This diary is dedicated to the 40 or so people who read my earlier diaryand encouraged me to write a sequel. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
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Warning! This diary may evoke disturbing mental images. Reader discretion is advised.
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Story #4 "So the Site VP and I were standing in our underwear when the delegation of state legislators arrived..."
I turn 50 this year and I've been thinking lately about how different things are now compared to when I was younger. In short, I've become like my dad who would would talk about life on the farm when his family still used draft horses and picked corn by hand. No tractors, much less tractors with radios, air conditioning and sound proof cabs like I drove growing up.
Take the three whippersnappers in this video wearing the iconic anti-contamination suit (aka Anti-C) everyone associates with nuclear power plant workers.
You may think everyone walks around in these things all day but the fact is you will hardly see anyone wearing them except during refueling outages when going into normally inaccessible areas. Anymore an outage will occur every 1 ½ to 2 years and last on average 3 or 4 weeks. Back in the early 80's when I started working a refueling outage would occur about every 12 months and often lasted 3 months.
Workers get taught on the order the various parts of the suit are put on and, more importantly, the order they are taken off to keep from getting any contamination on you or anythng else, but it isn't particularly hard. I'm sure Mike Rowe could figure it out after all of the episodes of Dirty Jobs showing him scraping goat manure and whatnot from the inside of some huge vat wearing protective suits. The concept is much the same.
But if you were to look at a throwback set of Anti-Cs you would notice a few differences compared to the suits of today. As you might gather from the video, the suits are not tailored. They only come in a limited number of sizes. But modern suits have knit wrists to keep the sleeves from sliding over your hand. Likewise, the legs are elasticized at the bottom and have stirrups to keep them from riding up or sliding down. Back in the day these conveniences weren't built in features and we would wrap masking tape of the type you use for painting rooms around the sleeves and pant legs several times keep them in place. We went through lots and lots of tape. At about a 1:27 in the video you will see a person holding an electronic dosimeter that workers wear in high radiation areas that chirps if their accumulated exposure reaches some a predetermined level or they walk near an area where the dose rate is particularly high. It also has a digital readout. Back in the day we were issued low tech pencil dosimeters that you would hold up to the light every now and then to read.
Underneath the Anti-Cs the guys in the videos are probably wearing hospital scrubs rather than work clothes because of the possibility of sweating enough to wick contamination through. If the scrubs become contaminated you will be issued a new set to change into rather than having your shirt or jeans confiscated.
Around 1987, just a few years out of college, I was a given the job of Containment Coordinator for the annual refueling outage at the Acme Nuclear Plant. It was not a well defined job but basically entailed troubleshooting, making sure electrical cords and air hoses were secured and not posing a tripping hazard and making sure everyone was wearing their hard hats and obeying the safety rules. If a worker needed a wrench and nobody else was around I fetched it. I did whatever needed doing to keep things running safely and smoothly. So I became very proficient at dressing in and out. One day the site VP stopped by and asked that I take him on an inspection tour inside, which went well. We had exited containment and were in an area marked off with stanchions and rope where the radiation techs had laid down disposable plastic sheeting to catch any loose contamination. We had shed most of our Anti-C garb except for the shoe covers and cotton glove liners and were waiting our turn to get to the "step off pad", an area with the floor space of a telephone booth (remember those?) where we would take them off and step back into the clean. And so it was that the Site VP and I were standing in our underwear when the delegation of state legislators arrived. I need to explain two things. First, during refueling outages we frequently gave tours to officials to let them see the plant first hand, answer questions, dispel any misconceptions they had about nuclear power and generally show we had nothing to hide. The highlight of the tour was a trip to the refueling floor where they could see fuel that had been taken out of the reactor that glowed blue from the Cerenkov radiation (very cool!). The tour had to pass by the entrance to the containment to get to the elevator. The other thing I need to mention is that the hospital scrubs (called "modesty garments" in the nuclear industry) were not issued to us until about 1990 or so. Before then workers were required to strip down to their skivvies, shoes and socks before donning the Anti-Cs at a dress out area about 30 yards from the containment entrance. So the area looked like one big locker room during outages.
You can tell a lot about a man from the underwear he wears. Things you could do without knowing. I saw everything from raggedy underpants that should have been retired long ago to racy little leopard print numbers.
A few of the members of the tour recognized the VP and waved. He waved back. I was standing next to him, both of us in our tighty whities. One of the legislators or their aids was a middle-aged woman who was trying hard not to let on that anything strange was going on. But yes, it felt strange. I am now a boxer man.