about that? 6200 mSv is 6.2 Sv, which I understand to be near-universally deadly. That dosage would be profoundly incompatible with the news that the worker was being sent offsite to seek non-emergency medical attention.
Poking around, it looks like "counts per minute" have to get converted to a dosage using an instrument-specific formula. I CBA to go find that formula, but you're quite welcome to.
Rate matters. 6.2Sv in a single hour is fatal. 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation. The measurement units for ionizing radiation are very complicated and confusing. That's why people are told to not try to compute this stuff yourself. I have code that computes these units and conversions, its not simple. Here is a brief and simplified explanation of how you calculate this stuff.
There are 4 types of ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, gamma/x-rays and neutron flux. Each one has a different rate it is blocked by different materials (water, air, etc). Each one has a different risk to people. You have to compute counts per unit time emitted from a point source for each of the different types of radiation. Then you have to compute the amount of "arc" the person is in. Then you have counts being absorbed and you next multiply each count by a fixed factor depending on the type of radiation. This final number gives you total Greys per unit time, then you then have to divide by the mass of the person. Then you multiple that number by the total amount of time and that gives you total Greys absorbed. That's the number you use to assess risk to the person. For reference, this guy probably got less than 1 Grey. Someone getting radiation treatment for cancer might get 75 Greys.
So please stop trying to calculate this stuff yourself. I'm pretty sure you are doing it wrong. This guy will be fine.
PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
> PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
The US's NRC disagrees with you. From [0], they say this about the sievert and rem:
Dose equivalent
A measure of the biological damage to living tissue as a result of radiation exposure. Also known as the " biological dose," the dose equivalent is calculated as the product of absorbed dose in tissue multiplied by a quality factor and then sometimes multiplied by other necessary modifying factors at the location of interest. The dose equivalent is expressed numerically in rems or sieverts (Sv) (see 10 CFR 20.1003). For additional information, see Doses in Our Daily Lives and Measuring Radiation.
and have this to say about the gray:
Dose, absorbed
The amount of energy absorbed by an object or person per unit mass. Known as the “absorbed dose,” this reflects the amount of energy that ionizing radiation sources deposit in materials through which they pass, and is measured in units of radiation-absorbed dose (rad). The related international system unit is the gray (Gy), where 1 Gy is equivalent to 100 rad. For additional information, see Doses in Our Daily Lives and Measuring Radiation.
Grays seem to be "amount of radiation absorbed per kg". Looking further, the "Measuring Radiation" page at [1] directly contradicts your claim. Speaking about rems and Svs, it says:
Dose equivalent (or effective dose) combines the amount of radiation absorbed and the medical effects of that type of radiation. For beta and gamma radiation, the dose equivalent is the same as the absorbed dose. By contrast, the dose equivalent is larger than the absorbed dose for alpha and neutron radiation, because these types of radiation are more damaging to the human body.
I'm definitely not an expert, but the NRC is pretty official, and their explanations sound pretty clear to me. Is what they're saying here incorrect?
> 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation.
Are you sure about that? <https://xkcd.com/radiation/> claims 4 mSv per year as normal radiation dosage, and 50 mSv per year as maximum permitted annual dosage for "US radiation workers", whatever that means.
I think you're off by a factor of a thousand for the typical exposure level and off by a factor of a hundred for the exposure level where they stop letting you work near the radioactives for a year.
No, you are just confused about the technical jargon being used. That text is written for people who have had this jargon hammered into them and is very confusing to people who haven't. This is why people are told to not try to do the calculations themselves.
"Dose absorbed" is a physical measure of ionizing radiation that is directed at something. That's measured in rems or sieverts (or Grays, notice the spelling). "Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A). Both those measures combine the count rates for the 4 different types of radiation into 1 amount. "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person. Even more confusing there is a Gray (dose absorbed) and a Grey (biological impact of a dose absorbed, or dose equivalent); they are different.
The part about beta and gamma radiation is about establishing a baseline for converting between the two units but should never be used for calculating "dose equivalent" in practice. Its how we determine the value of 1 Grey. It isn't a way to convert from "dose equivalent" to "dose absorbed".
I'm trying to simplify this stuff for an audience without the necessary background information. Doing that requires me cutting out a bunch of details. The NRC text on the other hand is technically precise but also is mentioning a lot of things that are true but confusing or only useful for calibrating instruments. They are also explaining one tiny part of this and you left out the parts where they talk about how to combine the different counts for each type of radiation into one measurement. That's something else I'm also trying to explain at the same time. So I'm covering more ground and trying to do so with simpler terms. That's going to mean you can cherry pick stuff but doing that will to give you the wrong impression.
Natural background radiation varies by location on earth by a factor of 300. That 4 mSv per year is for natural background radiation at the low end of the scale which happens at sea level in places without Uranium or Thorium deposits. However, there are places where people live (and have lived for 1000s of years) where the natural background radiation is 300x that amount or about 1.2Sv/year. There is no observed increase in cancer rates in those locations despite decades of study. I'm also assuming that the "normal person" will take a flight or two and potentially be near other sources of radiation without knowing it (like your smoke detector).
PS The 50 mSv/year number is absurdly low. Its one of the main complaints about how the NRC handles nuclear radiation. Its literally lower than the natural background radiation at sites in India and Brazil.
no not sure. yeah I used the an average instrument specific rate. The point is a) everything emits, b) we have no idea on severity from the info, could be a little, could be a lot. Could also be short term (haircut) or longer term (ingested) exposures.
> yeah I used the an average instrument specific rate.
Would you provide a link to the source of this average instrument specific rate?
I'm interested in knowing which instruments designed to detect low-to-medium-level radiation sources on a human are configured so that five detections per second would equate to a "You're fucking dead; there's really no hope for you" dose.
(Did you ask an LLM to "convert counts per minute to mSv" and fail to sanity-check the confident-sounding result it gave you?)
> ...everything emits...
Given that the crust and sea and air of this planet are chock full of radioactives, and that every living thing on the planet builds itself out of that material, that goes without saying.
You need a device that can measure the different types of radiation. Then you have to do a bunch of calculations to estimate absorption. Only then can you calculate Greys which is the measurement that matters.
PS 300 CPM is nothing. There are places where people live where the natural background radiation is higher than that. Also, background radiation is mostly Gamma rays which is more dangerous than what comes off of fission products or nuclear fuel.
Hair can't hold that much water compared to any ingested amount. Whether contaminated or activated, internal irradiation from that much will be pretty bad.
0) If you've not read this chart, do carefully read it: <https://xkcd.com/radiation/>. If you've read it before, take some time to carefully re-read it.
1) The guy's getting sent off to seek non-emergency medical attention. I bet you an entire American Nickle that that attention is almost entirely for injuries sustained in the fall, rather than for radiation exposure.
They typically have a railing around them. The circumstances of this incident are unknown beyond a small set of details. The report indicates that the person who fell was wearing a life vest, it is likely they were doing work around the pool beyond the normal safety barriers.
Huh why not. It's far less dangerous than, say, a train station or a viewpoint where everyone can just jump and die. Many reactors are open for kids and class trips where everyone can stare into a reactor
When I was a kid I was amazed at how many of the other kids would take pool water in their mouth and drool it out, simply as a normal part of their treading water. I thought they were weird for this but it was really about 1 out of every 3 or 4 kids I noticed that did this.
I mean that's something that happens commonly when people fall into things like pools. When you jump into a pool you tend to take a breath before you do so, so you don't suck in water. When you fall into water it's much more common for people to aspirate or swallow water from the surprise.
Depending on a velocity, it also doesn't matter if you took a breath or not. Fall in quickly enough and at just the right angle (you can even do that from a fast water slide) and the water will be forced through your nose into lungs/stomach. (Unless you hold it closed)
There is a deeper point here, not just pedantry. The point is that harm is a spectrum not a binary and one cannot meaningfully answer a question that assumes a binary.
Yes, it is tiring. In this case, not really because it is at least for me, humorous in a Doc Martin sort of way. But elsewhere and on places like Reddit where the pedantry is often at best unjustified and at worst, wrong, it has made me spend less time on the sites.
Personally, my belief in my own immortality only increases the older I get. Yes, Socrates died, but he clearly wasn't smart if he died. Me, on the other hand? I'm batting a thousand.
He will be fine. He might not still have his job in a few months but other that, he will be fine. 300 CPM isn't even close to dangerous. You get a higher dose every time you fly in an airplane, or go to La Paz, Bolivia.
Yes, but: depends on what he ingested. Deuterium/tritium cannot emit Alpha particles, the ones blocked by your outer/dead skin (also they're an order of magnitude more dangerous than the other at equivalent grey), so he's fine in that way (unless there is more in the pool, but that would be a bigger issue).
The issue with ingesting deuterium/tritium is that the dose will now have to be calculated/estimated per organ, and while I don't remember exactly how it's done, it's more complex than calculating the mSv he took (I can't give you more details, I'm not competent, I've observed a radiologist a week my bachelor year to decide which master I would do, I'm now working in software which should tell you everything)
We’re 50 years behind fusion because of people that now rage against fossil fuels. It’s tough to see it keep happening despite the educational resources we have now vs the 70s and 80s.
Not really hard: nuclear power generation uses radiation and radioactive material, but tries very hard not to release it. Coal power generation burns a substance that contains a small amount of radioactive material, and makes no effort not to release radiation.
It's not that surprising. We're burning a rock we dug out of the ground and turning it into a vapor. Rocks found underground contain some amount of natural radioactive material, for example granite/marble tend to be higher in radiation. If you burn that into a powder and put it into the atmosphere it'll spread around and expose the nearby area to very slightly radioactive pollution.
Hopefully the worker is okay. I have to agree that the non-emergency classification seems odd. This should warrant a proper investigation and steps to avoid this in the future.
I can guarantee you there will be a proper investigation and steps taken to avoid this in the future. The non-emergency classification here applies solely to the notification that the contamination was transported off-site. Not to the fact that the incident occurred. Every accidental incident that occurs within the controlled area of a nuclear facility is investigated and evaluated for necessary policy changes.
And the reason the contamination transport off-site was classified as non-emergency was because even though the amount of radiation detected on the guy is less than he'd have gotten from flying in an airplane; nuclear safety standards are so unbelievably rigorous and strict that even that small of an incident needs to be reported; even if it presents absolutely no danger to anyone anywhere (not even the guy that was contaminated) and hence is classified as a non-emergency notification.
I thought you could safely swim in that water so long as you stay a few meters clear of the rods? water being a good absorber of radiation and all. Is this just a precautionary reaction?
I'm not an expert in this topic but I've been working on a book in a related area and had to learn a lot. Here's what I can figure.
Unfortunately radiation medicine is pretty complicated and the report gives us very little info, presumably mostly because they don't have very much info. It will take some time and effort to establish more.
What we do know is that they measured 300 CPM at the person's hair, which was probably where they expected the highest count due to absorbed water (likely clothing was already stripped at this point). CPM is a tricky unit because it is something like the "raw" value from the instrument, the literal number of counts from the tube, and determining more absolute metrics like activity and dose requires knowing the calibration of the meter. The annoying thing here is that radiation protection professionals will still sometimes just write CPM because for a lot of applications there's only one or a handful of instruments approved and they tend to figure the reader knows which instrument they have. Frustrating. Still, for the common LND7311 tube and Cs137, 300CPM is a little below 1 uSv/hr. That wouldn't equate to any meaningful risk (a common rule of thumb is that a couple mSv is typical annual background exposure). However, for a less sensitive detector, the dose could be much higher (LND7311 is often used in pancake probes for frisking because it is very sensitive and just background is often hundreds of CPM). Someone who knows NRC practices better might know what detector would be used here.
That said the field dose here is really not the concern, committed dose from ingesting the water is. Ingesting radioactive material is extremely dangerous because, depending on the specific isotopes involved, it can persist in the body for a very long time and accumulate in specific organs. Unfortunately it is also difficult to assess. This person will likely go to a hospital with a specialty center equipped with a full body counter, and counts will also be taken on blood samples. These are ways of estimating the amount of radioactive isotopes in the body. In some cases tissue samples of specific organs may be taken.
I believe that the cavity pool water would be "clean" other than induced radioactivity (activation products from being bombarded by radiation). Because water shields so well the pool should not be that "hot" from this process. Most of those products have short half-lives which, on the one hand, means that they deliver a higher dose over a shorter period of time---but also means they will not longer forever and are less likely to be a chronic problem if they are not an acute one.
I suspect this will get some press coverage and we will perhaps learn more about the patient's state.
Another way we can get at this question is by the bureaucracy of the notification. An 8-hour notification as done here is required in relatively minor cases. Usually for a "big deal emergency" a one-hour notification is required. The definition of such an emergency depends on the site emergency plan but I think acute radiation exposure to a worker would generally qualify.
Radiation units are fiendishly tricky to convert between. Here, the only indication is that after decontamination their hair was still reading 300 counts per minute. CPM are instrument-specific and doesn't mean that's the correct number of disintegrations per second, nor easily converted to absorbed dose units, and this is after decontamination, and disregarding the amount of water they ingested.
All that disclaimer aside: a banana produces about 15 Bq (which is s^-1), i.e. 900 cpm.
"count" is that classical Geiger click, so 300 per minute is constant 5/sec gggggggg going on, which sounds bad but we don't know. They're boolean and also equipment dependent.
As others had said, more alarming part is that they ingested the water, which could go like defected Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. But it could also be like man eating few bananas seasoned with expired Himalayan salt. The report just doesn't say how much of what was ingested.
Not at all. My scintillating counter will do 300 cpm as background. The most concerning thing here will be the ingestion of the water. Even low level emitters can be very bad when the are inside the body
They keep the water in an LWR pretty clean to avoid corrosion problems. Thing is the slightest almost of tritium in the water will light up a portal detector like a pinball machine on tilt.
In other news, a kitten named millicurie did a really adorable thing.
The only remarkable fact here is that the regulatory structure is strong enough that we commoners are entitled to hear about it. That's a Very Good Thing, and one I wish we enjoyed apropos, say, the corporate veil (looking at you, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Aramco, Sinopec, Amazon, Oracle, AIPAC, United, The Trump Organization, X Corp, Paramount, Skydance, eMed Population Health, Inc., et. al.).
But the story here is a guy fell into some water, and is following SOP (which is also a Very Good Thing).
At Purdue university we had a small research reactor and to this day can remember looking down through the pool to see the blue glow of the nuclear reaction. It is crazy how well the water (boronized?) stops radiation.
Which do you consider as being under better control: a technology that we exhaustively create reports on even in the face of incidents like this where the only real chance of harm was that the guy couldn't swim and might have drowned; or a technology where we don't report on anything at all whatsoever and thus have no idea what's actually going on?
Reports don't mean danger, and they don't mean lack of control. Reports are information.
Of the eight reports I only see one that relates to a guy being able to swim or not (and I suspect the same is true for the estimated 1400 reports so far this year). Also having transparency is obviously good and I don't understand what you want to prove with arguing that a worse situation would be worse. It clearly would be worse.
I'm also not totally against nuclear, in case you are suspecting that. I do think though, that we as a society aren't at the point where we have the ability to completely control such technology, contrary to what proponents of much higher utilization of nuclear like to claim. Reports of fuses seemingly without failover or stolen equipment seem to support that argument.
Man in Michigan potentially exposed to radiation levels equivalent to undergoing 4 x-rays at the doctors office.
Meanwhile, in Texas, 1.5 people die every day working in Oil and Gas extraction.
A few people die every year installing or falling off of wind turbines.
But by all means, let's make this a news story instead and keep making nuclear sound scary. I’m sure the person who posted this to HN with this clickbait title has zero political beliefs.
This is enlightening chart. Only Solar beats nuclear in deaths/Wh of energy. Even wind power results in more deaths. Additionally this uses very pessimistic numbers for large nuclear incidents and doesn't count thinks like deaths and health complications due to pollution and emitted radiation from fossil-fuel power sources (which emit way more radiation than nuclear power).
Is it relevant? It's writing about a pool for storing spent fuel, which is not a part of the actual reactor system.
This incident report says that the worker fell into a "reactor cavity" containing water and that there was a measurable amount of radiation detected in their hair after the initial clean-up. The two situations don't seem remotely compatible to me.
I find it highly informative that the required PPE for working in that location is a life jacket so you float in case you fall in, rather than a tether and fall arrest harness so that it's not possible to fall in.
300 CPM is nothing, background levels might be 150.
Background is probably a bit lower depending on where you're at. My counter went through airport security luggage scans 'cause they wouldn't let me wear it through the metal detector. It beeps for a few seconds and then comes out about a days' dose of natural radiation higher. The count was higher than 300 CPM, but obviously only shortly.
That poor bloke might stay at 300 (if ingested and he can't scrub it off) for a while but it's still not very discouraging long-term. Pilots have about that at cruising altitude.
He went back to work the next day. They don't provide much detail about the minor injuries but it seems that the biggest issue is maybe a bruised shin from the fall.
Worker was wearing a life vest.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Nuclear_Generating_S...
[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
it sounds like "guy felt down in a volcano, but fortunately, he had a life vest"
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
On a tangent, I kinda love the fact that I've learned more about nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, and relativistic speeds from a poorly drawn webcomic than I have from any other source. (Ok KSP might actually have xkcd beat on orbital mechanics)
https://xkcd.com/1356/
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.
I bet there's some good chance of getting wacky extremophiles though!
Hot spring baths usually top out around 42-43C
edit: sorry for being lazy, I scrolled a bit more and found it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA&t=604s
I used to work at UC Berkeley, and one of the buildings on campus previously held a research nuclear reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Research_Reactor). There's a sign there now "Nuclear Free Zone"; (https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-berkeley-nuclear-free-...).
Note that they did have to do extensive decontamination on Gilman Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formerly_Utilized_Sites_Remedi...) where plutonium was first isolated.
See https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
“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.”
Apparently they do have concerns.
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.
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).
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.
Bizarre to see you in gray and all other random kvetching up and down the thread not gray.
Well, it's not bizarre. You're fact bound and aren't calling people names and intellectually posturing.
You just read the article.
That's no fun!
And I don't feel smarter! The other guy says we can make fun of dummies mentioning the life jacket, they don't know nuclear!
There are also plenty of jobs where people are in close proximity to insanely hot/dangerous liquids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diHG9W27XeU
Edit: ok, I’m probably the fiftieth person to point this out. It’s still a good video.
If said junk was alpha- or beta-emitting, it could be enough of a danger for cancer.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. They literally wrote up a safety report and transported them off-site.
Wow, people are really clueless about how to avoid reacting angrily. It's funny to append "they were wearing a life vest" to "they had a nuclear safety accident"
(Am I doing it right yet?)
There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sai... ("7 Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court" (2018))
E.g.,
"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."
I mean I would rather lick a keyboard than a butthole (with exceptions of course)
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.
> 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 was a quote of the linked article:
"Holtec International, which owns the closed nuclear facility, reported the worker was a contractor who was wearing all required personal protective equipment, including a life vest while working near the pool without a barrier in place."
From the linked xkcd in various threads it seems like a life vest should keep you in the "safe" zone
However it doesn't actually say how much is safe to drink
He was not working in a volcano.
Yes, radioactivity isn't good. You should not, for example, drink this water, or swim in it once a week for good luck. But, it isn't magic death fluid, the worker will have been decontaminated - destroying clothing, washing skin and so on, and the additional exposure means they might get more monitoring, but they're probably fine.
> The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair.
This event will result in acute hair loss. From shaving machine.
Maybe there is a problem elsewhere, maybe the pool is contaminated, maybe the sensor used is very sensitive and 300 cpm is not as concerning as it would seem.
It sure would be nice to have actual data, wouldn’t it?
Regulatory bodies have adopted the LNT (linear no threshold) model and for good reasons. Every exposure increases your likelihood to get cancer eventually. Many things do, such is life, and radiation is one of them.
And it should show up in realtime monitoring of the water, unless they just turned that off.
the deeper you get, the worse for you. I assume the first second was critical.
The usual reason for this is it keeps your mouth from being far from the air. In this case it also helps because the radioactive stuff is close to the bottom. And exposure depends on distance from the bottom.
This is well researched and just like with semaglutide I believe a big part of the population should take daily tadalafil.
Better cardiovascular health, more erections and many positive downstream effects (lower E:T ratio, weight loss) that are beyond the scope of this comment.
One of many, looking at just one detail (sitting): https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/sitting-may-i...
From a personal experience, so it's just a guess, a contributor may be fluid movement in the body. Fluid in blood vessels are pumped directly, but must fluid is not in blood vessels. The heart has a diminishing effect outside the vessels (capillaries have small holes to let water and small molecules through into extracellular space, and then to collect it back, rest goes through the lymphatic system which also drains back into the bloodstream). Muscle and body movement helps. From what I experienced and experimented, just walking did a lot more than running. I focus on this specifically due to personal health experiences that I don't want to go into that let me feel a clear difference, where intensive running did hardly anything but then just walking did, an experiment I performed during a period of my life when "getting stuff out from all over my body" mattered.
Personally, I choose to run only when my brain/body tell me to, when I feel like it. Definitely not when I would have to fight myself to get going. (If your body/brain tells you the opposite then it is what it is, personal feel over generic advice)
Every person has a limit of how much time and energy they can put into exercise. If they can go beyond that with a pill (with no other cost), why wouldn't you want everyone to take it?
The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.
Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.
This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.
"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
Agreed - low dose daily cialis/tadalafil (e.g. 5mg/day) is very common among elite athletes, bodybuilders, etc. As are GLP-1's despite elite athletes rarely being overweight.
Tadalafil is taken for its endothelial benefits (erections are a convenient side effect), and GLP's for its nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitization effects.
Medications are very often most effective when paired with good lifestyle habits, rather than one of the other.
It also depends on what your goals are, obviously.
Beyond that, if goals are for specific performance targets, in some athletic or competitive activity, you'll want to tune your training toward that. Again, the baseline is remarkably consistent, it's the high-performer tuning which varies.
Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks. If you're lucky, it's only wasted money. If you're not, it's markedly worse.
The biggest hurdle I've encountered personally is primary care doctors deal with very sick people every day (terrible diet, terrible body composition, terrible alcohol/drug habits, etc). And that's who they optimize their care for.
If you show up to a PCP and you're in shape, all vitals on point, all bloodwork looking good, the last thing the PCP wants to do is prescribe anything because "you don't need it" and "you're not sick".
Most doctors simply don't care about helping you optimize your health once you've reached "healthier than average" status.
This leads a lot of people to doing their own research, and finding health clinics outside of insurance that cater to health optimization, anti-aging, and non-standard treatments (like prescribing GLP's to people who aren't overweight, or Cialis for people who don't have ED). These clinics also aren't very good because, while they are indeed doctors or NPs, they make money off selling you prescriptions, so they are biased and usually push medications you might not really need or want. (Which again emphasizes the importance of self-education and doing your own research).
For drugs like GLP-1's, there are a whole lot of anecdotal benefits outside of weight loss. The problem with the drug industry is once a drug is approved for its most profitable use case, drug makers don't bother to pursue additional FDA approvals for additional indications because the headache isn't worth the (marginal) extra revenue.
I very much wish there were a category of doctors specializing in treating healthy people looking to optimize their health further.
"Sports medicine".
<https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/24627-sports-...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_medicine>
You might also look into nutrition and dietetics and exercise physiology. If you're looking at cognitive function, neuropsychology and possibly some psychotherapy specialisations.
"Wellness coaching" is starting to get into the woo / overly-self-interested / conflicted domain, though there are probably a few good apples. I'd proceed with extreme caution however. There are plenty of docs who're more than happy to provide what a patient asks (and is willing to pay top dollar) for.
The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.
Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.
Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.
Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis
Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?
No, it doesn't.
I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.
Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.
Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.
This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.
One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.
Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).
5mg daily tadalafil is fine for me though and that‘s also the normal daily dosage.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...
Emily Austin, Hilary S. Myron, Richard K. Summerbell, Constance A. Mackenzie, Acute renal injury cause by confirmed Psilocybe cubensis mushroom ingestion,
Medical Mycology Case Reports, Volume 23, 2019, Pages 55-57, ISSN 2211-7539,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mmcr.2018.12.007. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...)
Abstract: Psilocybe mushrooms are consumed for their hallucinogenic properties. Fortunately, there are relatively few adverse effects associated with their consumption. This is the first reported case of acute kidney injury (AKI) secondary to confirmed ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. A 15-year-old male developed symptomatic AKI 36 h post-ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. He was admitted to hospital with hypertension, nausea and abdominal pain and a creatinine of 450 mmol/L. A sample of the crop of mushrooms was confirmed by mass spectrometry to contain psilocin. On day 5 post-admission, he was discharged home. Outpatient follow-up confirmed complete resolution of his renal function.
Keywords: Psilocybe; Nephrotoxicity; Mushrooms; Kidney injury
I wonder if there was an accidental polyculture issue, either with a different mushroom or a freak mutation that caused that particular shroom to synthesize toxic compounds. When growing directly from spores, you get mixed genetics, so your various mushrooms will grow slightly differently (if you want consistent genetics you grow clones from an isolate via agar plate or tissue sample from fruiting body).
Even drinking it I would think would be completely fine. The water itself doesn't get activated.
I found this:
Ok so 300 for an hour (we'll assume the hair is cut off and the exposure either stops or 90% reduces) means no problem. Don't do that every day that's all.But it's from a prepper site that doesn't cite their own sources.
I found this: https://www.energy.gov/ehss/articles/doe-ionizing-radiation-...
Which uses rem instead of cpm. An on-line converter of unknown quality says 300 cpm is 500 rem, and the pdf from the .gov site says 500 rem is "death probable in 2-3 weeks", but I think that chart is saying that's whole body & no therapy. Where this is probably mostly hair that can be just cut off totally let alone washed, and so the elevated exposure is probably both low and short duration, and medical therapy (whatever that means, if any in this case) on top.
I can't tell, could be the same as just visting a country with a slightly higher background that isn't a problem for anyone, to dead in a month. Leaning towards no problem just because of the short time and apparently mostly external and removable source.
However, it's not nothing either. It's maybe no problem for this person only because they avoided ingesting the water and the water was very quickly washed off and presumably their hair was cut off and all clothes etc removed as fast as possible. It's clearly at least "rather hot" and you can't just play in it and have prolonged exposure and ingestion. It doesn't seem to be "basically zero".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counts_per_minute
Assuming this website was used, it looks like it does a naive multiplication by 5/3, which seems... simplistic? The rest of the page doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either. No indication of how the conversion factor was derived and there's a bunch of links to other CPM -> <radiation-related unit> calculators. On top of that, the landing page for the root domain boasts about AI capabilities and their AI page prominently features "Elevate Your Content Creation" and "Generate high-quality AI content with ease!"
[0]: https://www.inayam.co/unit-converter/radioactivity/counts_pe...
The linked report doesn't say how radioactive his hair is or give any indication of whether the person in question is threatened by this reading. Could be bad, could be nothing, we just know it is higher than normal.
EDIT The report below it seems to literally be "nothing interesting happened". The thresholds here for something to be reportable are very low. Frankly I don't know why this story is upvoted so much but I'm not about to make a bigger deal about it than one sentence.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB/videos
Not necessarily nuclear (since chemical and industrial accidents are much, muhc more likely), but highly recommended if you're interested in such incidents and their causes.
But just now I read that a (sharply reduced) budget had passed the house? [2] does anyone know what the current state is?
[0]: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/only-federal-agency-that-i...
[2]: https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/27090-house...
There is essentially zero risk to the operation of the plant (or this worker!) from such an event.
Imagine if oil and gas facilities were required for any worker fall to have federal government workers visit onsite, draft a report for review, have it examined by expensive niche lawyers with rounds of revisions, and then have it published it publicly.
This is just a silly example of the hysterical safety-ism involving anything nuclear-related in the US.
Yes, working in any job related to energy carries risks. Just ask a roughneck, lineman, or wind turbine installer.
I guess in a nuclear reactor there is a lingual shift and the word emergency cant be used for just any old 911 call.
Like how Australians apparently call a jellyfish bite "uncomfortable"
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-08/vinegar-makes-box-jel...
If you ever become prime Minister of Australia, and find yourself on an oceanside bombing range, don't go spear fishing.
In this case, not much. It's still an exposure event and absolutely worth giving medical attention to assess continued exposure levels from ingested contamination and generally be overly cautious. But that doesn't mean it's ultimately going to be a significant factor in this workers risk for radiation induced disease. It's certainly better than living in the vicinity of coal mining and processing plants.
If you fell in a lake and accidentally ingested some wayer known to contain some pathagen dangerous to humans, you might seek medical care, but I don't think most people would consider that an emergency. This is similar.
Not sure about spiders. Are their fangs considered to be teeth? Platypus have venomous spurs, not sure what that’s called.
The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense. This is an internal contamination event with unknown but potentially severe consequences.
> According to federal reports, the contractor ingested some of the reactor water before being yanked out, scrubbed down, and checked for radiation. They walked away with only minor injuries and about 300 counts per minute of radiation detected in their hair.
> That sounds like a lot, but apparently it isn't terribly serious. He underwent a decontamination scrubdown and was back on the job by Wednesday.
For reference, in Canada, that is considered trace contamination and not dose. You would experience 300-800 CPM on a commercial airliner during the entirety of your flight, for comparison.
edit: adding to this that the site in question, Palisades, is shut-down and is under decommissioning and was not operating at the time - so while the water would have had some radioactivity due to exposure to the formerly active core, it was not like falling into an operating reactor or into moderating heavy water... also something that cannot happen with a pressurized reactor such as this one.
EDIT: 300-600 CPM above background radiation levels is for EXTERNAL environmental monitoring, not for POST-DECONTAMINATION readings on a contaminated person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coll%C3%A9?wprov=sfti1
https://github.com/arthurcolle/Ronald-Colle-Papers
I love how punchy you are! And the astronomy photos. Take care :)
As someone who is not involved in this ongoing discussion, I have to just say that invoking LLM agents when asked for credentials is not going to go in your favor.
I was just sharing background. I want to make good models that can help scientists do work. Your personal feelings about LLMs and their capabilities feels quite distinct from the focus on this post, and the chain of comments that have led us here.
There is incentive to play down accidents. No idea what happened here, I actually rather think it recived publicity because falling into a nuclear reactor pool sounds way more dramatic than it is, but ... not my area. Still was happy to get arthurcolle's input.
Misinformation, whether ill-intentioned or not, does real and tangible harm to our society. Misinformation about the supposed dangers of nuclear power, as arthurcolle is spreading, are especially harmful because they form the foundation are the biggest obstacle to safe, clean, cheap, and abundant energy that could radically improve our lives at the systemic level.
Further, your reasoning is biased towards safety (rather than risk), which seems completely sane.
I cannot overstate how dangerous to human prosperity this false equivalence is. It is a first-tier ideological scourge that we entertain at great peril both to critical thought and the notion of objective truth itself.
On the other hand, it’s an excellent proxy to clarify that an idea, position, or sometimes even an entire ideology or its sycophant exist for entertainment purposes only and must not, on their own merits, be taken seriously.
Are we really so isolated from the brutality of nature to think that the inconvenient beating of a butterfly’s wings is the same category of experience as being disemboweled and eaten alive by a hungry beast?
Or is it that the whole ideological sham of the violence of ideas is merely a cowardice, a poverty of ingenuity, a plea for clemency by virtue of infantilism?
The pen, or the thought given flight, is mightier than the sword.
That does not make an idea a sword. It is in character , spirit, reach, and endurance a very different type of thing. A sword can be forged from an idea, but an idea will never spring forth from a blade.
Hell in a hand basket, get off my lawn, and uphill both ways to school. Lol.
Who claimed the event was normal? A worker falling in non contaminated water would not be normal. Many things are bot normal and not emergencies. False dichotomy and straw man are logical fallacies.
Were the plant cost and status meant to support your claim 300 counts per minute was a red flag? They appeared irrelevant.
You very much do, if you're calling into question the statements in the article that it's fine.
Are you qualified to make the statement I'm replying to?
Everyone is wrong sometimes. When you realize you’re wrong, do you update your beliefs to be correct, or do you double down?
Story checks out. I think this would pass.
FTA: “This is an eight-hour notification, non-emergency, for the transportation of a contaminated person offsite“
I read that as that the “non-emergency” classification isn’t for the victim or the “fell into a nuclear reactor pool”, but for the effects on those outside the facility of sending the victim off site.
This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.
As a general rule, falling into a reactor pool is probably fine, as long as you don't reach the bottom. (But please don't try it.)
There's even an XKCD "What if" about it. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
> On August 31st, 2010, a diver was servicing the spent fuel pool at the Leibstadt nuclear reactor in Switzerland. He spotted an unidentified length of tubing on the bottom of the pool and radioed his supervisor to ask what to do. He was told to put it in his tool basket, which he did. Due to bubble noise in the pool, he didn’t hear his radiation alarm.
When the tool basket was lifted from the water, the room’s radiation alarms went off. The basket was dropped back in the water and the diver left the pool. The diver’s dosimeter badges showed that he’d received a higher-than-normal whole-body dose, and the dose in his right hand was extremely high.
The object turned out to be protective tubing from a radiation monitor in the reactor core, made highly radioactive by neutron flux. It had been accidentally sheared off while a capsule was being closed in 2006. It sank to a remote corner of the pool floor, where it sat unnoticed for four years.
The tubing was so radioactive that if he’d tucked it into a tool belt or shoulder bag, where it sat close to his body, he could’ve been killed. As it was, the water protected him, and only his hand—a body part more resistant to radiation than the delicate internal organs—received a heavy dose
I love this book. Randall is such a gifted artist
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.”
For CPM, what matters is "CPM of <WHAT>"
CPM just tells you the number of particle detection. It does not tell you the particle type (e.g. alpha, beta, gamma) nor the energy level (i.e. eV). Without context, it is meaningless.
As an example, I can confidently say you are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you[0]. 1CPM or 1e20CPM, who cares. Conversely, 1 CPM can be deadly. You definitely don't want to be hit by a single ReV (10^27) proton (good luck producing that though). Context matters.
Which still needs context.Sievert is joule per kilogram. So energy divided per mass, much like pressure is force over area. But determining biological impact still takes interpretation. You have weight factors by particle types (e.g. alpha = 2x beta) and there is also weighting factor for internal/external dose and locations like soft tissue (e.g. higher weighting for dose at throat vs dose at hands).
This is why it is incredibly important to use caution when interpreting radiation values. If you don't have training in this it is incredibly easy to unknowingly make major errors. The little details can dramatically change the outcome. Context is critical.
I'm not here to tell you how to actually do the calculation (you'll need a lot more info), I'm here to tell you that it's not easy and you're likely doing it wrong. The experts are not dumb. You're just missing context and a first order approximation is nowhere near enough for an accurate conclusion. It's nuclear physics lol
It shouldn't need be said, but nuclear physics is, in fact, complicated.
[0] https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/faqs/
I mean, if you actually had a neutrino detector that produced 10e10 CPM over your cross-section, then it would matter for you, because particle physicists would kidnap you to learn the secret :)
Sufficient to say that you'd be very popular, but in probably the least fun way possible.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
Dumb question from a true non-expert:
So CPM varies with all those factors you mention, but wouldn't the site HP team know exactly what detector they used, the geometry, distance, etc.? They could convert to dose if they wanted, right?
Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv? Seems like that would be more useful for any medical team, any set of potential regulators or regulatory bodies as well as just general public understanding (drawing on my father's work here as he always emphasized the tension between "public fears radiation unnecessarily" and "industry safety protocols are inconsistent")
Follow-up: Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event? Or does staying with CPM keep things conveniently vague? Because from my limited understanding, if they did a proper survey, they have everything needed to calculate dose.
To get the actual effective dosage you'll need a lot more information and calculations. The CPM can give you a decent estimate, if you already know context, but it is meaningless if you don't. So to an expert in that space it's a good quick estimate, but to an average person it isn't (even to above average people).
In context is also being used as a stepping stone for quick evaluation. They sent the guy to the hospital and he'll get a better estimate of dosage there. I'm sure they also were doing those calculations prior to sending him out. It may just be customary to use CPM units. That part I don't know. Here's the page they reference though[0] (there's only a single (xii) so easy to find).
[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/p...
[disclosure] I have training in nuclear physics, including in radiation dosages (I worked on developing shielding materials), but I have not worked on a reactor (though I've seen reactors and Cherenkov Radiation :) so the customs of the bureaucracy are beyond my wheelhouse. But from my experience I'm not surprised by this. I would expect a lot more documentation and accurate measurements are being passed through other channels.
In that context, I'd guess that the 300 CPM figure is just a signpost that says "we measured the worker to make sure that he was safe to release to a hospital."
Here, take METAR as an example. This is broadcast on open airwaves and every pilot can read this. Here's the latest one from KSFO[0]
Is this public? YesIs the information intended to be given out to the public in a manner in which the general public can interpret? No. It's encoded lol. But you can hear that on the radio and if you're trained (could go to a public library to train yourself) and yeah it makes sense. It is specifically intended to be concise and communicate only the absolute minimum amount of necessary information.
For another example, look at arXiv. Is it public? Yes. Are the papers published there written for the general public? No. They are written for peers.
So yes, it is "public transparency", but not for transparency to people who aren't train in nuclear physics. (Which is what I previously said)
Don't confuse "public" with "for you"
[0] https://aviationweather.gov/data/metar/?ids=KSFO
Basically, the procedures for certain environments differ. If you want to gather dosage data, you use a dosimeter. If you want a binary Yes/No method of detecting contamination, you use a geiger counter and determine if the count rate is above a certain range (depending on background radiation and other factors).
The 300CPM metric just indicates whether they're clean or not after they've been scrubbed down. It doesn't measure the dose they took.
The USNRC is currently not operating normally due to the government shutdown. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
CPM is a raw stat from the sensor. There’s many different designs of dosimeters and they all read differently so you have to ask “what brand and model did you use?” You then apply a function to the data to normalize it into a real unit.
But CPM is the cool thing that makes the click-click-click sound. (The absolute rate of clicks also is not useful.)
This might be 500+ MBq (0.5 GBq). Yeah it's a different isotope, but clearly not a "non-emergency"
EDIT: (after 1 hr) - Litvinenko dose was 4GBq - I was wrong by 3 orders of magnitude. My bad
The poor guy who fell in the pool probably didn't take any Alpha ray, wasn't taking all the radiation on a specific place, and while in my country we would calculate the dose he took before sending him back to work, he would probably work again in the same nuclear sector (this isn't the case for anyone, I know someone who dive to get the radioactive/explosive/poisonous trash we put in the water in the 50s until the 90s, he now cannot work on any radioactive trash.)
the thing is that this type of "violation" can easily be prevented by including the obligatory showering or shaving as part of the contract, so either they consent or they didn't end up in a position where they can be exposed to radioactive matter.
So this can not explain why the hair wasn't shaved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LiveFromNewYork/comments/1bh2edu/th...
I'm essentially pro-nuclear, I just don't trust people who run it.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0534/ML053410342.pdf
NRC is a good place to start. They have been at trying to prevent tech from hurting people for awhile.
> What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
> Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
Among other things, he had to sit inside an enclosure made of scintillator material for a period of time, to make sure he wasn't contaminated. Then he also got blood tests for heavy metals etc. They pretty much went by the book for all of these tests.
Also, the facility is the only place that's equipped for this kind of situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCfapqYy00
It's important to identify even small defects or incidents so that patterns can be noticed before they turn into larger issues. You see the same breaker tripping at 3x the rate of other ones, and even though maybe nothing was damaged you now know there's something to investigate.
Sea-drilling rigs (oil) have far more potential for environmental damage than modern nuclear plants
Yet they have no federal public register for when a worker falls overboard (an incident far more likely to result in death).
When an oil rig has an incident, cities and hospitals and food storage and logistics aren't disrupted.
Key word: "modern". A key aspect of a modern nuclear plant, that supports its high level of safety, is the required incident reporting and followup.
The relevant issue is not really about a single worker being injured or dying. It's about detecting safety issues which could lead to a catastrophe far beyond what a sea oil drilling rig can, at least when it comes to human life and habitability of the surrounding area.
For example, after Chernobyl, much of Europe had to deal with contamination from cesium 137.
The entire planet's geological history shows when the nuclear age started, because humans are irresponsible in aggregate. (See also global warming.)
> Aaaand it’s this alarmist attitude ...
You're providing an object lesson in why humans can't really be trusted to operate systems like this over the long term.
Ironically so are you. The coal we burn puts far more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants do. Yet we make sure nuclear isn't viable and burn coal like crazy. We do this only because of the type of risk telescoping you are doing. If you do a rational risk assessment, you will see that even operating nuclear plants as shown in the Simpsons would have less risk than what we are doing now. There is a risk to doing nothing. You are missing that part in your assessment.
A worker falling into a reactor pool (which is just room temp water with very little risk) is not a catastrophe, yet due to the absurd safetyism surrounding nuclear it requires a federal report.
We don’t require this level of cost insanity for far more deadly worker events at oil, gas, solar or wind facilities.
There is no systemic risk from worker falls. MAYBE the plant in question should address hand railing heights from pre-ADA construction. It certainly shouldn’t require multiple federal government employees to create a report on it and be publicly listed in federal register and reported on by hundreds of news outlets.
You’re making my point.
Doing it often doesn’t really add to the cost. More reporting is helpful because it explicitly makes it clear even operational issues can have lessons to be learned from. It also keeps the reporting system running and operationally well maintained.
WebPKI does this as well.
If you're asking why it's interesting for HN, I think it's actually because people are fascinated with nuclear, in a positive way.
They will still try to decontaminate you of any radioactive materials they can scrub off as a matter of course, but 300 counts per minute, while noticeably higher than background radiation levels, is pretty benign in the grand scheme of things. The fact that you can still count individual radioactive emissions is incredibly good news compared to how bad things could be.
Especially since the reactor will have been shutdown for some time by definition, if the reactor cavity is open enough to fall into. Hopefully the low rate of radioactivity evidenced by the counts on the person's hair is matched by the level of radioactivity in the water.
And on that note, medical attention would also be provided as a matter of course after a fall like this, but it seems to me that the physical injury of falling some distance and possibly hitting metal on the way down is going to be more of a danger than the radiation, especially compared to the sources of radiation people naturally run into (especially cigarette smoke, whether primary or secondhand).
This sort of place is safe enough to bring your kid into without significant precautions (I got to do this as a kid—it was really cool). The biggest risk by far is drowning.
Relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Or to put it another way, 300 CPM (which is a rate) is less than how much radiation you get when on a flight, or how much radiation you get at higher elevations. Even giving a simple explanation of how to calculate Greys (the actual measure you are looking for) takes up the better part of a page. Hell, your bones are radioactive. Yet there are plenty of people posting that somehow the risk to this guy is radioactivity. In reality, his biggest problem is probably going to be finding a new job.
For his job, depends on the dose he took. In my country he would have been on benefits until the dose was calculated, then if possible, reintegrated in the team, or directed towards a new job if not (paid formation and everything). I've studied with a diver who couldn't work with radioactive trash anymore, he wasn't meant to be a SWE in the end, he now dive for unexploded WW2 stuff in the north sea/Baltic I think
The NRC would make you attend training and get decontaminated if you had to cross a street if they operated the roads.
TL;DR you're always getting some ionizing radiation, how much matters.
Are you sure about that? 6200 mSv is 6.2 Sv, which I understand to be near-universally deadly. That dosage would be profoundly incompatible with the news that the worker was being sent offsite to seek non-emergency medical attention.
Poking around, it looks like "counts per minute" have to get converted to a dosage using an instrument-specific formula. I CBA to go find that formula, but you're quite welcome to.
There are 4 types of ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, gamma/x-rays and neutron flux. Each one has a different rate it is blocked by different materials (water, air, etc). Each one has a different risk to people. You have to compute counts per unit time emitted from a point source for each of the different types of radiation. Then you have to compute the amount of "arc" the person is in. Then you have counts being absorbed and you next multiply each count by a fixed factor depending on the type of radiation. This final number gives you total Greys per unit time, then you then have to divide by the mass of the person. Then you multiple that number by the total amount of time and that gives you total Greys absorbed. That's the number you use to assess risk to the person. For reference, this guy probably got less than 1 Grey. Someone getting radiation treatment for cancer might get 75 Greys.
So please stop trying to calculate this stuff yourself. I'm pretty sure you are doing it wrong. This guy will be fine.
PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
The US's NRC disagrees with you. From [0], they say this about the sievert and rem:
and have this to say about the gray: Grays seem to be "amount of radiation absorbed per kg". Looking further, the "Measuring Radiation" page at [1] directly contradicts your claim. Speaking about rems and Svs, it says: I'm definitely not an expert, but the NRC is pretty official, and their explanations sound pretty clear to me. Is what they're saying here incorrect?> 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation.
Are you sure about that? <https://xkcd.com/radiation/> claims 4 mSv per year as normal radiation dosage, and 50 mSv per year as maximum permitted annual dosage for "US radiation workers", whatever that means.
I think you're off by a factor of a thousand for the typical exposure level and off by a factor of a hundred for the exposure level where they stop letting you work near the radioactives for a year.
[0] <https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/full-text>
[1] <https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/measu...>
"Dose absorbed" is a physical measure of ionizing radiation that is directed at something. That's measured in rems or sieverts (or Grays, notice the spelling). "Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A). Both those measures combine the count rates for the 4 different types of radiation into 1 amount. "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person. Even more confusing there is a Gray (dose absorbed) and a Grey (biological impact of a dose absorbed, or dose equivalent); they are different.
The part about beta and gamma radiation is about establishing a baseline for converting between the two units but should never be used for calculating "dose equivalent" in practice. Its how we determine the value of 1 Grey. It isn't a way to convert from "dose equivalent" to "dose absorbed".
I'm trying to simplify this stuff for an audience without the necessary background information. Doing that requires me cutting out a bunch of details. The NRC text on the other hand is technically precise but also is mentioning a lot of things that are true but confusing or only useful for calibrating instruments. They are also explaining one tiny part of this and you left out the parts where they talk about how to combine the different counts for each type of radiation into one measurement. That's something else I'm also trying to explain at the same time. So I'm covering more ground and trying to do so with simpler terms. That's going to mean you can cherry pick stuff but doing that will to give you the wrong impression.
Natural background radiation varies by location on earth by a factor of 300. That 4 mSv per year is for natural background radiation at the low end of the scale which happens at sea level in places without Uranium or Thorium deposits. However, there are places where people live (and have lived for 1000s of years) where the natural background radiation is 300x that amount or about 1.2Sv/year. There is no observed increase in cancer rates in those locations despite decades of study. I'm also assuming that the "normal person" will take a flight or two and potentially be near other sources of radiation without knowing it (like your smoke detector).
PS The 50 mSv/year number is absurdly low. Its one of the main complaints about how the NRC handles nuclear radiation. Its literally lower than the natural background radiation at sites in India and Brazil.
Would you provide a link to the source of this average instrument specific rate?
I'm interested in knowing which instruments designed to detect low-to-medium-level radiation sources on a human are configured so that five detections per second would equate to a "You're fucking dead; there's really no hope for you" dose.
(Did you ask an LLM to "convert counts per minute to mSv" and fail to sanity-check the confident-sounding result it gave you?)
> ...everything emits...
Given that the crust and sea and air of this planet are chock full of radioactives, and that every living thing on the planet builds itself out of that material, that goes without saying.
PS 300 CPM is nothing. There are places where people live where the natural background radiation is higher than that. Also, background radiation is mostly Gamma rays which is more dangerous than what comes off of fission products or nuclear fuel.
0) If you've not read this chart, do carefully read it: <https://xkcd.com/radiation/>. If you've read it before, take some time to carefully re-read it.
1) The guy's getting sent off to seek non-emergency medical attention. I bet you an entire American Nickle that that attention is almost entirely for injuries sustained in the fall, rather than for radiation exposure.
Yes, it is tiring. In this case, not really because it is at least for me, humorous in a Doc Martin sort of way. But elsewhere and on places like Reddit where the pedantry is often at best unjustified and at worst, wrong, it has made me spend less time on the sites.
Isn't it much worse internally than hitting your outer skin?
The issue with ingesting deuterium/tritium is that the dose will now have to be calculated/estimated per organ, and while I don't remember exactly how it's done, it's more complex than calculating the mSv he took (I can't give you more details, I'm not competent, I've observed a radiologist a week my bachelor year to decide which master I would do, I'm now working in software which should tell you everything)
https://cns.utexas.edu/news/research/coal-power-killed-half-...
And the reason the contamination transport off-site was classified as non-emergency was because even though the amount of radiation detected on the guy is less than he'd have gotten from flying in an airplane; nuclear safety standards are so unbelievably rigorous and strict that even that small of an incident needs to be reported; even if it presents absolutely no danger to anyone anywhere (not even the guy that was contaminated) and hence is classified as a non-emergency notification.
They returned to work the next day with minor injuries due to the fall. It doesn't sound like it was an emergency to me.
⇒ the “non-emergency” classification isn’t about the “fell into a nuclear reactor pool”, but about sending the victim off site.
Roughly 10x background radiation.
So like two weeks of sunshine in a day.
Not a good day. Not fatal.
Unfortunately radiation medicine is pretty complicated and the report gives us very little info, presumably mostly because they don't have very much info. It will take some time and effort to establish more.
What we do know is that they measured 300 CPM at the person's hair, which was probably where they expected the highest count due to absorbed water (likely clothing was already stripped at this point). CPM is a tricky unit because it is something like the "raw" value from the instrument, the literal number of counts from the tube, and determining more absolute metrics like activity and dose requires knowing the calibration of the meter. The annoying thing here is that radiation protection professionals will still sometimes just write CPM because for a lot of applications there's only one or a handful of instruments approved and they tend to figure the reader knows which instrument they have. Frustrating. Still, for the common LND7311 tube and Cs137, 300CPM is a little below 1 uSv/hr. That wouldn't equate to any meaningful risk (a common rule of thumb is that a couple mSv is typical annual background exposure). However, for a less sensitive detector, the dose could be much higher (LND7311 is often used in pancake probes for frisking because it is very sensitive and just background is often hundreds of CPM). Someone who knows NRC practices better might know what detector would be used here.
That said the field dose here is really not the concern, committed dose from ingesting the water is. Ingesting radioactive material is extremely dangerous because, depending on the specific isotopes involved, it can persist in the body for a very long time and accumulate in specific organs. Unfortunately it is also difficult to assess. This person will likely go to a hospital with a specialty center equipped with a full body counter, and counts will also be taken on blood samples. These are ways of estimating the amount of radioactive isotopes in the body. In some cases tissue samples of specific organs may be taken.
I believe that the cavity pool water would be "clean" other than induced radioactivity (activation products from being bombarded by radiation). Because water shields so well the pool should not be that "hot" from this process. Most of those products have short half-lives which, on the one hand, means that they deliver a higher dose over a shorter period of time---but also means they will not longer forever and are less likely to be a chronic problem if they are not an acute one.
I suspect this will get some press coverage and we will perhaps learn more about the patient's state.
Another way we can get at this question is by the bureaucracy of the notification. An 8-hour notification as done here is required in relatively minor cases. Usually for a "big deal emergency" a one-hour notification is required. The definition of such an emergency depends on the site emergency plan but I think acute radiation exposure to a worker would generally qualify.
All that disclaimer aside: a banana produces about 15 Bq (which is s^-1), i.e. 900 cpm.
As others had said, more alarming part is that they ingested the water, which could go like defected Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. But it could also be like man eating few bananas seasoned with expired Himalayan salt. The report just doesn't say how much of what was ingested.
Accidental swimming is no fun, I wish the guy a full recovery from dihydrogen monoxide poisoning.
Hair contaminated
In other news, a kitten named millicurie did a really adorable thing.
The only remarkable fact here is that the regulatory structure is strong enough that we commoners are entitled to hear about it. That's a Very Good Thing, and one I wish we enjoyed apropos, say, the corporate veil (looking at you, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Aramco, Sinopec, Amazon, Oracle, AIPAC, United, The Trump Organization, X Corp, Paramount, Skydance, eMed Population Health, Inc., et. al.).
But the story here is a guy fell into some water, and is following SOP (which is also a Very Good Thing).
Please don't feed the clickbait.
Reports don't mean danger, and they don't mean lack of control. Reports are information.
I'm also not totally against nuclear, in case you are suspecting that. I do think though, that we as a society aren't at the point where we have the ability to completely control such technology, contrary to what proponents of much higher utilization of nuclear like to claim. Reports of fuses seemingly without failover or stolen equipment seem to support that argument.
Meanwhile, in Texas, 1.5 people die every day working in Oil and Gas extraction.
A few people die every year installing or falling off of wind turbines.
But by all means, let's make this a news story instead and keep making nuclear sound scary. I’m sure the person who posted this to HN with this clickbait title has zero political beliefs.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Wow
I find it highly informative that the required PPE for working in that location is a life jacket so you float in case you fall in, rather than a tether and fall arrest harness so that it's not possible to fall in.
300 CPM is nothing, background levels might be 150.
He went back to work the next day. They don't provide much detail about the minor injuries but it seems that the biggest issue is maybe a bruised shin from the fall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8&t=11s
(Not exactly same but close)
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
How dumb do you have to be to not only fall into it but to also swallow it...