4 ms·

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

by donatj 1y ago

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.

andy99 1y ago
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?
- antonvs 1y ago
  "Complaining about residual radiation is for the weak." -- Lt. Worf probably
  - speed_spread 1y ago
    Klingon nuclear pools have springboards.
- grogenaut 1y ago
  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.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    > 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.
    - grogenaut 1y ago
      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.
      - simoncion 1y ago
        > 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.
        hunterpayne 1y ago
        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.
        simoncion 1y ago
        > PS 300 CPM is nothing. That depends on the instrument. It's an instrument-specific rate. I'd say that saying "300 CPM is nothing" absent any information other than the CPM is foolish. As I indicated earlier, given all of the other context we have, we can reasonably suppose that 300 CPM from whichever instrument was used in this incident is nothing to be concerned about.
  - jojobas 1y ago
    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.
- mpyne 1y ago
  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).
  - orwin 1y ago
    CPM is so useless as a unit, it doesn't mean anything.
    - mpyne 1y ago
      It can mean a lot of things, yes, but that is not the same as saying it doesn't mean anything. If the detector was pegged high you certainly wouldn't assume a neutral frame to the situation, you'd assume some kind of significant release of radioactive contamination and act accordingly until you had better data.
- ang_cire 1y ago
  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).
- lelandbatey 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- scarier 1y ago
  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. Relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
- simoncion 1y ago
  In addition to what most of the folks are saying: 0) If you've not read this chart, do carefully read it: <https://xkcd.com/radiation/ 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.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  What you "need to" do is often not decided by a rational risk assessment.
- ern 1y ago
  I get a feeling that there are a lot of people trying to minimize this incident for some reason.
  - hunterpayne 1y ago
    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.
    - orwin 1y ago
      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
      - hunterpayne 1y ago
        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.
deleted 1y ago
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by donatj 1y ago

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.

andy99 1y ago

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?

antonvs 1y ago
"Complaining about residual radiation is for the weak." -- Lt. Worf probably
- speed_spread 1y ago
  Klingon nuclear pools have springboards.
grogenaut 1y ago
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.
- simoncion 1y ago
  > 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.
  - grogenaut 1y ago
    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.
    - simoncion 1y ago
      > 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.
      - hunterpayne 1y ago
        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.
        simoncion 1y ago
        > PS 300 CPM is nothing. That depends on the instrument. It's an instrument-specific rate. I'd say that saying "300 CPM is nothing" absent any information other than the CPM is foolish. As I indicated earlier, given all of the other context we have, we can reasonably suppose that 300 CPM from whichever instrument was used in this incident is nothing to be concerned about.
- jojobas 1y ago
  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.
mpyne 1y ago
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).
- orwin 1y ago
  CPM is so useless as a unit, it doesn't mean anything.
  - mpyne 1y ago
    It can mean a lot of things, yes, but that is not the same as saying it doesn't mean anything. If the detector was pegged high you certainly wouldn't assume a neutral frame to the situation, you'd assume some kind of significant release of radioactive contamination and act accordingly until you had better data.
ang_cire 1y ago
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).
lelandbatey 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
scarier 1y ago
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. Relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
simoncion 1y ago
In addition to what most of the folks are saying: 0) If you've not read this chart, do carefully read it: <https://xkcd.com/radiation/ 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.
BurningFrog 1y ago
What you "need to" do is often not decided by a rational risk assessment.
ern 1y ago
I get a feeling that there are a lot of people trying to minimize this incident for some reason.
- hunterpayne 1y ago
  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.
  - orwin 1y ago
    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
    - hunterpayne 1y ago
      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.

deleted 1y ago

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