The ultimate of your last point is probably Anatoly Bugorski, who stuck his head inadvertently in a running particle accelerator. The beam had an estimated energy of 76 GeV. Per this statement by a Stanford engineering grad student (quickest cite I could find) Bugorski was estimated to have received a radiation dose of 300,000 rads (3,000 Gray). To his head. Normal whole body, rapid onset dose where 50% mortality is expected within 30 daysis four Sievert or so. Gray refers to the dose absorbed, Sievert to that dose’s effect on biological tissue. Often equivalent.
(I quibble with the use of rad for Dr. Bugorski’s dose mainly because I don’t think his tissues absorbed the energy so much as they slightly attenuated the proton beam on its way out his skull. I have no idea how many Sievert he picked up from this accident, but I doubt it was 3,000. Still enough to permanently paralyze half his face, as well as lead to permanent neurological deficits. He did recover sufficiently from the accident to earn his PhD )
If you are old enough, you might remember that dentists used to leave the room when you were having a mouth x-ray. And there is a medical joke that you should stand behind the radiographer while your patient is x-rayed, because radiographers are “x-ray opaque”… or perhaps because radiographers stand out of the beam, in the direction of least leakage, when doing an x-ray.
The difference between getting one x-ray every year or two, and giving a couple of x-rays every day is pretty large. You have to be in the room when you get that x-ray, because that’s how x-rays work. The technician giving the x-rays doesn’t, and so there’s no good reason for them to be in the room, even if it probably wouldn’t give them cancer even after a 20 year career of giving x-rays every day.
So basically there is no such thing as a suit that will protect you from the kind of radiation that would be caused by a nuclear meltdown? You would basically have to be in a lead box?
I think it’s been linked already but the factors to consider in determining how to minimize radiation exposure are: Distance, Shielding, and Time. To answer your question, we need to know how far away from the radiation source are you? Opening a door to the reactor room, post explosion, and staring at radiating fuel elements, is different than sitting in a Mi-8 2500 feet over the core, taking overhead photos.
What shielding is between you and it? Sandia Labs had one of their stereotypically baroque experimental apparatus for testing robots in an ultra high gamma environment. I think they used something like feet of earth, lead, and concrete. This attenuated much of the gamma flux.
How long are you exposed? The bio robots at Chernobyl had something like 45 seconds to run from shelter, scoop up a piece of graphite moderator, huck it off the roof, and return to safety. 45 minutes? They’d die horribly. As many personnel did, of course. Even the elephants foot, even at 300 Sv/hr dosage rate at X distance, still would allow a brief glimpse, say 5-10 seconds, without certain death.
Don’t ingest any material, of course. Gamma is bad enough, but IIRC, internal alpha can have a much higher Sv/Gy ratio, if you allow it to pass your skin. Like if you breath in the right size dust. Of course, many alpha emitters, that finely divided, are going to do their best to give you heavy metal poisoning too.
It also protects you from radioactive contamination, i.e. getting radioactive material on your skin and clothes. And contamination can be a larger risk in the long run - when you inhale or ingest radioactive materials, it stays in your body, emitting radiation right next to your cells.
Of course you’d want to combine the tyvek suit with a good mask, and tape up all the gaps.
Clearly some of them at the beginning didn’t realize the extent of the problem, especially since their boss was in full denial mode (*). After that, they knew if only from seeing their colleagues droping like flies and vomiting blood. They did that because they had too. For instance the guys who apparently died turning valves. Just heroism.
I rather liked the episode, but I’m left wondering if they didn’t exagerate a bit the general incompetence for effect.
(*)By the way I was amazed that the engineers inside a power plant might have no clue that the core had exploded. I somehow assumed that it would have been immediately obvious when in fact they didn’t know for apparently hours and had to sent guys on the roof to check.
Denial that the accident was that serious. Denial that they were probably going to die.
I haven’t seen this (yet) but I’ve read accounts of the accident. Apparently at one point some of the people on site were trying to measure the radiation in the area. They went through several detectors, all of them indicating off the scale, and kept discarding one and picking up another more or less muttering that this thing must be broken because it’s off the scale… failing to consider that ALL their machines were actually reporting the radiation levels accurately. :eek:
It’s not at all unusual for there to be a period of denial when a catastrophe starts.
According to the movie, there were 3 types of radiation detectors available to the crew the night of the explosion. Cheap ones that everyone had access to that pegged at 3.6 Sv. Dangerous but not immediately deadly. So when all the available meters read the same thing, everyone said hmm well it is serious but not a catastrophe at that level. Oops. The better detectors were literally locked in a safe to keep them from being stolen. No one there in the middle of the night had a key. When they finally did get the key, the first detector literally failed as soon as it was turned on. So no one considered that reading (pegged) as realistic. The other good meter didn’t break-but it pegged at 300 Sv and no one believed that since it was just one detector. Then people started falling over. That finally got people’s attention-after the entire local fire brigade was wiped out. You would think that the fire brigade nearest an active nuclear power plant would have it’s own radiation detectors. If anyone needed them they would. Apparently not.
Just spent a month and a couple weeks getting 54 Gy a day/26 doses … very tightly targeted doses [as in they tattooed 3 aiming points on me, and bitchen me out when I would lose as little as a kilo, when I dropped 9 kilo in a week and almost croaked they had to recalculate the targetting.]
Been there, done that [worked in nuke plants repairing them] Trained for every contract no matter how many I had previously done [I think I can still recite the CFRs in my sleep …] and part of the training is getting into and out of anticontamination gear safely. Unlike the guys I worked with who were happy in tighty whities, I used a bathing suit as my underwear … though the guys on my shift got told to get trunks, though personally I wouldn’t have cared if they had gone commando [naked doesn’t bother me, though some guys would benefit from having the pelt on their backs and asses waxed or at least shaven!]
I can report that the radiation from the spent rod pool is lovely [access in to Ginnea in Rochester is a catwalk over the pool] and one contract the only safe place for me to stand while recording numbers was a single square of just over a meter by just under a meter with my back to the reactor shielding dome … and I had a limit of 15 minutes per 24 hour period. That contract I ‘burnt’ my exposure limit for the year in 3 months.
I actually can’t wait for the next general monitoring session I have in a year, I can report an amazing amount of exposure now =) I swear, I could probably work in a pitcheblend mine and get less occupational exposure =)
I recall one article about the disaster which mentioned the “bridge of death”. There was a bridge in the nearby town with a good view of the reactor building. When things went haywire, quite a few people went out onto th bridge to watch the spectacle. They were quite a few hundred meters (a kilometer or more?) from the reactor, but I think they were in the downwind path. The cloud of radioactive fine particles and smoke went up and across Poland and Scandinavia sickening field workers in Poland and setting off radiation alarms in Sweden (setting off a serious concern there until the people monitoring realized the alarms were stronger outside the plant than in it…)
Everyone who stood on that bridge died.
Supposedly, quit a few people who had the nuclear training and who saw the damage knew they were effectively dead men, but they kept on working.
I’m quite looking forward to seeing this show myself. I’m a Mechanical Engineer, and my father’s career as the same took place in the nuclear industry in Canada. I well remember the incident from when I was a teen and my dad having lots of not-then- public info to review.
I haven’t seen the show yet, but I read a book written by insiders from “behind the iron curtain” - the denial was so strong that it wasn’t until a helicopter survey that the official story changed. That chapter of the book was titled “The Myth of the Intact Reactor Building”. This was a book published by the Russians in the late 80s which my dad gave me to read when I was about 44 or so.
As I recall, the first 2 inspectors to go into the reactor building reported seeing stars through the absent roof, but they were flat out ignored/disbelieved.
Actually, I just had a dental x-ray, the the technician used a battery-operated, hand-held x-ray generator. The new, digital sensors must be really sensitive!
