A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool
nrc.govPalisades MI reactor. Currently shut down and de-fueled but a restart of this reactor is apparently underway, with new fuel assemblies being delivered.[1]
Worker was wearing a life vest.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Nuclear_Generating_S...
[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
Archive of [2] (blocked me): https://archive.ph/0pzuY
dunno if the life vest bit comment of yours was sarcastic, but it is a funny remark for sure :-)
it sounds like "guy felt down in a volcano, but fortunately, he had a life vest"
My understanding is that reactor and waste pools are some of the least radioactive environments as they are constantly monitored for leakage.
I'm pretty sure the engineer at the nuclear plant I visited in elementary school drank a glass of water out of that pool to demonstrate how safe it was.
I hope I'm misremembering that but it's a pretty strong memory that totally locked in for me that that water is not necessarily dangerous.
Serious question, as daft as it might sound - do they have to chlorinate the water to stop stuff growing in it? I'd expect it'd be about "swimming pool" warm so just great for all sorts of manky algae growing.
The water is borated and heavily purified. You don’t want stuff growing inside, but at the same time you don’t want to have chlorinated water slowly corroding the metal components.
Check out this study. Pretty wild! [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760952/]
I also read in the XKCD thing that it might be up to about 50° so it's probably a bit uncomfortable for most algae type things.
I bet there's some good chance of getting wacky extremophiles though!
50C is terribly hot for a swim.
Hot spring baths usually top out around 42-43C
Would you mind sharing a link to "the xkcd thing" if you have it?
edit: sorry for being lazy, I scrolled a bit more and found it.
Relevant: "For the kinds of radiation coming off spent nuclear fuel, every 7 centimeters of water cuts the amount of radiation in half."
On the picture, the fuel rods are indeed protected by a huge quantity of water above them. But what happens below them ? They seem to be in direct contact with the ground...
People tend to avoid casually tunneling under nuclear pools.
I would guess that in reality they are either suspended and/or there is enough concrete at the bottom
Chlorinating the water would have adverse effects on material strength and longevity. Even irradiated and heated to 50c, I’ll bet there’s some extremophile bacteria in there somewhere.
Just an update: I finally remembered that it was the UVA research reactor (since decommissioned). https://news.virginia.edu/content/reacting-history
But now 100% sure that actually happened. Also it was likely a professor and not a working engineer drinking the water which makes much more sense.
Had a buddy on a nuclear sub drink water from the primary coolant loop when he joined the team.
While I do see this as a form of hazing which I am morally opposed to-
8oz (.237 liters) of primary coolant in a properly maintained pressurized water reactor might contain up to 13mrem of orally ingestible radiation, or approximately the radiation of a chest x-ray. (For comparison you get between 3-8 milirem on a 7 hour transatlantic flight)
Don’t make it your primary source of hydration and you’ll be ok. If the fuel is degraded or there is a leak (unlikely in properly maintained PWRs) the radiation dose is significantly higher.
That makes zero sense. Radiation is not a component of water; it is literally photons[0]. In the nanosecond after you fill the glass, all the radiation in it has left the volume.
I'd drink it. It's just extremely pure water, with a nuclear flashlight at the bottom of the pool - which no one could see, even if they had gamma-ray glasses on[1], because the water attenuates it so much.
[0] Or ions of hydrogen or helium, in the case of alpha and beta radiation.
[1] Which it turns out were way less cool than the Sea Monkeys(tm).
Radiation isn’t contained in the water as photons, but the coolant itself becomes radioactive through neutron activation. Even with intact fuel rods, oxygen in the water turns into N-16 with a half-life of about seven seconds, and trace metals like nickel and cobalt form isotopes such as Co-58 and Co-60. These emit strong gamma radiation while the reactor operates.
The primary coolant is not simply pure water; it contains boric acid, lithium hydroxide, dissolved hydrogen, and trace corrosion products like iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium. Under power level neutron flux, some of these elements become short- or medium-lived radionuclides. Once removed from the core, most of the activity decays within minutes, but during operation the water is measurably radioactive.
An eight-ounce sample taken from the loop at power would carry roughly the dose of a chest X-ray before it decayed away, due to these activated isotopes rather than residual photons [EPRI PWR Primary Water Chemistry Guidelines; NUREG-1437][0].
I was on site for the mid cycle outage of three mile island unit 1 around 2005. I did the data sync and transfer for the steam generator inspection, but got tutored by some old PHDs during the down time.
[0] https://downloads.regulations.gov/NRC-2020-0101-0142/content...
Thank you very much! TIL!
I mean, apparently the inventor of lead additive to gasoline used to pour the chemical over his hands to demonstrate how safe it was -- even though he knew it was actually quite toxic. So there are people who will knowingly give themselves small doses of poison to keep the money flowing.
Fair enough - although this engineer didn't stand much to gain by impressing a bunch of 10 year olds.
It's because water blocks radioactivity. It's like the opposite of the Fallout games and their radioactive water: you would have to swim right down to the radioactive material and wrap yourself around it at which point you'd basically melt.
Water blocks alpha, beta and gamma rays, but the water itself can carry radioactive elements, which I'd guess was the source of this (relatively minor) contamination.
Reactor h2o itself does not carry radiation, but any extra molecules in tend to do it, thats the reason why the water is as clean you can get, over-distilled. This by itself means that it is not potable (btw for disposal to environment it gets re-salinated), so they told the story of professor drinking it must be an urban myth. It is bad even for skin expose (swimming in it), but hopefully that worker got just a few seconds expose and is well. Source: training trip in a nuclear center.
> This by itself means that it is not potable
Do you mean because it's distilled? Distilled water is perfectly safe to drink.
Yes, that comment is whack.
And "resalinated" is nonsense. Water isn't safe because it contains salts.
I was reading accounts from the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. One of the survivors was blown out of the house and was stuck neck deep into water. Couldn't get free, so had to wait for rescue. They didn't get much of any radiation sickness afterwards.
There was a video about this I saw recently. Indeed, the person said the most dangerous risk is drowning.
I thought the main risk was from being shot by the guards before you made it to the pool?
The main risk is getting into a car accident as you outrun the cops down the freeway on your way to the reactor.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted.
See https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
“But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
So death by acute lead poisoning :-)
...only in the US.
Not from what I heard from a boss who visited a European nuclear plant.
The site contains the most dangerous poison on Earth, that is also a key component in the most feared weapon on Earth. Do you suppose in the UK they just put up signs saying "Sir or madam, kindly do not steal our plutonium"?
Hence the life vest.
TFA says: “The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair. At 1632 EDT they were sent off site to seek medical attention.”
Apparently they do have concerns.
300 counts per minute is significantly less than you’d get from a banana. Wish they’d use uSv though.
Nuclear plants follow a strict “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) principle. Any intake of reactor water or radiation exposure must be reported and evaluated no matter how small.
> Apparently they do have concerns.
Well yeah. If someone falls in water at work, you get them checked out at the hospital. The paltry amount of radiation is kind of the least of your worries if there's even the smallest risk you got some water in your lungs.
People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
> People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).
I didn't expect this level of ignorance here. Maybe reddit but this is crazy.
I didn't expect this level of unfounded ignorant hysteria here. Have you really never gone swimming and inhaled some water? Did you go to the hospital?
> In the past, these terms were used to try to explain that some fatal drowning victims had very little water in their lungs at autopsy. Now it is understood that little water enters the lungs during drowning. Moreover, when water enters the lungs, it is rapidly absorbed when breathing starts again. The amount of water that enters the lung does not determine the amount of injury or determine the treatment of drowning. The amount of injury from drowning is due to how long the victim is without oxygen.
Source: Red Cross
Maybe the common factor isn't "everybody else".
Nah mate, you've got it backwards.
Even a tiny amount of water in your lungs is a trip to the hospital.
The amount of radiation that guy was exposed to is roughly the same as eating a banana, or driving through the middle of Aberdeen with your car windows down inhaling all the radon off the granite.
Your lungs can handle a tiny amount of water just fine. It’s not pleasant but it’s fine.
You’re probably thinking of something along the lines of pneumonia, which is different than breathing some water and coughing it back up.
For the record, I think the GP comment is way off-base saying drowning is uncommon.
No, I'm not talking about pneumonia.
If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
My water rescue course is up to date. When's yours due for renewal?
As the saying goes, "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing". Your "water rescue course" taught you something that's clearly wrong, as we see with the sibling comment, while my common sense and just everyday life experience led me to the correct conclusion.
Yeah, that Red Cross link is wrong. That's talking about things happening days later.
If you aspirate a surprisingly small amount of water, especially if it's not very clean, then you are risk over the next few hours, not days.
Maybe don't set too much store by AI-generated nonsense.
> If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
Allow me to quote an article from Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine https://www.ccjm.org/content/85/7/529 (AI generated nonsense of course)
> Secondary drowning, sometimes called delayed drowning, is another term that is not medically accepted. The historical use of this term reflects the reality that some patients may worsen due to pulmonary edema after aspirating small amounts of water.
> Drowning starts with aspiration, and few or only mild symptoms may be present as soon as the person is removed from the water. Either the small amount of water in the lungs is absorbed and causes no complications or, rarely, the patient’s condition becomes progressively worse over the next few hours as the alveoli become inflamed and the alveolar-capillary membrane is disrupted. But people do not unexpectedly die of drowning days or weeks later with no preceding symptoms. The lungs and heart do not “fill up with water,” and water does not need to be pumped out of the lungs.
> There has never been a case published in the medical literature of a patient who underwent clinical evaluation, was initially without symptoms, and later deteriorated and died more than 8 hours after the incident. People who have drowned and have minimal symptoms get better (usually) or worse (rarely) within 4 to 8 hours. In a study of more than 41,000 lifeguard rescues, only 0.5% of symptomatic patients died.
Maybe don't set too much store by what some random "water rescue course" instructor tells you, especially if it sounds like complete bovine excrement.
> while my common sense and just everyday life experience led me to the correct conclusion.
Anytime someone claims knowledge based on common sense, it's a red flag. Or, as we used to say, "Common sense tells us they're a witch! Burn them!".
hell, I inhaled at least a tablespoon of banana daquiri just reading this. almost ruined my breakfast
Got room at the breakfast table for a guest?
300 counts per minute is nothing, almost indistinguishable from standing in a grocery store.
Not only that, but CPM (Counts per min) is measurement device specific. Using a very sensitive pancake probe will generate much higher CPM than a geiger tube from the same source. You have to look at calibrated units (usV/hr for example). Of course uSv has it own problems given the exposure model.. but better than CPM!
CPM isn't a actual measure without the service in question being specified.
>Apparently they do have concerns.
More like "send 'em to the ER, my ass is covered".
Also, it is fully demineralised water to avoid neutron capture.
Well it’s not demineralised anymore since someone fell into it. I wonder if they have to replace the water now.
Nah, just take out the minerals
Possibly, but I wouldn't think "least radioactive environments in a nuclear reactor" is a low bar. I don't know, though.
You’re right, you don’t know! When I worked on a nuclear aircraft carrier, I learned that the people working down in the reactor spaces got significantly less radiation exposure than the people working on the flight deck. My ship was ported in Japan when the Fukushima disaster happened, and we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly.
> "...we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly."
There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sai... ("7 Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court" (2018))
E.g.,
"He was issued iodine tablets—which are used to block radioactive iodine, a common byproduct of uranium fission, from being absorbed by the thyroid gland—and fitted for an NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit. He was also told not to drink water from the ship’s desalination system. [...] Torres, the senior petty officer, recounted, “One of the scariest things I’ve heard in my career was when the commanding officer came over the loudspeaker, and she said, ‘We’ve detected high levels of radiation in the drinking water; I’m securing all the water.’” That included making showers off limits."
I believe sailors from the USS Ronald Reagan were deployed to the disaster area to help, but that was not my ship.
No you misread. One of the least radioactive areas, full stop. It is less radioactive than your house.
Reminds me of the "your keyboard is dirtier than your asshole" and similar 'myths' that no one would bother to verify.
I mean I would rather lick a keyboard than a butthole (with exceptions of course)
I wouldn't lick my own keyboard, but licking my own asshole sounds interesting
You'd have to be shockingly flexible
I mean, cats are pretty smart and picky about what they do and don't do, and they do it all the time
they are also very flexible
Except in this case it's very easy to check; just drop a dosimeter in and compare it to readings from outside. And they do check, frequently, because if the water was somehow contaminated then they would have a very big problem on their hands.
Oh really? Huh, very interesting, thanks.
It’s basically due to background radiation and the containment shield. The base radiation level within the nuclear plant complex is less than outside due to shielding, and water is VERY good at soaking up radiation. With safety margins considered, the top of the containment pool will have less radiation than the cosmic rays being blocked by the containment shield.
My experience so far has been that when people say "full stop", it usually makes a lot of sense to fact-check further what they said. In this case the notice says his hair is 300 counts per minute after decontamination. The typical background is under 100.
Your fact checking was not successful: there is no typical background expressed in counts. Background count rates vary globally by significant amounts, but importantly, they vary by device. Some devices may get a measly 10-20 counts per minute in a background, next to another device that could get 500. It also matters what kind of radiation the device is configured to detect.
At any rate 300 is widely recognizable as not an alarming value for a typical contamination detector in a typical configuration, but the report is likely slightly deficient because it does not specify how the measurement was taken. However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
>but importantly, they vary by device.
Of course it varies for "civilian" devices from EBay.
They put that count into NRC report. It means that it has pretty specific calibrated meaning for that regulated environment.
>However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
report mentions 300 clearly as something above normal, whatever normal is there. And that is after decontamination. Clearly the source of contamination - the pool - is much higher than 300.
CPM has no calibrated amount by itself.
CPM is pretty well defined measure of flux.
Anyway feel free to explain why supposedly not calibrated value was put into an official NRC report instead of some calibrated value.
CPM is literally not.
It is counts per minute in an undefined, arbitrary sensor. Which could have a alpha radiation transparent sensor (and hence show alpha particles), or be from a low sensitivity geiger counter which can only detect high energy gamma radiation (for say fallout/emergency use). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter
It could have a small sensor, and hence require high flux for a given CPM, or a physically large one - and catch more disintegrations per minute/CPM for the exact same actual amount of radiation.
As to why it is in a government document is why we’re all wondering what is going on. It certainly isn’t the only WTF thing the government is doing right now, is it?
you're just don't know what you're talking about. Google "nrc calibration cpm geiger". In short - they are calibrated either on dose or cpm with conversion factor.
I found nothing in the Google search results for that, or follow up search results, that indicate what you are saying is correct.
Mind linking to something concrete?
What I did find was numerous documents noting that Geiger counters needed to be calibrated to generate useful dose rates because CPM by itself is useless without a bunch of other work to characterize the sensor and radiation type.
I remember hearing somewhere that the biggest risk from swimming in a live reactor's coolant pool would be lead poisoning caused by the DoE guards and their lack of a sense of humour
Here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
It’s an incredibly high bar. Most places in a reactor are required by law to have lower radiation levels than you’d be exposed to standing outside in Denver.
It sure shouldn't be a low bar! People have to work there all day.
> dunno if the life vest bit comment of yours was sarcastic, but it is a funny remark for sure :-)
It was a quote of the linked article:
"Holtec International, which owns the closed nuclear facility, reported the worker was a contractor who was wearing all required personal protective equipment, including a life vest while working near the pool without a barrier in place."
And it's important because it probably provides limits on how deep into the pool they might have fallen
From the linked xkcd in various threads it seems like a life vest should keep you in the "safe" zone
However it doesn't actually say how much is safe to drink
Anyone working around a large pool of deep water should be wearing a personal floatation device.
He was not working in a volcano.
Rather more like "Guy fell over looking into the volcano but fortunately there's a metal fence". The most immediate danger to you is that you'll drown because radioactive water is water and you can't breathe. So the life vest avoids this. In contrast volcanic lava absolutely can kill you before you drown, no problem.
Yes, radioactivity isn't good. You should not, for example, drink this water, or swim in it once a week for good luck. But, it isn't magic death fluid, the worker will have been decontaminated - destroying clothing, washing skin and so on, and the additional exposure means they might get more monitoring, but they're probably fine.
> If you’re concerned about staying within safe radiation levels, Ken Jorgustin explains on the Modern Survival Blog that it would take 432 days at a CPM of 100 to up your chance of getting cancer to odds of 1 in 1,000
> The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair.
This event will result in acute hair loss. From shaving machine.
Unfortunate because for the first time in his life he had RAD hair. ;)
Not sure how fortunate that metal fence would be. Apparently those things conduct heat. "Fortunately guy who fell in volcano landed on the white hot chain link safety fence deep inside and was grilled to death over a span of several minutes. His last thoughts were on how lucky he was that at least he hadn't fallen in a reactor pool without a life vest."
Wait, when the guy falls on the dangerously hot fence, why the fuck doesn't anybody pull them away? The nuclear reactor pool guy presumably didn't just float there until he got the idea to haul himself out, everybody else went "Shit! Bob fell into the water, quick help me get him out".
I think you would probably explode if you hit lava to be honest
In addition to that they increased their likelihood to get cancer earlier than they would otherwise. Many things have this effect, for example alcohol. In the end everyone get cancer eventually, some just die before from other causes.
Unlikely in this case. Water is amazingly as a shielding medium, and unless the water was contaminated (very unlikely, as it’s easily detected and heavily monitored) he likely got lower than background levels while in the pool itself.
The article seems to indicate that the radiation level in their hair was notably elevated.
Unfortunately, it also provided no useful information quantifying the statements.
Maybe there is a problem elsewhere, maybe the pool is contaminated, maybe the sensor used is very sensitive and 300 cpm is not as concerning as it would seem.
It sure would be nice to have actual data, wouldn’t it?
The reactor cavity water is usually moderately radioactive from activation and small leaks. Not life-threatening but certainly a long term health risk, especially when ingested. That is why the person was advised to seek medical attention.
Regulatory bodies have adopted the LNT (linear no threshold) model and for good reasons. Every exposure increases your likelihood to get cancer eventually. Many things do, such is life, and radiation is one of them.
It was deactivated and being refueled, so likely something leaked somewhere. But that should be a lot more than a ‘we dunno’ if so - it’s not like it’s not going to be clear from isotopic analysis eh? Or hopefully they at least have some decent spectrum on it.
And it should show up in realtime monitoring of the water, unless they just turned that off.
There’s no data that shows LNT is correct.
If you work near water you should be wearing a life vest. Especially if it's an area that may be hard to get to or where other dangers are around or if you're alone.
it's actually important - close to the surface, the radiation should be mostly all filtered out by the water already.
the deeper you get, the worse for you. I assume the first second was critical.
to make this point extra extra explicit: a life vest is also a "stay very close to the surface" vest. It prevents the worker going down like when you jump into a pool.
The usual reason for this is it keeps your mouth from being far from the air. In this case it also helps because the radioactive stuff is close to the bottom. And exposure depends on distance from the bottom.
Your radiation exposure next to a coal power plant (thorium in ash) is significantly higher than a nuclear power plant (background radiation). I imagine this is much the same.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. It's really not that dangerous to fall into the water.
Hey, no need to be condescending. Some people just haven't read [the xkcd.](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
This is such a better response than "wow some people really are stoopid"
To be fair, you don’t have to be stupid to be clueless. We’re all clueless about plenty of things.
I mean, if you actually think there's a pool of "lava" that's dangerously radioactive at the surface, while people are walking right next to it, you might be a bit "stoopid". The whole reason water is used is that it shields from radioactivity pretty well
Why would the average person know this about the water used in nuclear reactors?
There are also plenty of jobs where people are in close proximity to insanely hot/dangerous liquids.
That's exactly my point, people are clueless about the basics of nuclear power. Why would they know it? I mean, why would the average person know what a linear equation is or what year the first world war started?
I found the "Nuclear Engineer reacts to XKCD" version of this video pretty interesting, too. Adds a little more context.
Life vest suddenly seems very relevant.
Just make sure the life vest is made of kevlar.
Or you have an employee badge.
I feel like you’re citing the primary source material for the vast majority of us. Like, “let me find the thing that original taught me how to think about radiation pools. Ah yes, this xkcd. Yep, here’s the manual.”
Can you please make your substantive points without putting others down?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
No :)
The zeitgeist has been anti-nuclear for so many decades, fear pops up around any topic that's at all adjacent to a reactor.
Or maybe people just don’t that water mitigates radiation really well? You can be very pro-nuclear and still be concerned about radioactive contamination if you don’t know that radioactivity is dramatically reduced by just a few feet of water.
If you’re in the water, you may get a few feet less of that protection. Particularly if you swim down.
According to Randall Munroe, you'd actually experience less radiation about a metre under the water in a spent fuel pool then you do walking down the street.
On a tangent, I kinda love the fact that I've learned more about nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, and relativistic speeds from a poorly drawn webcomic than I have from any other source. (Ok KSP might actually have xkcd beat on orbital mechanics)
Why not both? Kerbal Space Program is XKCD approved:
It made me very sad when he stopped regularly writing those.
A lot of us grew up in the time of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Combined with a lot of media about radioactivity's dangers (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/nyregion/babies-teeth-and...). I think that has strongly affected people's perception of risk.
I used to work at UC Berkeley, and one of the buildings on campus previously held a research nuclear reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Research_Reactor). There's a sign there now "Nuclear Free Zone"; (https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-berkeley-nuclear-free-...).
Note that they did have to do extensive decontamination on Gilman Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formerly_Utilized_Sites_Remedi...) where plutonium was first isolated.
I think for the general population we also have The Simpsons to blame. Ask anyone on the street what "nuclear waste" actually is and I'd wager at least half would say "a barrel with glowing green goo leaking out of it."
Which is funny, because everybody knows that's toxic waste (see Toxic Avenger from the 1980s).
You know the article that people love around around here, ‘Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail’… well it does, and most people don’t realize how little of it they’re even aware of.
As a person who knows way too much about way too many things. I am fully aware of this myself, however, the headline was shifted in a way that makes you perceive there's a problem caused by said person falling into water. So yes, logic tells you no problem but haven't recognition tells you they're trying to announce a problem. At the same time there was no problem.
Doesn’t it depend on how far they sink? I’m pretty sure xkcd did a comic on this. Oh, it’s a video, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8
Edit: ok, I’m probably the fiftieth person to point this out. It’s still a good video.
Few fun riffs for a Sunday morning:
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. They literally wrote up a safety report and transported them off-site.
Wow, people are really clueless about how to avoid reacting angrily. It's funny to append "they were wearing a life vest" to "they had a nuclear safety accident"
What, "morning", how dare you! It's late afternoon shading towards early evening here!
(Am I doing it right yet?)
It's literally 11:59 AM, Hieronymus. People don't get how time works. I'm the observer of spacetime!
Most likely including OP
Might be. If the reactor was recently defueled, especially, might there be more junk floating in the water?
If said junk was alpha- or beta-emitting, it could be enough of a danger for cancer.
It almost sounds plausible but it's not. All fuel is extremely heavy elements that in still water falls down and deposits on the bottom.
The fuel is (almost) harmless, it's the fission products that make reactors dangerous. Many of those are water-soluble. Of course the fuel elements should be encased, but drinking pool water is probably not a great idea anyway.
Probably is if you don't have a life vest.
Did you read the report? Doesn't sound like it was safe for him.
XKCD has a good video about this. The top of the water is remarkably safe, and a life vest would keep you up there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8
Wow, this video literally answers all the speculation and discussion in this thread.
This is bad but cavity water radiation is usually very weak. Ingestion could be bad but its not like he swallowed a uranium isotope which would be catastrophic.
FYI:
the primary hazard from acute, high-dose uranium ingestion is chemical toxicity leading to acute kidney failure (nephrotoxicity), not radiation.Fuck me, is there anything fun that isn't nephrotoxic?
Menu tonight is neurotoxic or nephrotoxic
I read this in the voice of GLaDOS
Would you have a fusion menu tasting? We are celebrating tonight.
Helium is pretty tasteless.
"Sir, just stop chewing on the menu and move on to the food."
PDE5 (viagra, cyalis) improve the health of the cardiovascular system, thus improve kidney health and I greatly enjoy them.
This is well researched and just like with semaglutide I believe a big part of the population should take daily tadalafil.
Better cardiovascular health, more erections and many positive downstream effects (lower E:T ratio, weight loss) that are beyond the scope of this comment.
People should probably try improve their CV health via exercise, rather than pills, wherever possible.
Better than exercise is a better normal lifestyle. Trying to compensate in an hour what went wrong most of the day or week, and with your diet, is far from optimal.
One of many, looking at just one detail (sitting): https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/sitting-may-i...
From a personal experience, so it's just a guess, a contributor may be fluid movement in the body. Fluid in blood vessels are pumped directly, but must fluid is not in blood vessels. The heart has a diminishing effect outside the vessels (capillaries have small holes to let water and small molecules through into extracellular space, and then to collect it back, rest goes through the lymphatic system which also drains back into the bloodstream). Muscle and body movement helps. From what I experienced and experimented, just walking did a lot more than running. I focus on this specifically due to personal health experiences that I don't want to go into that let me feel a clear difference, where intensive running did hardly anything but then just walking did, an experiment I performed during a period of my life when "getting stuff out from all over my body" mattered.
Personally, I choose to run only when my brain/body tell me to, when I feel like it. Definitely not when I would have to fight myself to get going. (If your body/brain tells you the opposite then it is what it is, personal feel over generic advice)
Exercise is a better normal lifestyle. Standing isn’t of sitting isn’t going to fix much, given the key finding in most relevant studies is that frequent movement is necessary (albeit it’s easier and more natural when already standing).
How about walking desk?
Doctors have been telling us that for decades now and still noone does it despite overwhelming evidence. I guess the average Joe will always need a cheap workaround drug rather than putting themselves at any level of physical discomfort.
Lazy people will be lazy, whatever nasty side effect it brings down the line. These days they will also 'brag' about it online.
Why not both?
Every person has a limit of how much time and energy they can put into exercise. If they can go beyond that with a pill (with no other cost), why wouldn't you want everyone to take it?
Sure, but let’s start with promoting the 90 percenter rather than the 1 percenter then.
Kinda seems like taking boner pills encourages certain types of physical activity.
Why?
Because of all the other physiological and mental benefits that come from the exercise that the pill won’t give you?
It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.
The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.
Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.
> It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.
Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.
Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis
Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?
No, it doesn't.
i kinda see where he's coming from, wear and tear on joints and such
however any kind of "pill" that would have anywhere near the same health effects as exercise is decades away at least.
hips and knees acls tend to be a failure point but the non-existance of said "pill" is probably a fairly big tick for the excercise side, and our tech for repairing those failure points continues to progress at speed
In the context of running, physiological benefits I’m familiar with include improvements to bone density and joint health, increased capillarisation and therefore blood flow in the muscles and improved energy efficiency in cells.
I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.
Doing resistance training will mechanically stress the ligaments, bones and muscles which results in your body reinforcing and strengthening them. This is important to do on a localized level, as hypertrophy of the heart is not good whereas hypertrophy of the leg muscles is. You cant do this in pill form (at least yet)
Excessive exercise might not be healthy? No shit?
It turns out that there's a wealth of evidence which shows that appropriate introductions of stress (cardio training, resistance training, fine-motor-control practice) do in fact lead to improvements: greater heart health, better pulmonary function, increased strength, greater bone density, improved blood sugar regulation, decreased overall stress response, and more.
Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.
Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.
This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.
One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.
Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).
Medication frequently (though not always) provides benefits that may be achieved at least in part by non-medical means: lifestyle (adequate sleep, low stress, reduced exposure to contaminants and pollutants), diet (preferring healthier to unhealthier foods, generally), and exercise (itself comprised of multiple modalities, including cardio, strength training, fine motor control, and others).
The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.
Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.
This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.
"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
> This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools".
Agreed - low dose daily cialis/tadalafil (e.g. 5mg/day) is very common among elite athletes, bodybuilders, etc. As are GLP-1's despite elite athletes rarely being overweight.
Tadalafil is taken for its endothelial benefits (erections are a convenient side effect), and GLP's for its nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitization effects.
Medications are very often most effective when paired with good lifestyle habits, rather than one of the other.
It also depends on what your goals are, obviously.
At a baseline, healthy vitals (blood pressure, blood sugar, heart function, preservation of bone mass/density, and lean/muscle mass, avoiding accumulation of excess fat, particularly visceral / mid-section fat).
Beyond that, if goals are for specific performance targets, in some athletic or competitive activity, you'll want to tune your training toward that. Again, the baseline is remarkably consistent, it's the high-performer tuning which varies.
Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks. If you're lucky, it's only wasted money. If you're not, it's markedly worse.
> Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks.
The biggest hurdle I've encountered personally is primary care doctors deal with very sick people every day (terrible diet, terrible body composition, terrible alcohol/drug habits, etc). And that's who they optimize their care for.
If you show up to a PCP and you're in shape, all vitals on point, all bloodwork looking good, the last thing the PCP wants to do is prescribe anything because "you don't need it" and "you're not sick".
Most doctors simply don't care about helping you optimize your health once you've reached "healthier than average" status.
This leads a lot of people to doing their own research, and finding health clinics outside of insurance that cater to health optimization, anti-aging, and non-standard treatments (like prescribing GLP's to people who aren't overweight, or Cialis for people who don't have ED). These clinics also aren't very good because, while they are indeed doctors or NPs, they make money off selling you prescriptions, so they are biased and usually push medications you might not really need or want. (Which again emphasizes the importance of self-education and doing your own research).
For drugs like GLP-1's, there are a whole lot of anecdotal benefits outside of weight loss. The problem with the drug industry is once a drug is approved for its most profitable use case, drug makers don't bother to pursue additional FDA approvals for additional indications because the headache isn't worth the (marginal) extra revenue.
I very much wish there were a category of doctors specializing in treating healthy people looking to optimize their health further.
I very much wish there were a category of doctors...
"Sports medicine".
<https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/24627-sports-...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_medicine>
You might also look into nutrition and dietetics and exercise physiology. If you're looking at cognitive function, neuropsychology and possibly some psychotherapy specialisations.
"Wellness coaching" is starting to get into the woo / overly-self-interested / conflicted domain, though there are probably a few good apples. I'd proceed with extreme caution however. There are plenty of docs who're more than happy to provide what a patient asks (and is willing to pay top dollar) for.
Do you not have any negative side effects? When I tried I felt this tightness and weird headache that I don't otherwise ever experience, brain fog and also nasal symptoms.
On high dosages (20mg tadalafil daily), diarrhoea, which ironically makes the backside useless while the frontside works better. And some congestion.
5mg daily tadalafil is fine for me though and that‘s also the normal daily dosage.
What about migraines though? Or do you keep the dose low enough to avoid that?
Researched daily dose is usually 5mg tadalafil.
unfortunately i was surprised that even the generic is kinda pricey to take every day. At the smallest available dose it was 5 usd a pill (last i checked in China)
I just checked my text from Walmart last week saying my Tadalafil was ready for pickup. It was literally $25.60 for a 30 day supply of 10mg and I currently don't have insurance. 100% out of pocket.
interesting. thanks for letting me know. in Taiwan it was also not cheap (and requires a prescription and doctor visit) Guess Ill keep looking around. id sort of given up using it regularly
Uranium ingestion is fun?
shrooms
Copying the abstract here, just in case anybody don't have access:
Emily Austin, Hilary S. Myron, Richard K. Summerbell, Constance A. Mackenzie, Acute renal injury cause by confirmed Psilocybe cubensis mushroom ingestion,
Medical Mycology Case Reports, Volume 23, 2019, Pages 55-57, ISSN 2211-7539,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mmcr.2018.12.007. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...)
Abstract: Psilocybe mushrooms are consumed for their hallucinogenic properties. Fortunately, there are relatively few adverse effects associated with their consumption. This is the first reported case of acute kidney injury (AKI) secondary to confirmed ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. A 15-year-old male developed symptomatic AKI 36 h post-ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. He was admitted to hospital with hypertension, nausea and abdominal pain and a creatinine of 450 mmol/L. A sample of the crop of mushrooms was confirmed by mass spectrometry to contain psilocin. On day 5 post-admission, he was discharged home. Outpatient follow-up confirmed complete resolution of his renal function.
Keywords: Psilocybe; Nephrotoxicity; Mushrooms; Kidney injury
Kind of a cool read. They're not really sure why the P. cubensis was nephrotoxic. The sample they put through mass spec didn't contain the compound (Orellanine) that the clinical presentation lined up with, and none of the other youths who ate from that crop of mushrooms had subsequent problems.
I wonder if there was an accidental polyculture issue, either with a different mushroom or a freak mutation that caused that particular shroom to synthesize toxic compounds. When growing directly from spores, you get mixed genetics, so your various mushrooms will grow slightly differently (if you want consistent genetics you grow clones from an isolate via agar plate or tissue sample from fruiting body).
I wouldn't even call it bad. Reactor pools have basically zero radiation at the surface. The water is constantly filtered and kept very pure to remove contaminants that can be activated by neutrons.
Even drinking it I would think would be completely fine. The water itself doesn't get activated.
Then where did their radioactive hair come from?
That's what I was thinking, but it does look like 300 cpm for a few hours is essentially nothing, or it looks real bad, I can't tell.
I found this:
Ok so 300 for an hour (we'll assume the hair is cut off and the exposure either stops or 90% reduces) means no problem. Don't do that every day that's all.Days to receive chronic dose for increase cancer risk of 1 in a 1,000 432 (at 100 CPM) 86 (at 500 CPM)But it's from a prepper site that doesn't cite their own sources.
I found this: https://www.energy.gov/ehss/articles/doe-ionizing-radiation-...
Which uses rem instead of cpm. An on-line converter of unknown quality says 300 cpm is 500 rem, and the pdf from the .gov site says 500 rem is "death probable in 2-3 weeks", but I think that chart is saying that's whole body & no therapy. Where this is probably mostly hair that can be just cut off totally let alone washed, and so the elevated exposure is probably both low and short duration, and medical therapy (whatever that means, if any in this case) on top.
I can't tell, could be the same as just visting a country with a slightly higher background that isn't a problem for anyone, to dead in a month. Leaning towards no problem just because of the short time and apparently mostly external and removable source.
However, it's not nothing either. It's maybe no problem for this person only because they avoided ingesting the water and the water was very quickly washed off and presumably their hair was cut off and all clothes etc removed as fast as possible. It's clearly at least "rather hot" and you can't just play in it and have prolonged exposure and ingestion. It doesn't seem to be "basically zero".
What does it mean for airline pilots? From what I read, they are exposed to more than 400 CPM thought the year.
Stewardesses become infertile earlier than women working on the ground.
The report doesn't read like something involving 500 rem and potential death in 3 weeks. It says "Non Emergency". Can you link to this converter? It seems to be a rather key step that got handwaved. Wiki says [0] there isn't a standard on what a "count" counts.
This website [0] gives the same numbers (300 CPM -> 500 REM). Seems like a candidate for what was used at the very least, and nothing else obviously appeared to claim a similar CPM -> REM conversion capability.
Assuming this website was used, it looks like it does a naive multiplication by 5/3, which seems... simplistic? The rest of the page doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either. No indication of how the conversion factor was derived and there's a bunch of links to other CPM -> <radiation-related unit> calculators. On top of that, the landing page for the root domain boasts about AI capabilities and their AI page prominently features "Elevate Your Content Creation" and "Generate high-quality AI content with ease!"
[0]: https://www.inayam.co/unit-converter/radioactivity/counts_pe...
I'd love to know how they got to 5/3. It also offers CPM to half-life conversion which has to be at least poorly labelled. That would imply that if two piles of different radioactive substances emit the same amount of radiation (obviously different masses in each pile) they have the same half life. That isn't the case, half life depends on what the substance is which is radiating, not the measured amount of radiation emitted.
Given their CPM to half-life conversion amounts to dividing by 60 (not to mention the nonsensical units), I'm not sure I'd place much faith in the website at all.
Obligatory not a nuclear safety or health physics person, but I am a particle physicist and I deal with radiation. CPM is a rather annoying unit because it doesn't convert to dose very well. If you have external 300 cpm (eg. hair), but all of that is in the form of alpha radiation, your actual dose is essentially zero.
It's worth noting that humans are typically radioactive to the level of 3 kBq, or 3000 disintegrations per second, so if I ever realised I had 300 cpm of radiation on my skin as measured by a device that is sensitive to alpha, beta, and gamma, I probably would just shrug and wash it off. Where it might be a problem is if I am dealing with only alpha and beta isotopes, and I'm getting 300 cpm on a gamma-sensitive detector, meaning that the _secondary radiation alone_ is 300 cpm.
(Realistically, I and the radiation safety officer overseeing whatever I was doing would be in serious trouble and have a ton of paperwork, but I just mean it in the abstract)
I mean, 10 grams of potassium has ~300 Bq (that is 300 disintegrations per second) of radiation, so I think I should be able to get my hair far more radioactive than 300 cpm on a beta-sensitive geiger counter if I just slather myself in low-sodium salt from the grocery salt. The salt might be bad for my scalp, I don't know, but the radiation is fine. My point here, though, is that I don't know what equipment the 300 cpm is measured with, what the thresholds are and what the window material is, and that can change things greatly, but my non-professional opinion as the wrong kind of doctor is that it's...probably not a big deal.
We've actually used KCl as a low-level radiation source before, and we joked that when the experiment is done we can just take it home and use it to season dinner.
Much more useful comment. Thanks buddy.
The pool. But it isn't necessarily a problem - your hair, right now, is radioactive. Presumably wouldn't trip a measuring device because it'd be background levels.
The linked report doesn't say how radioactive his hair is or give any indication of whether the person in question is threatened by this reading. Could be bad, could be nothing, we just know it is higher than normal.
It says "The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair."
For reference, this is about the same in your hair that you’d get from a few hours in a pub in the 90s, never mind working in one - surprising amount of radiation in cigarette smoke from polonium and lead-210.
It does say that. Can you translate that into a measurement of radioactivity & medical risk? I don't think it is obvious.
EDIT The report below it seems to literally be "nothing interesting happened". The thresholds here for something to be reportable are very low. Frankly I don't know why this story is upvoted so much but I'm not about to make a bigger deal about it than one sentence.
300cpm is lower than what you’d be exposed to on a commercial airline flight (400-900ish cpm).
But is that the same thing? 300cpm says something about the risk to someone near the worker, not about what the worker has been exposed to
CPM is a function of the detector sensitivity/size and radiation level.
Water itself is activated by neutrons, even if slightly.
How? Neutrons slamming into water would break it apart, turn it into hydrogen and oxygen, and possibly activate the hydrogen into deuterium or tritium. But once it's hydrogen (or an isotope of it) it'll turn gaseous and be filtered off.
In order to become gaseous they need to combine with another atom of the same kind torn free, which is about as likely as combining with a free atom of another kind, form an HO radical and stay liquid.
Tritiated water is a reality of reactor pools.
Obligatory what-if:
Is it not Heavy Water?
No, just pure water. It's used to isolate against radiation leaks.
Mostly no.
Sounds like it was a lot more serious for the water than for the worker
The Uranium Isotopes would also not be that terrible. It's the fission products that get you.
The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has a great YouTube channel where they carefully analyze similar accidents.
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB/videos
Not necessarily nuclear (since chemical and industrial accidents are much, muhc more likely), but highly recommended if you're interested in such incidents and their causes.
I loce their videos, too, but as far as I know the current US administration will shut them down at the end of this year. [0] [1]
But just now I read that a (sharply reduced) budget had passed the house? [2] does anyone know what the current state is?
[0]: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/only-federal-agency-that-i...
[2]: https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/27090-house...
That’s from July, and it says a committee has approved a specific line item to be put into the budget that would eventually be voted on.
“worker fell off roof installing solar panels” — just getting ahead of the ‘anti-nuclear’ folks on here. Energy installations all come with risks, albeit nuclear long tail accidents are mutli-generational and externalised to people not involved in managing the risk
That happens all the time; it's only news when something unusual happens.
I’ve heard of people falling into the spent fuel pool but never the reactor pool. Usually there are strict FME barriers in place and one cannot even look over into the pool without violating the FME. I wonder what led to the event? Definitely an OSHA recordable!
This is not true at all. I have personally looked into a reactor pool. I remember thinking how easy it would be to literally just jump in. I mean, I'd trip about a thousand alarms and probably end up in prison, but....
I second this. We went to one on a school trip and the intrusive thoughts were very strong that day.
Least harmful call of the void there is
was this place one of those who suffered firings as a result of the government shutdown? I believe at least 1,000 employs at nuclear facilities have been fired.
300 CPM in hair after decontamination is a massive red flag. If this is from systemic circulation, could be GBq-level total body activity.
The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense. This is an internal contamination event with unknown but potentially severe consequences.
From: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-nuclear-plant-worker-fell-...
> According to federal reports, the contractor ingested some of the reactor water before being yanked out, scrubbed down, and checked for radiation. They walked away with only minor injuries and about 300 counts per minute of radiation detected in their hair.
> That sounds like a lot, but apparently it isn't terribly serious. He underwent a decontamination scrubdown and was back on the job by Wednesday.
Can you quantify why you're better qualified to assess risk from this brief report than the nuclear experts on site that know the full picture?
300CPM above background is considered very low - likely why they classified this as non-emergency - the only reason it was reported was per NRC cfr that states any time there is transportation of a radioactively contained person offsite, it must be notified.
For reference, in Canada, that is considered trace contamination and not dose. You would experience 300-800 CPM on a commercial airliner during the entirety of your flight, for comparison.
edit: adding to this that the site in question, Palisades, is shut-down and is under decommissioning and was not operating at the time - so while the water would have had some radioactivity due to exposure to the formerly active core, it was not like falling into an operating reactor or into moderating heavy water... also something that cannot happen with a pressurized reactor such as this one.
I thought 50-130 CPM above background was considered trace exposure. But yeah I didn't realize it was a decommissioned core... idk there are so many red flags in this story.
EDIT: 300-600 CPM above background radiation levels is for EXTERNAL environmental monitoring, not for POST-DECONTAMINATION readings on a contaminated person.
I learned a few things from my father along the way. I can share my notes if you'd like
I'm sure your father is a very accomplished gentleman. But I was asking why your armchair analysis is better than the experts who actually know what happened here?
I maintain the complete archive of every publication my father did from 1969 to 2019 and continue to update the archive based on new publications. I use the data to train Nuclear Radiochemistry AI Agents and while I do not have my father's credentials, I actively use this dataset to learn about his field, and from my limited knowledge here I felt the need to comment. After all, what is skepticism if we can't share and teach each other what we know, right?
https://github.com/arthurcolle/Ronald-Colle-Papers
I love how punchy you are! And the astronomy photos. Take care :)
> I use the data to train Nuclear Radiochemistry AI Agents and [...]
As someone who is not involved in this ongoing discussion, I have to just say that invoking LLM agents when asked for credentials is not going to go in your favor.
My use case for data that exists that is pre-AI scientifically vetted work is completely divorced from the specifics of this conversation actually. If I want to do paper-maché sculptures with printouts of these papers, and I still commented on this post, would that be better or worse for you, here?
I was just sharing background. I want to make good models that can help scientists do work. Your personal feelings about LLMs and their capabilities feels quite distinct from the focus on this post, and the chain of comments that have led us here.
So you don't have the necessary credentials, and you still wouldn't be qualified to comment even if you did have them unless you had access to the internal data. But no worries, I'm sure you'd be OK getting surgery from a surgeon's son who never went to medical school nor read your chart.
I would take the advice of a surgeons son, who is also somewhat active in the field, that something sounds fishy about a operation, to further look into it. That is very different from letting him perform the surgery.
There is incentive to play down accidents. No idea what happened here, I actually rather think it recived publicity because falling into a nuclear reactor pool sounds way more dramatic than it is, but ... not my area. Still was happy to get arthurcolle's input.
There is also incentive for people to inflate their sense of importance by weighing in on topics they're not qualified on, especially if it's motivated by a sense of familial pride. You can see elsewhere on this thread that arthurcolle self-admits a lack of familiarity with basic interpretation of CPM.
Misinformation, whether ill-intentioned or not, does real and tangible harm to our society. Misinformation about the supposed dangers of nuclear power, as arthurcolle is spreading, are especially harmful because they form the foundation are the biggest obstacle to safe, clean, cheap, and abundant energy that could radically improve our lives at the systemic level.
"Misinformation about the supposed dangers of nuclear power, as arthurcolle is spreading "
I maybe did not read all of it, but which missinformation is he spreading exactly?
(Follow up, why are you in a position to judge that? )
As for missinformation in general, I happened to be born after chernobyl. Where the authorities in eastern germany said, all is fine. But since the people got western television, where they said no, not fine, children may not go outside while the radioactive raincloud is still there, my immediate experience is rather people downplaying the dangers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2020/03/10/every-da...
> Every Day 10,000 People Die Due To Air Pollution From Fossil Fuels
> The NBER study found that “the switch from nuclear power to fossil fuel-fired production resulted in substantial increases in global and local air pollution emissions.” A key reason for the increased air pollution was that “lost nuclear production was replaced by electricity production from coal- and gas-fired sources in Germany as well as electricity imports from surrounding countries.”
> The study concluded that “the phase-out resulted in more than 1,100 additional deaths per year” due to excess mortality from the consequences of increased air pollution. Since 2011 that totals more than 10,000 deaths, far more than all deaths attributable to nuclear power in history.
Are you arguing about nuclear safety compared to fossil fuels with me? I was aware of those numbers, thank you.
But I asked for cases where arthurcolle was spreading missinformation, which is what you claimed and which is what I perceived as an unecessary attack.
Perhaps you should finish reading the threads to discover his numerous self-admissions of limited knowledge and incorrect statements when confronted with people who cite sources
But I am not doing surgery. I am expressing skepticism at the "oh no it's all fine" from literally everyone reporting on this story
You're being unnecessarily attacked for what is largely a casual forum where people make casual comments and speculation all of the time.
Further, your reasoning is biased towards safety (rather than risk), which seems completely sane.
Agreed. These violent reactions aren’t unusual for HN but they are unnecessary and acutely disappointing.
Skepticism and sarcasm are not violence.
Thanks for giving me the chance to clarify. You're right, of course. I was using it in the spirit of the phrase "violent disagreement" which is meant figuratively.
Off topic, but the idea that the “violence” of ideas, where the only thing in play is your point of view, is somehow equatable to physical violence, where physical integrity is at risk, is one of the least endearing features of the 21st century so far.
I cannot overstate how dangerous to human prosperity this false equivalence is. It is a first-tier ideological scourge that we entertain at great peril both to critical thought and the notion of objective truth itself.
On the other hand, it’s an excellent proxy to clarify that an idea, position, or sometimes even an entire ideology or its sycophant exist for entertainment purposes only and must not, on their own merits, be taken seriously.
Are we really so isolated from the brutality of nature to think that the inconvenient beating of a butterfly’s wings is the same category of experience as being disemboweled and eaten alive by a hungry beast?
Or is it that the whole ideological sham of the violence of ideas is merely a cowardice, a poverty of ingenuity, a plea for clemency by virtue of infantilism?
The pen, or the thought given flight, is mightier than the sword.
That does not make an idea a sword. It is in character , spirit, reach, and endurance a very different type of thing. A sword can be forged from an idea, but an idea will never spring forth from a blade.
Hell in a hand basket, get off my lawn, and uphill both ways to school. Lol.
Agree completely. I should’ve used a different term.
Yep you know better than the people who have the credentials you don't and the access to internal data you don't. I don't see what's holding you back from doing surgery, qualifications and context are no barrier to the application of your self-imagined expertise.
I don't claim to know better. But restarting a $1.5B plant after 2 years of inactivity and having a worker fall into a vat of radioactive water and still being at 300 CPM after a decontamination procedure is not normal.
Phrases such as massive red flag and bureaucratic nonsense were claims you knew better.
Who claimed the event was normal? A worker falling in non contaminated water would not be normal. Many things are bot normal and not emergencies. False dichotomy and straw man are logical fallacies.
Were the plant cost and status meant to support your claim 300 counts per minute was a red flag? They appeared irrelevant.
That'd be a very interesting statement if you were qualified to make it
What makes one qualified to make a statement?
Are you qualified to make the statement I'm replying to?
In technical fields: Accredited formal education, professional certification(s), and/or recognition from other experts in the field who have the same.
How do I know you're qualified to make that statement?
If I'm not, then we're not grounded in the same consensus-driven objective reality, making this conversation meaningless, and therefore not worth your time to reply further.
> I don't claim to know better.
You very much do, if you're calling into question the statements in the article that it's fine.
> Collé and his collaborators have maintained, expanded and improved radioactivity measurement standards...
Story checks out. I think this would pass.
LMFAOOOOOO insufferable
Quantify? What kind of number would satisfy your request?
> The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense
FTA: “This is an eight-hour notification, non-emergency, for the transportation of a contaminated person offsite“
I read that as that the “non-emergency” classification isn’t for the victim or the “fell into a nuclear reactor pool”, but for the effects on those outside the facility of sending the victim off site.
A CPM value means nothing without additional context. Counts vary based on detector type and size, radiation type, energy, distance and geometry, all sorts of things. They're not comparable except in identical contexts.
This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.
As a general rule, falling into a reactor pool is probably fine, as long as you don't reach the bottom. (But please don't try it.)
There's even an XKCD "What if" about it. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
From the what if:
> On August 31st, 2010, a diver was servicing the spent fuel pool at the Leibstadt nuclear reactor in Switzerland. He spotted an unidentified length of tubing on the bottom of the pool and radioed his supervisor to ask what to do. He was told to put it in his tool basket, which he did. Due to bubble noise in the pool, he didn’t hear his radiation alarm.
When the tool basket was lifted from the water, the room’s radiation alarms went off. The basket was dropped back in the water and the diver left the pool. The diver’s dosimeter badges showed that he’d received a higher-than-normal whole-body dose, and the dose in his right hand was extremely high.
The object turned out to be protective tubing from a radiation monitor in the reactor core, made highly radioactive by neutron flux. It had been accidentally sheared off while a capsule was being closed in 2006. It sank to a remote corner of the pool floor, where it sat unnoticed for four years.
The tubing was so radioactive that if he’d tucked it into a tool belt or shoulder bag, where it sat close to his body, he could’ve been killed. As it was, the water protected him, and only his hand—a body part more resistant to radiation than the delicate internal organs—received a heavy dose
I love this book. Randall is such a gifted artist
One of my favourite bits (and a fine example of Randall's sublime humour), comes right at the end:
But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
Here to confirm this. If you're googling "CPM" you'll find charts that say different things. That's why you need to read carefully. Better, just chill, it is okay that you don't know. It's nuclear physics. It's not a subject you're expected to know about.> A CPM value means nothing without additional contextFor CPM, what matters is "CPM of <WHAT>"
CPM just tells you the number of particle detection. It does not tell you the particle type (e.g. alpha, beta, gamma) nor the energy level (i.e. eV). Without context, it is meaningless.
As an example, I can confidently say you are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you[0]. 1CPM or 1e20CPM, who cares. Conversely, 1 CPM can be deadly. You definitely don't want to be hit by a single ReV (10^27) proton (good luck producing that though). Context matters.
Which still needs context.> This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.Sievert is joule per kilogram. So energy divided per mass, much like pressure is force over area. But determining biological impact still takes interpretation. You have weight factors by particle types (e.g. alpha = 2x beta) and there is also weighting factor for internal/external dose and locations like soft tissue (e.g. higher weighting for dose at throat vs dose at hands).
This is why it is incredibly important to use caution when interpreting radiation values. If you don't have training in this it is incredibly easy to unknowingly make major errors. The little details can dramatically change the outcome. Context is critical.
I'm not here to tell you how to actually do the calculation (you'll need a lot more info), I'm here to tell you that it's not easy and you're likely doing it wrong. The experts are not dumb. You're just missing context and a first order approximation is nowhere near enough for an accurate conclusion. It's nuclear physics lol
It shouldn't need be said, but nuclear physics is, in fact, complicated.
> [Y]ou are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you.
I mean, if you actually had a neutrino detector that produced 10e10 CPM over your cross-section, then it would matter for you, because particle physicists would kidnap you to learn the secret :)
Honestly, the military would probably come after you first. Or maybe an oil company? Frankly because if you could detect neutrinos at that resolution you would be able to produce a really good mapping of... just about anything. From the inside of the Earth to the inside of a secret military facility on the opposite side of the planet. Not to mention you've also invented a communication device that is essentially unjammable[0].
Sufficient to say that you'd be very popular, but in probably the least fun way possible.
It would be a very up-close-and-personal variation of the resource curse.
This is exactly why no one can know my alter-ego is… Neutrino Man.
Thank you for the followup (familiar with the XKCD)
Dumb question from a true non-expert:
So CPM varies with all those factors you mention, but wouldn't the site HP team know exactly what detector they used, the geometry, distance, etc.? They could convert to dose if they wanted, right?
Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv? Seems like that would be more useful for any medical team, any set of potential regulators or regulatory bodies as well as just general public understanding (drawing on my father's work here as he always emphasized the tension between "public fears radiation unnecessarily" and "industry safety protocols are inconsistent")
Follow-up: Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event? Or does staying with CPM keep things conveniently vague? Because from my limited understanding, if they did a proper survey, they have everything needed to calculate dose.
It is a technical document. It is meant to communicate between experts, not to the public.> Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv?
It's not nefarious, it is the measurement that they had. CPM is an easier measurement to get. And keep in mind that these notices are just a small part of the communication going on. They're meant to be brief.> Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event?To get the actual effective dosage you'll need a lot more information and calculations. The CPM can give you a decent estimate, if you already know context, but it is meaningless if you don't. So to an expert in that space it's a good quick estimate, but to an average person it isn't (even to above average people).
In context is also being used as a stepping stone for quick evaluation. They sent the guy to the hospital and he'll get a better estimate of dosage there. I'm sure they also were doing those calculations prior to sending him out. It may just be customary to use CPM units. That part I don't know. Here's the page they reference though[0] (there's only a single (xii) so easy to find).
[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/p...
[disclosure] I have training in nuclear physics, including in radiation dosages (I worked on developing shielding materials), but I have not worked on a reactor (though I've seen reactors and Cherenkov Radiation :) so the customs of the bureaucracy are beyond my wheelhouse. But from my experience I'm not surprised by this. I would expect a lot more documentation and accurate measurements are being passed through other channels.
Looking at these bulletins, they appear to be quick summaries of pretty much any nuclear related incident that happens in the US, no matter how minor. I would assume that these are mostly intended for public transparency, and as for a quick reference point for regulatory action. Introductory slide on a PowerPoint sort of material.
In that context, I'd guess that the 300 CPM figure is just a signpost that says "we measured the worker to make sure that he was safe to release to a hospital."
I think you're over interpreting. Publicly available doesn't mean "for the general public"
Here, take METAR as an example. This is broadcast on open airwaves and every pilot can read this. Here's the latest one from KSFO[0]
Is this public? YesMETAR KSFO 260756Z 29004KT 10SM SCT012 BKN042 16/14 A3007 RMK AO2 SLP183 T01610139 401890133Is the information intended to be given out to the public in a manner in which the general public can interpret? No. It's encoded lol. But you can hear that on the radio and if you're trained (could go to a public library to train yourself) and yeah it makes sense. It is specifically intended to be concise and communicate only the absolute minimum amount of necessary information.
For another example, look at arXiv. Is it public? Yes. Are the papers published there written for the general public? No. They are written for peers.
So yes, it is "public transparency", but not for transparency to people who aren't train in nuclear physics. (Which is what I previously said)
Don't confuse "public" with "for you"
>Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event?
Basically, the procedures for certain environments differ. If you want to gather dosage data, you use a dosimeter. If you want a binary Yes/No method of detecting contamination, you use a geiger counter and determine if the count rate is above a certain range (depending on background radiation and other factors).
The 300CPM metric just indicates whether they're clean or not after they've been scrubbed down. It doesn't measure the dose they took.
I would imagine the on-site team would know, yes. I don't know why the report only gives a measurement in CPM, but just because the person was sent off-site doesn't mean the levels were dangerous. Thresholds at nuclear facilities tend to be very low for safety.
The USNRC is currently not operating normally due to the government shutdown. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
CPM is a measure of rate, GBq is a total amount. And 300 CPM is basically nothing. People live their entire lives in places where the natural background radiation is higher than that with no increased chance of cancer.
GBq is also a measure of rate; it's a billion decays per second.
300 CPM on its own is both meaningless and not high.
CPM is a raw stat from the sensor. There’s many different designs of dosimeters and they all read differently so you have to ask “what brand and model did you use?” You then apply a function to the data to normalize it into a real unit.
But CPM is the cool thing that makes the click-click-click sound. (The absolute rate of clicks also is not useful.)
There is no circulation in hair, hair is dead, and it is produced slowly. Nothing about your commentary passes basic scrutiny.
Unless I'm misinterpreting what you mean, I believe if it was reflected in the hair in the immediate aftermath, it wouldn't reflect internal circulation because hair does not grow that fast. It would have been from exposure to the pool rather than any amount ingested.
Litvinenko had about 10 MBq in his body and died in 3 weeks.
This might be 500+ MBq (0.5 GBq). Yeah it's a different isotope, but clearly not a "non-emergency"
EDIT: (after 1 hr) - Litvinenko dose was 4GBq - I was wrong by 3 orders of magnitude. My bad
External contamination is not comparable to internal, at all. Bq is a terrible unit to understand radioactive danger. Doses are usually detected in Grey, then converted into Sievert because Grey didn't take into account the difference between Alpha radiation and the others. And even then, when someone is truly contaminated, we calculate effective dose per organ.
The poor guy who fell in the pool probably didn't take any Alpha ray, wasn't taking all the radiation on a specific place, and while in my country we would calculate the dose he took before sending him back to work, he would probably work again in the same nuclear sector (this isn't the case for anyone, I know someone who dive to get the radioactive/explosive/poisonous trash we put in the water in the 50s until the 90s, he now cannot work on any radioactive trash.)
> Non Emergency
I guess in a nuclear reactor there is a lingual shift and the word emergency cant be used for just any old 911 call.
Like how Australians apparently call a jellyfish bite "uncomfortable"
Aussie surfer here, the stings typically are uncomfortable. Some of the deadlier ones can be close to painless and only result in itching and result in you dying from respiratory failure 24 hours later. Others are downright painful with even strong opiate based pain killers struggling to cut through the pain.
Also it's in a way normalised to happen in a few places with beaches. There are vinegar stations every 100m or so. Basically a "yes, it will happen to a few of you".
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
Just fyi, they don't put vinegars at the beaches anymore, apparently it makes it worse (well I haven't seen any for a long while)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-08/vinegar-makes-box-jel...
Townsville's Strand has a number of them for example. (Really bad lighting, but I believe it's that green board: https://maps.app.goo.gl/x7gggCjGwxVqDBx79?g_st=ac) I went down the Qld coast a couple of weeks ago and they're still very common.
Is the deadly itchy one of those tiny box jellyfish? More than sharks or crocs, this is why I was an absolute coward and decided not to get in the water in Queensland. There are lots of ways to die, but I'd prefer not to blame myself in my last moments.
Oceans are dangerous, but it's the water that's most likely to get you, even in Australia.
If you ever become prime Minister of Australia, and find yourself on an oceanside bombing range, don't go spear fishing.
Hahaha eeesh that 2nd sentence took a turn
There's no significant immediate threat to life or well-being. It's simply not an emergency. We're all constantly exposed to some ionizing radiation. It's a question of how much.
In this case, not much. It's still an exposure event and absolutely worth giving medical attention to assess continued exposure levels from ingested contamination and generally be overly cautious. But that doesn't mean it's ultimately going to be a significant factor in this workers risk for radiation induced disease. It's certainly better than living in the vicinity of coal mining and processing plants.
It isn't an emergency. It was an accident that required medical attention.
If you fell in a lake and accidentally ingested some wayer known to contain some pathagen dangerous to humans, you might seek medical care, but I don't think most people would consider that an emergency. This is similar.
Nah this is literally just not an emergency. The water isn't very radioactive.
Or how Brits call a civil war "trouble"
We’re not that flippant, they’re ‘troubles’, indicating ’ongoing concern’.
In American English, troubles doesn't mean anything different than trouble, so we not only miss the meaning of your protestations, but to us it seems like your downplaying it even more.
it doesn't mean anything different in American english, he said it himself - Brits consider events involving the murder of (Irish, Palestinian, etc.) civilians as ’ongoing concern(s)’
I never says that, you sanctimonious twat.
Similar to how “math” becomes “maths”
A bite requires teeth. Sharks bite. Snakes bite. Bees and wasps sting. Jellyfish and bluebottles sting.
Not sure about spiders. Are their fangs considered to be teeth? Platypus have venomous spurs, not sure what that’s called.
Spiders bite. I've never heard it called anything else.
Spiders bite with their fangs, much like vampires bite with their fangs, they don't sting. I might call the tarantula "hair" that makes you itch a sting, but I would feel a bit silly calling it that.
Mosquitos bite with their nose.
They bite (and suck) with their (elongated and specialized) mouthparts. Insects don’t have noses (they breathe through their skin and smell primarily with their antennae).
Oh I thought I couldn't hate them anymore and I learn this. My leg currently has large hives on it from multiple bites, the antihistamines I have are doing bugger all.
and blackflies/moshka just eat you
i mean it might be a medical emergency but not a reactor emergency?
Basically often it could be better to have an incident in a nuclear plant than in some building construction site... But the attention delta is incredibly high. 300 CPM sounds low, I hope they will be fine.
Why didn't they shave off the hair and measure again before sending off to medical? They have the opportunity to report lower numbers, and would enable identifying non-hair-adsorbed radiatioactive matter on the subject. It sounds so easy and actionable it boggles the mind that it's not part of the protocol.
I thought this as well but given some other comments the measures numbers are open to interpretation/ spread. Also it could be considered a violation of the person's body if done without his consent.
and one could argue that showering without consent is also a violation of the person's body... consider an accident where a person is actually super hot with radioactive contamination, does the person have the right to exit the facility without shower and spread the radioactive particulates at will?
the thing is that this type of "violation" can easily be prevented by including the obligatory showering or shaving as part of the contract, so either they consent or they didn't end up in a position where they can be exposed to radioactive matter.
So this can not explain why the hair wasn't shaved.
Dude might prefer to keep his hair? Given the low exposure amount.
If my childhood taught me anything, it’s that there’s about to be an awesome superhero.
A spider will bite this guy and get the powers of a human.
his super power will be misunderstanding other spiders and prosecuting them for their otherness -_-
Ironically, despite these powers, he will get eaten during mating.
Where is Jimmy Carter when we need him? And Rodney Dangerfield to explain how big Jimmy Carter is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LiveFromNewYork/comments/1bh2edu/th...
If one falls into a tank like this, what steps are required to guarantee likelihood of developing powers?
same thought here
I greatly appreciate the nuclear industry. Nuclear field engineering was my first "real" job out of college and they really committ to safety. Transparency in this industry is inspiring because everyone involved knows that one screw up and that's the end of the US nuclear industry. Good luck getting oil and gas to be accountable and as transparent about incidents. I carry the culture into the rest of my work and appreciate being involved. Wish events like this didn't happen but it is not of significant danger and I find it great that they communicate even "smaller" issues.
I've lived through three major nuclear incidents, and what they had in common, regardless of the political systems of the US, The Soviet Union or Japan, was not the transparency, it was the lying. It started immediately after each incident.
I'm essentially pro-nuclear, I just don't trust people who run it.
Totally valid perspective. I only became part of the industry after Fukushima. I only knew an industry by its disasters. I will say, having gone through the training programs we studied the nuclear incidents and spent a year in training before going to the plants. I just don't see parallel experiences looking back like that. The people in nuclear (at least from what I saw) want the industry to be safe and successful.
You describe incidents which become political. At some point the normal rules are being ignored by those on the top of the information food chain. That says nothing about the rules of the game, but does say a lot about the people involved.
The rule-ignoring and the lying started inside the plants before anybody outside got involved. Then it just spread like cancer.
Can you recommend a book or two in order to learn about that culture? IMO we could use more of it in AI.
I found strong parallels between tech safety and nuclear safety.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0534/ML053410342.pdf
NRC is a good place to start. They have been at trying to prevent tech from hurting people for awhile.
I once worked in a nuclear research reactor, and they had lifebuoys at their pool. Quite prescient, as it turns out.
Incidents like this show that “nuclear safety” is as much cultural as technical. Even the best systems fail when people and organizations stop treating the environment with the respect it demands.
This harmless incident shows us nothing aside from why nuclear is so expensive.
There is essentially zero risk to the operation of the plant (or this worker!) from such an event.
Imagine if oil and gas facilities were required for any worker fall to have federal government workers visit onsite, draft a report for review, have it examined by expensive niche lawyers with rounds of revisions, and then have it published it publicly.
This is just a silly example of the hysterical safety-ism involving anything nuclear-related in the US.
Yes, working in any job related to energy carries risks. Just ask a roughneck, lineman, or wind turbine installer.
I have SOOO many questions, and this report answers SOOO few of them.
My question is what happened between when they went in the water and when they got off-site medical treatment. 7 hours seems like a long time. Is there on-site medical that would be doing something during that time?
Anecdote: My house mate in grad school was working in a national lab when an experiment caught fire and the fire consumed a certain amount of radioactive material. (Tiny little buttons used for calibrating detectors). He was on shift and was the person who discovered the fire and pulled the alarm.
Among other things, he had to sit inside an enclosure made of scintillator material for a period of time, to make sure he wasn't contaminated. Then he also got blood tests for heavy metals etc. They pretty much went by the book for all of these tests.
Also, the facility is the only place that's equipped for this kind of situation.
Realistically, there is little to do besides decontamination which I'm sure they're equipped to do on site.
It’s a process to come into a high radiation area, as well as, a process to come out; I’m sure the worker was not injured so they processed he/she out and decontaminated the individual and did a whole body count. Then release him to medical for evaluation…which in itself is a process.
Like what is a reactor cavity? HN title makes it sound like they fell into the reactor but maybe this is some sort of moat or something? what did they fall into and why?
Almost certainly a refueling outage, this video will give you a good image of it
Palisades is not an operating reactor. It has been shut down since 2022. It's in the process of being recommissioned/restarted.
ooh, thank you for this!
Scrolling up and down the list, just how onerous is this reporting regulation? It seems almost cartoonishly excessive, even for critical safety applications.
Literally no amount of incident reporting is excessive when it comes to nuclear power. Not just because of the safety of the plant itself, but because so much is reliant on it.
It's important to identify even small defects or incidents so that patterns can be noticed before they turn into larger issues. You see the same breaker tripping at 3x the rate of other ones, and even though maybe nothing was damaged you now know there's something to investigate.
Aaaand it’s this alarmist attitude which is why we don’t have abundant cheap nuclear energy.
Sea-drilling rigs (oil) have far more potential for environmental damage than modern nuclear plants
Yet they have no federal public register for when a worker falls overboard (an incident far more likely to result in death).
> Sea-drilling rigs (oil) have far more potential for environmental damage than modern nuclear plants
Key word: "modern". A key aspect of a modern nuclear plant, that supports its high level of safety, is the required incident reporting and followup.
The relevant issue is not really about a single worker being injured or dying. It's about detecting safety issues which could lead to a catastrophe far beyond what a sea oil drilling rig can, at least when it comes to human life and habitability of the surrounding area.
For example, after Chernobyl, much of Europe had to deal with contamination from cesium 137.
The entire planet's geological history shows when the nuclear age started, because humans are irresponsible in aggregate. (See also global warming.)
> Aaaand it’s this alarmist attitude ...
You're providing an object lesson in why humans can't really be trusted to operate systems like this over the long term.
> You're providing an object lesson in why humans can't really be trusted to operate systems like this over the long term.
Ironically so are you. The coal we burn puts far more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants do. Yet we make sure nuclear isn't viable and burn coal like crazy. We do this only because of the type of risk telescoping you are doing. If you do a rational risk assessment, you will see that even operating nuclear plants as shown in the Simpsons would have less risk than what we are doing now. There is a risk to doing nothing. You are missing that part in your assessment.
> It's about detecting safety issues which could lead to a catastrophe far beyond what a sea oil drilling rig can
A worker falling into a reactor pool (which is just room temp water with very little risk) is not a catastrophe, yet due to the absurd safetyism surrounding nuclear it requires a federal report.
We don’t require this level of cost insanity for far more deadly worker events at oil, gas, solar or wind facilities.
There is no systemic risk from worker falls. MAYBE the plant in question should address hand railing heights from pre-ADA construction. It certainly shouldn’t require multiple federal government employees to create a report on it and be publicly listed in federal register and reported on by hundreds of news outlets.
You’re making my point.
> We don’t require this level of cost insanity for far more deadly worker events at oil, gas, solar or wind facilities.
This is not saying what you think it's saying.
> Not just because of the safety of the plant itself, but because so much is reliant on it.
When an oil rig has an incident, cities and hospitals and food storage and logistics aren't disrupted.
Having the infrastructure for reporting incidents is the expensive part.
Doing it often doesn’t really add to the cost. More reporting is helpful because it explicitly makes it clear even operational issues can have lessons to be learned from. It also keeps the reporting system running and operationally well maintained.
WebPKI does this as well.
Relevant from Randall Munroe https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
> What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
> Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
That blog post is about the spent fuel pool. The link is about the reactor cavity.
Wouldn’t the same principles apply?
No, reactor cavity has a different shape and is directly part of the reactor system.
I mean the principle of water mitigating radioactive impact.
> “While performing work inside the containment building, a Palisades contractor fell into a pool near the reactor that contained clean, borated water,” O’Brien said.
From https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
It doesn't say worker, just "person." I could understand falling in with some freak accident where you trip. But they ingested the water?!
Knowing nothing about nuclear reactor design, why would there ever be a dangerous pool that people could walk by that wasn’t covered? Hard to believe it’s like some kind of Bond villain complex with open pools everywhere. This must have been in the course of some kind of servicing that required opening something that normally stays closed?
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.
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?
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).
CPM is so useless as a unit, it doesn't mean anything.
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.
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.
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).
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/
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/>. 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.
I get a feeling that there are a lot of people trying to minimize this incident for some reason.
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.
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
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.
Yeah I stopped really looking at replies when I realized it was just a bunch of people telling me that falling in a nuclear reactor pool isn’t that bad and to go read the XKCD again if I don’t get it.
What you "need to" do is often not decided by a rational risk assessment.
"Complaining about residual radiation is for the weak." -- Lt. Worf probably
Klingon nuclear pools have springboards.
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.
> 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.
Rate matters. 6.2Sv in a single hour is fatal. 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation. The measurement units for ionizing radiation are very complicated and confusing. That's why people are told to not try to compute this stuff yourself. I have code that computes these units and conversions, its not simple. Here is a brief and simplified explanation of how you calculate this stuff.
There are 4 types of ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, gamma/x-rays and neutron flux. Each one has a different rate it is blocked by different materials (water, air, etc). Each one has a different risk to people. You have to compute counts per unit time emitted from a point source for each of the different types of radiation. Then you have to compute the amount of "arc" the person is in. Then you have counts being absorbed and you next multiply each count by a fixed factor depending on the type of radiation. This final number gives you total Greys per unit time, then you then have to divide by the mass of the person. Then you multiple that number by the total amount of time and that gives you total Greys absorbed. That's the number you use to assess risk to the person. For reference, this guy probably got less than 1 Grey. Someone getting radiation treatment for cancer might get 75 Greys.
So please stop trying to calculate this stuff yourself. I'm pretty sure you are doing it wrong. This guy will be fine.
PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
> PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
The US's NRC disagrees with you. From [0], they say this about the sievert and rem:
and have this to say about the gray:Dose equivalent A measure of the biological damage to living tissue as a result of radiation exposure. Also known as the " biological dose," the dose equivalent is calculated as the product of absorbed dose in tissue multiplied by a quality factor and then sometimes multiplied by other necessary modifying factors at the location of interest. The dose equivalent is expressed numerically in rems or sieverts (Sv) (see 10 CFR 20.1003). For additional information, see Doses in Our Daily Lives and Measuring Radiation.
Grays seem to be "amount of radiation absorbed per kg". Looking further, the "Measuring Radiation" page at [1] directly contradicts your claim. Speaking about rems and Svs, it says:Dose, absorbed The amount of energy absorbed by an object or person per unit mass. Known as the “absorbed dose,” this reflects the amount of energy that ionizing radiation sources deposit in materials through which they pass, and is measured in units of radiation-absorbed dose (rad). The related international system unit is the gray (Gy), where 1 Gy is equivalent to 100 rad. For additional information, see Doses in Our Daily Lives and Measuring Radiation.
I'm definitely not an expert, but the NRC is pretty official, and their explanations sound pretty clear to me. Is what they're saying here incorrect?Dose equivalent (or effective dose) combines the amount of radiation absorbed and the medical effects of that type of radiation. For beta and gamma radiation, the dose equivalent is the same as the absorbed dose. By contrast, the dose equivalent is larger than the absorbed dose for alpha and neutron radiation, because these types of radiation are more damaging to the human body.> 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation.
Are you sure about that? <https://xkcd.com/radiation/> claims 4 mSv per year as normal radiation dosage, and 50 mSv per year as maximum permitted annual dosage for "US radiation workers", whatever that means.
I think you're off by a factor of a thousand for the typical exposure level and off by a factor of a hundred for the exposure level where they stop letting you work near the radioactives for a year.
[0] <https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/full-text>
[1] <https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/measu...>
No, you are just confused about the technical jargon being used. That text is written for people who have had this jargon hammered into them and is very confusing to people who haven't. This is why people are told to not try to do the calculations themselves.
"Dose absorbed" is a physical measure of ionizing radiation that is directed at something. That's measured in rems or sieverts (or Grays, notice the spelling). "Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A). Both those measures combine the count rates for the 4 different types of radiation into 1 amount. "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person. Even more confusing there is a Gray (dose absorbed) and a Grey (biological impact of a dose absorbed, or dose equivalent); they are different.
The part about beta and gamma radiation is about establishing a baseline for converting between the two units but should never be used for calculating "dose equivalent" in practice. Its how we determine the value of 1 Grey. It isn't a way to convert from "dose equivalent" to "dose absorbed".
I'm trying to simplify this stuff for an audience without the necessary background information. Doing that requires me cutting out a bunch of details. The NRC text on the other hand is technically precise but also is mentioning a lot of things that are true but confusing or only useful for calibrating instruments. They are also explaining one tiny part of this and you left out the parts where they talk about how to combine the different counts for each type of radiation into one measurement. That's something else I'm also trying to explain at the same time. So I'm covering more ground and trying to do so with simpler terms. That's going to mean you can cherry pick stuff but doing that will to give you the wrong impression.
Natural background radiation varies by location on earth by a factor of 300. That 4 mSv per year is for natural background radiation at the low end of the scale which happens at sea level in places without Uranium or Thorium deposits. However, there are places where people live (and have lived for 1000s of years) where the natural background radiation is 300x that amount or about 1.2Sv/year. There is no observed increase in cancer rates in those locations despite decades of study. I'm also assuming that the "normal person" will take a flight or two and potentially be near other sources of radiation without knowing it (like your smoke detector).
PS The 50 mSv/year number is absurdly low. Its one of the main complaints about how the NRC handles nuclear radiation. Its literally lower than the natural background radiation at sites in India and Brazil.
> Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A).
Neither the NRC nor the EPA nor the NIH nor the NRC seems to know about the "Grey". Everyone in the US seems to know about the "Gray" (abbreviated as "Gy"), which is used to measure dose and doesn't factor in biological harm.
What country uses the "Grey" unit? What's the abbreviation of the "Grey" unit? Would you point to credible sources for the answers to those two questions?
> "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person.
Yes. That's biological harm. Getting hit on the skin from outside your body with a large amount of alpha radiation is far less harmful than getting hit with the same amount of gamma radiation. AFAICT, "dose equivalent" is measured in Sv or rems.
If you can demonstrate a credible source for the "Grey" unit, then I can dismiss this as a time-wasting misunderstanding, but I've yet to see any reference to a "Grey" unit of radiation exposure.
> Its literally lower than the natural background radiation [at some places on earth]...
Yep. ALARA is a scourge. And I -too- have read Admiral Whatshisface's open letter from the 1980's or 1990's or whenever about how the regulation of the civilian nuclear energy program is batshit nuts by way of being negligently overcautious.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They typically have a railing around them. The circumstances of this incident are unknown beyond a small set of details. The report indicates that the person who fell was wearing a life vest, it is likely they were doing work around the pool beyond the normal safety barriers.
Huh why not. It's far less dangerous than, say, a train station or a viewpoint where everyone can just jump and die. Many reactors are open for kids and class trips where everyone can stare into a reactor
When I was a kid I was amazed at how many of the other kids would take pool water in their mouth and drool it out, simply as a normal part of their treading water. I thought they were weird for this but it was really about 1 out of every 3 or 4 kids I noticed that did this.
probably likely just a thing that happens when you suddenly fall into a pool of water?
I mean that's something that happens commonly when people fall into things like pools. When you jump into a pool you tend to take a breath before you do so, so you don't suck in water. When you fall into water it's much more common for people to aspirate or swallow water from the surprise.
Depending on a velocity, it also doesn't matter if you took a breath or not. Fall in quickly enough and at just the right angle (you can even do that from a fast water slide) and the water will be forced through your nose into lungs/stomach. (Unless you hold it closed)
Not a good place to be a klutz!
Your periodic reminder that coal is deadlier than nuclear.
https://cns.utexas.edu/news/research/coal-power-killed-half-...
More radiation released also which is hard to get your head around.
It's not that surprising. We're burning a rock we dug out of the ground and turning it into a vapor. Rocks found underground contain some amount of natural radioactive material, for example granite/marble tend to be higher in radiation. If you burn that into a powder and put it into the atmosphere it'll spread around and expose the nearby area to very slightly radioactive pollution.
Not really hard: nuclear power generation uses radiation and radioactive material, but tries very hard not to release it. Coal power generation burns a substance that contains a small amount of radioactive material, and makes no effort not to release radiation.
I wonder if it had anything to do with the empty "alcoholic bottles" being found?
FITNESS FOR DUTY (FFD) EVENT
The following information was provided by the licensee via phone and email:
"On 10/25/25, at approximately 1230 EDT, 3 empty alcohol bottles were found in the protected area by a contract employee. Site security was notified and took possession of the empty bottles which were removed from the protected area. The individual who accidentally brought in the empty alcohol bottles with other non-alcoholic empty bottles was tested for FFD and was negative. This event is reportable in accordance with 10 CFR 26.719(b).
"The NRC Resident Inspector has been notified."
Is he going to die no matter what or is this survivable?
Ultimately, yes; he will die no matter what.
As you get older this pedantry gets really tiring.
The good news is, you have less time to be annoyed by it
There is a deeper point here, not just pedantry. The point is that harm is a spectrum not a binary and one cannot meaningfully answer a question that assumes a binary.
Yes, there is a such a thing as a bad question after all.
Personally, my belief in my own immortality only increases the older I get. Yes, Socrates died, but he clearly wasn't smart if he died. Me, on the other hand? I'm batting a thousand.
(Tired quip “you must be new here”)
Yes, it is tiring. In this case, not really because it is at least for me, humorous in a Doc Martin sort of way. But elsewhere and on places like Reddit where the pedantry is often at best unjustified and at worst, wrong, it has made me spend less time on the sites.
Would it kill you? Well, ultimately yes..
Not necessarily. Could get hit by a car later the same day.
Unprovable.
He will be fine. He might not still have his job in a few months but other that, he will be fine. 300 CPM isn't even close to dangerous. You get a higher dose every time you fly in an airplane, or go to La Paz, Bolivia.
According to https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo... he returned to work the next day (presumably at the nuclear reactor) and only suffered minor injuries due to the fall.
> They ingested some amount of cavity water
Isn't it much worse internally than hitting your outer skin?
Yes, but: depends on what he ingested. Deuterium/tritium cannot emit Alpha particles, the ones blocked by your outer/dead skin (also they're an order of magnitude more dangerous than the other at equivalent grey), so he's fine in that way (unless there is more in the pool, but that would be a bigger issue).
The issue with ingesting deuterium/tritium is that the dose will now have to be calculated/estimated per organ, and while I don't remember exactly how it's done, it's more complex than calculating the mSv he took (I can't give you more details, I'm not competent, I've observed a radiologist a week my bachelor year to decide which master I would do, I'm now working in software which should tell you everything)
I'm not an expert but it definitely doesn't sound like an immediate threat to his life.
Man in Michigan potentially exposed to radiation levels equivalent to undergoing 4 x-rays at the doctors office.
Meanwhile, in Texas, 1.5 people die every day working in Oil and Gas extraction.
A few people die every year installing or falling off of wind turbines.
But by all means, let's make this a news story instead and keep making nuclear sound scary. I’m sure the person who posted this to HN with this clickbait title has zero political beliefs.
This is enlightening chart. Only Solar beats nuclear in deaths/Wh of energy. Even wind power results in more deaths. Additionally this uses very pessimistic numbers for large nuclear incidents and doesn't count thinks like deaths and health complications due to pollution and emitted radiation from fossil-fuel power sources (which emit way more radiation than nuclear power).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Really puts it into perspective
Does anyone have a sense for how significant of a dose of radiation this person got?
I'm not an expert in this topic but I've been working on a book in a related area and had to learn a lot. Here's what I can figure.
Unfortunately radiation medicine is pretty complicated and the report gives us very little info, presumably mostly because they don't have very much info. It will take some time and effort to establish more.
What we do know is that they measured 300 CPM at the person's hair, which was probably where they expected the highest count due to absorbed water (likely clothing was already stripped at this point). CPM is a tricky unit because it is something like the "raw" value from the instrument, the literal number of counts from the tube, and determining more absolute metrics like activity and dose requires knowing the calibration of the meter. The annoying thing here is that radiation protection professionals will still sometimes just write CPM because for a lot of applications there's only one or a handful of instruments approved and they tend to figure the reader knows which instrument they have. Frustrating. Still, for the common LND7311 tube and Cs137, 300CPM is a little below 1 uSv/hr. That wouldn't equate to any meaningful risk (a common rule of thumb is that a couple mSv is typical annual background exposure). However, for a less sensitive detector, the dose could be much higher (LND7311 is often used in pancake probes for frisking because it is very sensitive and just background is often hundreds of CPM). Someone who knows NRC practices better might know what detector would be used here.
That said the field dose here is really not the concern, committed dose from ingesting the water is. Ingesting radioactive material is extremely dangerous because, depending on the specific isotopes involved, it can persist in the body for a very long time and accumulate in specific organs. Unfortunately it is also difficult to assess. This person will likely go to a hospital with a specialty center equipped with a full body counter, and counts will also be taken on blood samples. These are ways of estimating the amount of radioactive isotopes in the body. In some cases tissue samples of specific organs may be taken.
I believe that the cavity pool water would be "clean" other than induced radioactivity (activation products from being bombarded by radiation). Because water shields so well the pool should not be that "hot" from this process. Most of those products have short half-lives which, on the one hand, means that they deliver a higher dose over a shorter period of time---but also means they will not longer forever and are less likely to be a chronic problem if they are not an acute one.
I suspect this will get some press coverage and we will perhaps learn more about the patient's state.
Another way we can get at this question is by the bureaucracy of the notification. An 8-hour notification as done here is required in relatively minor cases. Usually for a "big deal emergency" a one-hour notification is required. The definition of such an emergency depends on the site emergency plan but I think acute radiation exposure to a worker would generally qualify.
Radiation units are fiendishly tricky to convert between. Here, the only indication is that after decontamination their hair was still reading 300 counts per minute. CPM are instrument-specific and doesn't mean that's the correct number of disintegrations per second, nor easily converted to absorbed dose units, and this is after decontamination, and disregarding the amount of water they ingested.
All that disclaimer aside: a banana produces about 15 Bq (which is s^-1), i.e. 900 cpm.
"count" is that classical Geiger click, so 300 per minute is constant 5/sec gggggggg going on, which sounds bad but we don't know. They're boolean and also equipment dependent.
As others had said, more alarming part is that they ingested the water, which could go like defected Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. But it could also be like man eating few bananas seasoned with expired Himalayan salt. The report just doesn't say how much of what was ingested.
Not at all. My scintillating counter will do 300 cpm as background. The most concerning thing here will be the ingestion of the water. Even low level emitters can be very bad when the are inside the body
If it was just swimming in it that would be one thing. Ingesting the water could be very bad, depending on what's in it.
They keep the water in an LWR pretty clean to avoid corrosion problems. Thing is the slightest almost of tritium in the water will light up a portal detector like a pinball machine on tilt.
Water is a pretty good radiation shield so probably not too much. Certainly not good for your health but probably not seriously threatening.
Why is this interesting? Workers gets injured all the time and sometimes even die on various accidents in all industries and nobody ever talk about it. Is this anti-nuclear propaganda?
I guess that U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is required to report any unusual events in the plants in the US, which would be reasonable. A worker falling into a nuclear reactor pool is unusual. The report itself doesn't seem like it's anti-nuclear in any way, and it clearly states "no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel".
If you're asking why it's interesting for HN, I think it's actually because people are fascinated with nuclear, in a positive way.
Because another mutant might be joining our ranks soon.
Like in Teenage Ninja Turtles? Sounds cool! (But you know it's fictional, right?)
You must not have heard of Luke Cage. It's very real.
The rest of the event reports are also very active. Reactor sites are fun places to work.
At Purdue university we had a small research reactor and to this day can remember looking down through the pool to see the blue glow of the nuclear reaction. It is crazy how well the water (boronized?) stops radiation.
Interesting page overall. Didn't realize reactors get scrammed that often.
I thought you could safely swim in that water so long as you stay a few meters clear of the rods? water being a good absorber of radiation and all. Is this just a precautionary reaction?
Hopefully the worker is okay. I have to agree that the non-emergency classification seems odd. This should warrant a proper investigation and steps to avoid this in the future.
I can guarantee you there will be a proper investigation and steps taken to avoid this in the future. The non-emergency classification here applies solely to the notification that the contamination was transported off-site. Not to the fact that the incident occurred. Every accidental incident that occurs within the controlled area of a nuclear facility is investigated and evaluated for necessary policy changes.
And the reason the contamination transport off-site was classified as non-emergency was because even though the amount of radiation detected on the guy is less than he'd have gotten from flying in an airplane; nuclear safety standards are so unbelievably rigorous and strict that even that small of an incident needs to be reported; even if it presents absolutely no danger to anyone anywhere (not even the guy that was contaminated) and hence is classified as a non-emergency notification.
FTA: “This is an eight-hour notification, non-emergency, for the transportation of a contaminated person offsite“
⇒ the “non-emergency” classification isn’t about the “fell into a nuclear reactor pool”, but about sending the victim off site.
> Plant officials today confirmed the worker sustained minor injuries from the fall and has already returned to work. - https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
They returned to work the next day with minor injuries due to the fall. It doesn't sound like it was an emergency to me.
Palisades was closed down 2022, but just reopened recently at August 27, 2025.
Hair contaminated
> 300 counts per minute
Roughly 10x background radiation.
So like two weeks of sunshine in a day.
Not a good day. Not fatal.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with corporate malfeasance.
For comparison: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/around-us/calculator
In other news, a kitten named millicurie did a really adorable thing.
The only remarkable fact here is that the regulatory structure is strong enough that we commoners are entitled to hear about it. That's a Very Good Thing, and one I wish we enjoyed apropos, say, the corporate veil (looking at you, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Aramco, Sinopec, Amazon, Oracle, AIPAC, United, The Trump Organization, X Corp, Paramount, Skydance, eMed Population Health, Inc., et. al.).
But the story here is a guy fell into some water, and is following SOP (which is also a Very Good Thing).
Please don't feed the clickbait.
I'm not literate at all on nuclear physics, but I remember in the "Chernobyl" TV show (which seemed trustworthy) some divers died after going in the cooling water to close the pumps. How was that water different ?
I watched the show but if I remember correctly they actually didn’t die. They survived.
> The reality is much more positive than the myth, with all three men escaping such a grisly fate. Indeed, Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bespalov are believed to be both still alive as of 2024, while Boris Baranov lived until 2005 when he passed away from heart disease.
Source: https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-real-story-of-the-cher...
Does the operator go to court for OH&S breaches?
I have instagram id hack please
No more horseplay around the reactor!
These are quite a few reports for one day for a technology we purportedly have under full control, nothing to worry.
Which do you consider as being under better control: a technology that we exhaustively create reports on even in the face of incidents like this where the only real chance of harm was that the guy couldn't swim and might have drowned; or a technology where we don't report on anything at all whatsoever and thus have no idea what's actually going on?
Reports don't mean danger, and they don't mean lack of control. Reports are information.
Of the eight reports I only see one that relates to a guy being able to swim or not (and I suspect the same is true for the estimated 1400 reports so far this year). Also having transparency is obviously good and I don't understand what you want to prove with arguing that a worse situation would be worse. It clearly would be worse.
I'm also not totally against nuclear, in case you are suspecting that. I do think though, that we as a society aren't at the point where we have the ability to completely control such technology, contrary to what proponents of much higher utilization of nuclear like to claim. Reports of fuses seemingly without failover or stolen equipment seem to support that argument.
Did a coal miner write this comment?
Worse, an environmentalist.
Miner vs. straw man, who wins? :o)
The fear about nuclear is so big that this idiocy gets 500 points and 350 comments because nuclear is scary
We’re 50 years behind fusion because of people that now rage against fossil fuels. It’s tough to see it keep happening despite the educational resources we have now vs the 70s and 80s.
swimming in a reactor pool isnt that bad, water is a great radiation shield.
The XKCD has come to life!
Accidental swimming is no fun, I wish the guy a full recovery from dihydrogen monoxide poisoning.
Toxic Avenger remake.
I can't help but be reminded of relevant xkcd^{TM} https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Apparently it’s fine according to this xkcd: https://youtu.be/EFRUL7vKdU8
It's the reactor cavity in this case, not a nuclear waste storage pool.
How is that different from the accident point of view. They're both quite radioactive and both sit in deep pools of water.
The water in a nuclear waste storage pool should not be particularly radioactive unless something has gone wrong and contains mostly regular H2O.
The reactor vessel can contain heavy water or water with boric acid in it, neither of which are good for you. Additionally, neutron radiation from the reactor will cause the formation of radioactive tritium in the vessel water, so the liquid itself becomes radioactive.
Doesn’t seem like the same pool if you measure 300 counts/min from their hair afterwards.
That makes it sound like a feature! Might get some rods for my pool to keep her warm.
Relevant xkcd content: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
> You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on the street.
Wow
Is it relevant? It's writing about a pool for storing spent fuel, which is not a part of the actual reactor system.
This incident report says that the worker fell into a "reactor cavity" containing water and that there was a measurable amount of radiation detected in their hair after the initial clean-up. The two situations don't seem remotely compatible to me.I guarantee you there's 'a measurable amount of radiation' in your hair right now. Unless you're bald, I suppose.
Yeah, no shit. But, come on, don't play dumb. By measurable, I obviously meant "above normal background". Something that shouldn't have been possible if, as described in the xkcd post, the water should have had less radioactivity than normal background. Combined with the fact that the post was literally about a different kind of pool than the one involved in the accident, it was reasonable to question whether the post was actually relevant.
I agree this was not a serious incident, and I never really though it was. (I'm extremely pro-nuclear, for the record.) But at the time I posted, the comment section was about 8 people posting the xkcd link at once (with no additional commentary), and few others reading it and saying "oh, no problem then", with literally nobody pointing out the discrepancies, or explaining exactly what a "reactor cavity" means in this context.
And a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8
So if I understand this correctly (solely from reading the xkcd), then the person might actually be okay?
They're totally fine.
I find it highly informative that the required PPE for working in that location is a life jacket so you float in case you fall in, rather than a tether and fall arrest harness so that it's not possible to fall in.
300 CPM is nothing, background levels might be 150.
Background is probably a bit lower depending on where you're at. My counter went through airport security luggage scans 'cause they wouldn't let me wear it through the metal detector. It beeps for a few seconds and then comes out about a days' dose of natural radiation higher. The count was higher than 300 CPM, but obviously only shortly. That poor bloke might stay at 300 (if ingested and he can't scrub it off) for a while but it's still not very discouraging long-term. Pilots have about that at cruising altitude.
> Plant officials today confirmed the worker sustained minor injuries from the fall and has already returned to work. - https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
He went back to work the next day. They don't provide much detail about the minor injuries but it seems that the biggest issue is maybe a bruised shin from the fall.
Mandatory xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Video format if anyone prefers it: https://youtu.be/EFRUL7vKdU8
And a video version:
This may be the most relevant xkcd yet. It answered all questions I had about this, thank you.
New superhero on their way.
Guys slow down, you're gonna hug xkcd to death
Dude about to have superpowers and go after the government
3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible
and so hulk was born
relevant xkcd not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreev_Bay_nuclear_accident#A...
Not bad, not terrible.
Did you mean “not great, not terrible” or was the change deliberate?
Obligatory XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
(Not exactly same but close)
Obligatory xkcd (ish)
> They ingested some amount of cavity water.
How dumb do you have to be to not only fall into it but to also swallow it...