When you leak 400k gallons of radioactive water and don't say anything publicly for months...

[SteveGangi]

They’ll shit themselves when they run a Geiger counter over their fancy granite countertops.

Hell, there's radon EVERYwhere. Can't avoid it, it's everywhere.

 

[SteveGangi]

Yeah and I'm still thin. No green skin, no 1000 pounds of muscle.

 

[Matt_21]

Enough in my basement where I have a remediation fan running 24/7.


Nothing cool ever happens like me being able to shoot spiderwebs. Or hang out with Aunt May.


mmmmm…… Aunt May.


View attachment 678430

Thank you for your post.
That is all.

 

[THDNUT]

This story reminds me of the old Firesign Theater album where they were making fun of the accent of native Minnesotans.

The name of the album was "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"

"Yomping into da vater in Minnisotah" was the line on the album.

 

[TheX]

I tried to get a tour of the reactors on the Enterprise. Never had any friends on ships company with access.

 

[Leee]

I tried to get a tour of the reactors on the Enterprise. Never had any friends on ships company with access.

Tiny compared to those ashore for electrical generation.
Not sure how much you could actually see - they are packed pretty tightly from what my Navy nuke buddies said.

But the enrichment they run on is something else altogether.
Power plant I was in ran fuel enriched up to around 4.5% while the naval reactors invert that percentage.

From what I understand, their enrichment is over 90%.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

 

[Roberteaux]

Tiny compared to those ashore for electrical generation.
Not sure how much you could actually see - they are packed pretty tightly from what my Navy nuke buddies said.

But the enrichment they run on is something else altogether.
Powe plant I was in ran fuel enriched up to around 4.5% while the naval reactors invert that percentage.

From what I understand, their enrichment is over 90%.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

I don't know much about the subject and can't be at all specific... but I did read that the reactors aboard a nuclear submarine are ultimately powered by a chunk of Uranium 238 that starts out about the size of a golf ball. This is enough fuel to run the sub for up to a couple of decades, though the fuel seems to be refreshed or enriched at some point prior to such a lengthy period of time.

Though they do have to resurface for resupply and such-- and there's preventative maintenance that must be performed at various intervals as well-- that golf ball-sized chunk of U238 gives those subs virtually unlimited range, as well as the capability of remaining submerged for several months at a time if necessary. The typical mission seems to be about two or three months, and the sub may travel up to 20,000 miles in that time period.

The missions could be stretched out for a longer period of time, but the Navy believes it's best to rotate crews every so often. Three months on a submarine is challenging in a great many ways, not the least of which is that it's psychologically challenging. It's an unusually stressful kind of duty, to say the least, and the operational environment is nothing if not a totally uptight, "no slack, no excuses" kind of working environment.

Goofball, borderline-capable seamen don't tend to make it as sub crew members. The good ones are almost a breed all their own.

--R

 

[Leee]

Uranium 238 is the garden-variety stuff, as it comes out of the ground.
Uranium 235 is fissile, but occurs in tiny amounts naturally.

The refining process is the enrichment.
When you have fuel that is 4% U-235, it is then considered to be enriched at 4%.

I don’t know the physical size of the core in the naval reactors, but I do know that their tiny relative size is partly because of the high enrichment.

 

[revtime]

I watched C.H.U.D. just last night.

 

[LtDave32]

We currently have a Uranium 238 and Gross Alpha problem in our water.

It's not enough to really *do* anything, but it's just above the county's limits in PPB.

it comes off the skin of the gravel down below, some 325 feet to the water table.

This is not unusual. Kitty litter also gives off radioactive readings.

At any rate, we take the trip to town to take advantage of the Culligan shop and the $0.25 per gl dispensers. We and the pets consume only that water.

 

[lancpudn]

 

[Bobby Mahogany]

I once worked as a member of a labor union located in Oswego, NY. As a result, I worked at a couple of nuke plants on the shore of Lake Ontario. The general area is almost exactly nine miles from Oswego and was/is known as "Nine Mile Point".

During reactor maintenance shutdowns, I'd be sent in to do the laundry. That is, I'd go around to various workstations to retrieve barely-irradiated protective gear used by the techs who went to work in "hot" places, and I'd wash the damned clothes, boots, gloves, and etc. that were left in the work station bins after use.

I was informed at one point that even though the clothing I was laundering was so barely irradiated as to even be detectable, the water being used in the process was now "nuclear waste". The tech telling me this stuff pointed out a railroad spur that ran up to the plant and a fleet of tank cars sitting on a siding.

What that was all about was that part of the maintenance program which required a full shut-down of the reactor also called for the entire reactor core to be flooded with water. This stuff was "slightly hotter" than the laundry I was doing. But once the flood-job was completed, they'd be pumping the irradiated water into the tank cars out on that railroad spur and would then spirit the water off to God-knows-where.

You know what was cool, weird-- and a bit scary-- about that water?

There were these two gigantic horizontal "doors" up there which, when opened, provided a view of the entire inside of the reactor from the very top on down. So, at one point, near the very end of whatever else they had going on in there, they would slide those two massive covers off the top of the egg-shaped reactor core.

One day, while those doors were open, one of the really friendly, gabby techs brought us into the area where the door-things were. He said we'd get a look at something we might find startling.

In attendance at this gathering were techs, a few of we laborers, and a gaggle of power company suits, who were wearing only lab coats and hardhats over their business attire.

That was the tip-off that this demonstration we were about to witness wasn't something that would give us all leukemia in five minutes or something.

What they did was to click off all the lights-- the ones down there in the reactor, as well as the overheads in this service area. And then we got to see that the water was actually glowing... it was a very faint, very dim blue... kind of swimming pool colored, but nowhere nearly as bright or luminescent as a lighted swimming pool.

Like, it wasn't a glow you could read a book by... it wasn't quite exactly "glowing", even. But it was faintly visible.

Even though I was well aware that I was in no danger whatsoever, it was still kind of freaky to see that IRL.

Matter of fact, I'm even a little freaked just remembering it-- though the last time I did the laundry at the NYS Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant was, like, late in 1980.

Still, it was a semi-freakish sort of thing to witness.

--R

Have you checked your sperm under a black (no racism intended... lol) light since then?

 

[Dilemma]

From a strictly practical -will this hurt me?- point of view this is a big nothing burger. Unfortunately there are other factors to consider.

Fukushima and Chernobyl were catastrophic events. Three Mile Island however was a big nothing burger also, again looking through a -will this hurt me?- lens. Unfortunately TMI had a devastating effect on the utility and public perception.

And there is the problem with nothing burger 'events' like this spill. The general public is wary if not scared shitless of nuclear. You can thank Fukushima, Chernobyl and TMI for that.

While the utility in this case promptly reported the spill to the proper agencies as required, waiting months to notify the general public was a massive mistake IMHO.

Bad optics. Plain and simple.

 

[GuitarsAnn]

Worked in the Nuclear department of our local utility for 12 years. Very safe operations. More zoomies coming off the coal piles at the fossil plants.

 

[Leee]

… waiting months to notify the general public was a massive mistake IMHO.

Bad optics. Plain and simple.

I will offer only this in their defense:

They had to have time to determine what to report.
They need measurements and numbers and data before sending out any notice to the public.

Bureaucratic and regulatory agencies move at the speed of molasses.
They need to know their data is correct (or at least defensible) before they throw it out to the wolves and the sheep in the media and the public.

 

[SteveGangi]

This story reminds me of the old Firesign Theater album where they were making fun of the accent of native Minnesotans.

The name of the album was "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"

"Yomping into da vater in Minnisotah" was the line on the album.

I had that album too. Freezing Mister Foster, Bear Wizz Beer, and Yomping

 

[SteveGangi]

Worked in the Nuclear department of our local utility for 12 years. Very safe operations. More zoomies coming off the coal piles at the fossil plants.

 

[pnuggett]

That article jumps back and forth between calling it a leak and a spill. Sometimes in the same paragraph. So WTF is it, a leak or a spill? And what's with all the frenchie metric shit?

The leak was sprung from a pipe that ran between two buildings in the power plant complex, which is 55 kilometres northwest of Minneapolis and about 600 kilometres south of Thunder Bay. State officials said they waited until more information could be gathered before making the spill public.

 

[Roberteaux]

I had that album too. Freezing Mister Foster, Bear Wizz Beer, and Yomping

Clone me, Dr. Memory!

--R

 

[CRobbins]