When I was in graduate school, I worked in a small (5 megawat) research nuclear reactor. Before I worked there, I believed that reactors were dangerous, that we needed to work our way to a point where renewable resources could replace reactors and fossil fuels. It struck me as a very difficult choice as to whether nuclear power or fossil fuels were more dangerous.
After working in that small, very safe, reactor for two years, I believe that all reactors should be shut down--now, if not sooner.
I want to be clear at the outset. I am not a nuclear engineer. I do not really understand much about the physics or details of reactor construction. I am an anthropologist, so I'm just a people person. But what I learned working in a reactor was this...no matter how dangerous something is, eventually people become complacent and do stupid things. Its natural...we just can't keep our attention up, our guard up, or live with that level of anxiety. When working with dangerous things, eventually people forget about the danger.
Here are some of the things I saw working at that reactor.
1. The reactor core was the last place on campus where you could smoke inside. The people running the show were worried the reactor operators would slip out back during their shifts if they couldn't smoke. As a result, there were always a large number of men (and yes, they were always men), sitting on old La-Z-boys with their feet up on the railing around the reactor pool smoking. The ash trays were always overflowing.
2. The reactor was built in the 1950s, with no real updates. As a result, the control room looked like some bad 1950s sci-fi film in which aliens stalked and menaced attractive teens. The only modern computer was against the back wall, where the reactor controls were out of sight. Here the reactor operators would spend almost all their time--for the most part downloading pornography from the internet and jerking off.
3. Reactors use distilled water for coolant. Of course some grit and dust gets into the water. So, on the roof of the building there is a settling tank. This allows for the dust and grit to settle out of the water before being pumped back into the reactor. There was a small leak in the sludge tank, that flowed through the roof, down a cinderblock wall, where it seeped into the room I worked in. The main concern of everyone was that it was buckling the vinyl tiling. The solution was to remove the tile, and place a large sticky pad at the entrance to the room so that we would not track the radioactive sludge through the building.
4. For our IDs, we had a Polaroid camera and lamination machine in the office. But at some point the camera was stolen. The solution was obvious. The camera and lamination machine was placed inside the large, lead-lined, walk-in safe intended for fuel rods and other highly radioactive materials. Those materials were then moved to the closet behind the water fountain in the reactor core. The Polaroid was locked up each night, but still managed to be stolen again.
There are other stories, and other things that I cannot believe happened. But there is one last thing. You might be asking how such slipshod standards could have occurred? Weren't we inspected by the NRC? Yes we were, and we got the highest marks. Throughout high school and college I worked in restaurants, mostly as a dish dog. What I can say is this, a surprise inspection by the NRC has exactly the same feel as the surprise visit of a health inspector at a restaurant. That is, while they are in one room, we cleaned up the other.
The whole point of this diary is simple--people are people. If you want to know what the staff of a nuclear reactor is like, just imagine the people you work with at whatever job you do--then imagine them operating a machine that could kill everyone in a small city and render that town unlivable for several hundred years.
I have listened to many nuclear engineers explain to me why the latest designs are safe, why we can engineer safety and redundancy into reactor designs--but I have never heard a nuclear engineer explain how they will stop reactor operators from jerking off in the middle of their shift. They may be able to engineer a safe reactor design--but as long as reactors are designed by, built by, and operated by people, they will never be safe.
PS Just to ease your mind, since then, that reactor has been decommissioned and dismantled. One down, many, many more to go.