Nuclear plant refueling and temporary workers

meb66

I live and work approximately ten miles from the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant. As many of you probably know, this facility (and I assume others around the country) is periodically shut down for refueling. From what I understand, hundreds of temporary workers are brought in to assist with this activity.

I believe the last refueling outage at TMI was back in fall 2009. Literally thousands of temp workers arrived for that one due to some other major work (installation of new steam generators. etc) that was being done at the time. I assume that many of these workers stayed at local hotels, possibly rented cars, ate at local restaurants, etc. during their time in the area.

My question has to do with how closely a small army of workers like this is checked for potential contamination before they leave a plant site everyday. In other words, what is the chance that any of these workers could inadvertently transport radioactive particles/material off-site (into the community) via their clothing, shoes, etc?

Thanks for taking the time to read

Astronuc

Workers going into certain areas of the plant - particularly containment are scanned - whole body in and out. Whenever I go into highly restricted areas - I've been scanned in and out. The detectors are pretty sensitive.

That is even moreso true today than in the past. Since 9/11 security is much tighter. The utility has an interest to make sure that nothing unwanted gets in or out.

M. Bachmeier

This link might help...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_decontamination

meb66

Thanks for the info, guys

Can get a little scary thinking about this given the large number of people going in and out of these plants daily ... and the fact that even tiny amounts of some radioactive substances (particularly if inhaled from what I've read) can potentially be very dangerous.

minerva

You should remember that everything around a nuclear power plant is very well monitored for the presence of radioactive contamination, with very sensitive instruments.

Look up the case of Stanley Watras, for an interesting demonstration of the implications of this.

As another example, if you went into a nuclear power plant and you have recently had a nuclear medicine procedure, you would probably set off all those monitors too.