Thursday, March 17, 2011

Japan plant crisis hits close to home for U.S. nuclear workers

Japan plant crisis hits close to home for U.S. nuclear workers

By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY

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When he was a young worker at a nuclear power plant in Kansas, Raymond Rogers and his wife, Lori, planned for the worst.
If an accident happened at the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant in Burlington, Lori was to take their two young children to a safer location and he would join them when he could.
Now, 26 years into the industry, with both children grown and gone, the topic of “what if" is so worn, “We don't even talk about it much in the house,” says Rogers, 53. But his thinking is the same: If disaster struck and it was his job to stay, he would.
"When the World Trade Center went down, what did those firefighters do? They went in and did their jobs," says Rogers, who rose from day laborer to journeyman mechanic to mechanical planner and president of the local union for the 1,000-employee plant. “That’s what I signed on for.”
While the world watches the heroic efforts of a skeleton crew of workers attempting to stave off a nuclear meltdown in Japan, nuclear energy workers in the U.S. are thinking hard about what it would be like in their shoes.
"As a worker, you would be thinking, ‘I want to help the public, but I know I'm at a lot more risk,’ ” says Steve Williams, 56, who left his job at the Donald C. Cook Nuclear Power Plant in Bridgman, Mich., last year after taking a buyout. The prospect "would cause someone to pause," Williams says.
Reconsidering the improbable
About 60,000 people work in the U.S. nuclear energy industry. Like Rogers and Williams, plant workers are well trained to respond to emergencies that never materialize. Yet they live daily with the knowledge that they might. The unprecedented chain of catastrophes that crippled the Japanese plant a week ago has brought the worst scenarios to life.
The risk at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station was so great that most emergency workers had to be evacuated earlier this week. Left behind was a crew of 50 that had to stop work at times because of spiking radiation levels, according to the Associated Press. About 180 workers were back Wednesday night, AP reported.
The Japanese workers have six reactors to contend with, three in danger of meltdowns and three others with spent fuel pools that may present an even greater radiation risk.
Just working in the dark, as those employees have done, would be unnerving, says Todd Newkirk, 48, a former Wolf Creek plant worker. Without lights — and windows — nuclear plants become “like a tomb, a maze, where the dose levels can go up around any corner,” Newkirk says.
To prevent a larger disaster, the Japanese workers have placed their own lives in jeopardy, risking excessive radiation doses that could lead to cancer or other illnesses. Some may have lost homes or loved ones in the earthquake and tsunami that preceded the nuclear plant crisis.
“It's got to be heart-wrenching, knowing that their homes may be lost. You can visualize someone saying, ‘I'm a worker, not a prisoner, and leaving,’” Newkirk says. "But, like a policeman or fireman, you've got a duty to serve. There's pretty heroic stuff going on."
Earlier this week, Japan's Health Ministry raised the limit as to how much radiation each worker could be exposed to. The limit went from 100 to 250 millisieverts. American nuclear plant workers can be exposed to up to 50 millisieverts a year, or 5 rem, federal regulations say. (Rem is how the U.S. measures radiation doses. In the metric system, the unit is sievert.)
A ‘daunting’ situation
Few U.S. nuclear workers ever exceed more than 1 rem of exposure a year, says David Richardson, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina who has studied the long-term health risks for nuclear plant workers. Richardson estimates that U.S. nuclear workers, over an entire career, would rarely get more than 10 rem of exposure.
He says the Japanese workers are likely being moved in and out of work areas "by the minute" to avoid acute exposure. "The workers are in a situation now … that is really daunting," Richardson says.
Nuclear plant workers wear monitors to track their exposure. One sounds an alarm if exposures get too high when they are in hotter parts of the plant, near the reactor or steam generator, for instance.
“You can just hear it, going ‘tick, tick, tick, tick,’” says Williams, who frequently worked on equipment in locked-down radioactive areas of the plant.
In one year, Williams’ radiation exposure exceeded 1 rem, which he was told was among the highest in the plant. Still, he considers his work at the nuclear plant safer than a previous job at a coal-burning power plant. Moving from coal to a nuclear plant was like “going to a hospital,” Williams says.
Working in areas of a nuclear plant where radiation levels are higher than in other parts , but still controlled, was "just part of the job," says Donald Gartner, 61, who retired two years ago after 30 years at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in North Perry, Ohio.
He's watching the events in Japan closely, monitoring news reports for hours a day. He came close to an emergency situation only once, in 2003 when East Coast blackouts shut off power and the Perry plant switched to backup generators. Employees handled the situation. "That was their job,” s just what they did,"
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