AlaskaDenise
In Memoriam
As radiation levels rise at the crippled reactors in northern Japan, a basic question arises: how long can workers keep struggling to ward off full meltdowns?
The workers are performing what have been described as heroic tasks, like using fire equipment to pump seawater into the three failing reactors to keep the nuclear fuel from melting down and fighting the fire at a fourth reactor.
They are operating in places that have been contaminated by radioactive isotopes from all four reactors. Technicians who have not been evacuated face an escalating exposure, and will have to be replaced if the fight is to go on. ?
If they exceed a certain amount, they can?t go back in for a day or a week or longer,? said Dr. Lew Pepper, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the effects of radiation on nuclear weapons workers. And the pool of available replacements is finite, he said: ?What do you do? You don?t have a lot of people who can do this work.?
While regulations may differ somewhat in Japan, in the United States the usual radiation exposure limit for nuclear power plant workers is 50 millisieverts, or 5 rem, per year (compared with the 0.3 rem that the Environmental Protection Agency says most people get from normal background radiation). When there is an emergency, the limit can be raised to 25 rem, which is still far below the level at which people would show symptoms or get sick.
The explosion at Fukushima?s Reactor No. 2 on Tuesday morning sent radiation levels spiking, to 8,217 microsieverts an hour from 1,941 about 40 minutes earlier. Later Tuesday, Japanese nuclear officials announced much higher levels and evacuated most of the emergency workers.
During the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986, when the reactor caught fire, operators and firefighters received high doses of radiation, sometimes within minutes and without being made aware of the dangers. More than two dozen of them died of acute radiation illness. ?People in Chernobyl were just over overexposed,? Dr. Pepper said. ?The outcome for those folks was death.?
Read more at: http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=2714
.
The workers are performing what have been described as heroic tasks, like using fire equipment to pump seawater into the three failing reactors to keep the nuclear fuel from melting down and fighting the fire at a fourth reactor.
They are operating in places that have been contaminated by radioactive isotopes from all four reactors. Technicians who have not been evacuated face an escalating exposure, and will have to be replaced if the fight is to go on. ?
If they exceed a certain amount, they can?t go back in for a day or a week or longer,? said Dr. Lew Pepper, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the effects of radiation on nuclear weapons workers. And the pool of available replacements is finite, he said: ?What do you do? You don?t have a lot of people who can do this work.?
While regulations may differ somewhat in Japan, in the United States the usual radiation exposure limit for nuclear power plant workers is 50 millisieverts, or 5 rem, per year (compared with the 0.3 rem that the Environmental Protection Agency says most people get from normal background radiation). When there is an emergency, the limit can be raised to 25 rem, which is still far below the level at which people would show symptoms or get sick.
The explosion at Fukushima?s Reactor No. 2 on Tuesday morning sent radiation levels spiking, to 8,217 microsieverts an hour from 1,941 about 40 minutes earlier. Later Tuesday, Japanese nuclear officials announced much higher levels and evacuated most of the emergency workers.
During the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986, when the reactor caught fire, operators and firefighters received high doses of radiation, sometimes within minutes and without being made aware of the dangers. More than two dozen of them died of acute radiation illness. ?People in Chernobyl were just over overexposed,? Dr. Pepper said. ?The outcome for those folks was death.?
Read more at: http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=2714
.