nuclear-news

Japanese nuclear workers called upon for heroic sacrifice

Disaster officials could face a grim choice: Scale back their containment efforts or allow workers to face radiation levels that could significantly increase their risk of cancer…..The actions of the power plant workers in Japan have already been described as heroic,

Japan nuclear accident poses crisis for worker safety, latimes.com, 17 march 11, Workers at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could rapidly reach their annual radiation exposure limit and may have to be rotated out soon.
Bursts of radiation being released at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant could mean workers there will have to be quickly rotated out, and some could rapidly reach their annual exposure limit, complicating efforts to contain Japan’s continuing nuclear crisis.

“Those are pretty brave people,” David Brenner, the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, said of the workers. “There are going to be some martyrs among them.”

Disaster officials could face a grim choice: Scale back their containment efforts or allow workers to face radiation levels that could significantly increase their risk of cancer.
Reports on Thursday indicated that at times radiation was intense enough to exceed even Japan’s newly raised annual limit in as little as an hour.

The new limit — 250 millisieverts — is five times the allowable exposure in U.S. nuclear plants and 125 times what workers typically receive each year…….
The actions of the power plant workers in Japan have already been described as heroic, and examples of heroism are common in such situations, said Dr. Fred Mettler, a University of New Mexico radiologist and advisor to the U.N. on radiation safety.

At one point during the Chernobyl disaster, he said, workers were conferring about how much water was in one reactor pool. No one knew the answer and their instruments couldn’t tell them, he said. “An Armenian engineer slipped out and came back in 30 minutes. He said, ‘There’s 3 feet of water,’ ” Mettler said. “He did that on his own.”

The engineer died soon after of acute radiation poisoning……

March 18, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - Fukushima 2011, Japan, Religion and ethics