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MehBlah@lemmy.world 13 hours agoI once spent several hours stuck in decon on a reactor shutdown because I had breathed in … Its been thrity years… I think boron gas from the reactor. It had a short half life measured in seconds but I got enough dose that it took a while for it to drop down low enough for me to be passed by the machine. Nothing to do in decon but stand around. No restrooms, food or water. No chairs either. It could have been worse. One guy got a hot particle on them. A microscopic piece of fuel rod. It finally ended up his nethers and they used duct tape pull it off. Hair and all. He left in a set of scrubs with his boots and everything else taken.
janus2@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Ok that is a rough time. Every time I got contaminated I was always insanely glad it was only a 2 hour half life (and that each time, I managed to remove it by ditching clothes/shoes or washing my skin so I wouldn’t be trapped in the lab).
We also had some very small amounts of long-lived isotopes that would end up in our waste stream and have to be found by playing hot/cold with the pancake. Oh and most of the contaminated items were needles and broken glass. I was so fuckin scared of accidentally stabbing myself with a LLRM sharp 😭
Oh also I broke a pancake tube by letting it get stabbed and Ludlum took like 3 months to get it back to us and the other Model 3 was shitty uuuuuuuugh
MehBlah@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I once forgot I had a contaminated sharpie from the hot shed. It had a fairly high level of contamination and probably shouldn’t have been handed out. it fell out of my anti-c’s hitting the leg of my scrubs and both of my boots at decon. They were not happy with me and I lost my scrub bottoms and boots. I did the walk of shame from the sally port back to the locker room.
Fun times, sorta. It was good money though. I was in a union with a bunch of old timers(in their forties and early fifties) who built the unit and they were a treasure trove of knowledge about that place. I’m glad I quit because all of those guys died before they were sixty. Too many chemicals from different plants we also worked.
Three people my age died before they were thirty when they got exposed to something at a chemical plant. All of them died from massive organ failure and tumors withing three years of each other. They were all doing some cutting in a supposedly cleared high pressure storage tank. When they cut through in one place there was a void filled with something. It covered them and they were cleaned up and laid off. They were not in a union so they had no way to complain It was not a pretty thing to witness.