Career Path > Radiation Safety

RP and Chemistry Question Re Fuel Leaks

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nowhereman:
I certainly hope that N-16 comment was a typo error. Or maybe. I've got a major GCE going on.
Someone has got to talk to Chili from SES. He's got a summer class coming up.
Hi Chili!🙃

SloGlo:

--- Quote from: Marlin on Apr 22, 2020, 09:08 ---N16 ??? Not so much.

--- End quote ---
yins gotta bee quick wit n16. butt, it will decay off fast.😉

scotoma:
N16 decays off before it ever gets into the atmosphere. Radon and its daughters mostly come from natural sources. In Vermont, radon is prevalent in the earth and gets into houses and well water. If you shower prior to coming to work, and go directly into the RCA, you could alarm the portals when you exit. Failed fuel gives you radioactive noble gases, mostly Krypton and Xenon, (and also Iodine which is not noble, but decays to Xenon), which escape into the atmosphere. The noble gases float around and don't interact, but it is the daughters that give you the problems. Krypton has the shortest 1/2life which makes it most radioactive and decays to Ribidium. Ribidium88 is the most prevalent with an ~18 minute 1/2life. It is most significant when the Rx is critical. I'm sure that there were other things fllying around, but not in sufficient quatities to be significant. There was an RP tech assigned to vacuum people to help them clear the monitors more quickly (maybe that is "bug off", but there was one tech who said "come with me, I have to suck you off"). After S/D, the rubidium goes away. When you de-pressurize the primary system, the noble gases and Iodine leave the failed fuel bundles and concentrate in the coolant. At CY, I recall that the Xenon got up to 25 uc/ml and the Iodine was over 1 uc/ml. A 1 liter sample bottle was over 100 mR/hr. The S/G charcoal sample was 500 mR/hr. and the Iodine oozed out and crapped up the count room. I believe that in 2003, VY had only one failed element. CY had several failed elements with multiple pinhole leaks which is why it was mostly a gas problem and not an alpha problem.

Blacksnake66:
Great stuff, except for the Scott gibberish. Must've been at the pub when they responded.
The N-16 shine is daily BWR life.Bug off is my term, loitering around the portals, trying to get out, bugging the RP techs.(I personally think you Rps are more nuclear nerds than us twidgets)
Bug off, is getting the hell back to my shop term before management thinks you're F'in off.
They were a great bunch up there at VY- Terri, Tony B, others and that hot red head who visited us for outages.Radon I know from my old monitoring days, temp inversions, etc.
What I'm interested in is the stuff I used to have to track as a reactor operator- my iodine and xenon transients.And the other stuff I didn't have to care too much about that circulated in the coolant.
If this gets out, and in a BWR, it doesn't take much to go from primary to atmosphere, at least MY atmosphere,I want to know what I might have gotten exposed to.
I presently have thyroid cancer. The thyroid is a sponge for iodine. When there's an accident we supply pillsto fill the thyroid with non radioactive iodine to prevent uptake.
In reflecting back on my career, I've been around a bunch of different sites and exposures;  open heads, fuel pools, sampling, etc.As I get ready to have my thyroid removed next month at the VA, I'm wondering if that bad fuel was the likely exposure to get the cancer started.
I remember a story after I left VY in 2004 to start contracting. Another site had bad fuel and one of the operators in the Aux bldg who was a health freakdropped dead in a couple months from an aggressive cancer that hit him out of the blue.
My wondering is this, Are utilities doing what they should to make sure employees are not getting uptakes of especially dangerous fission products?
I felt at VY we were letting it run out quietly. I'd sit there for a half an hour and sometimes changing clothes to get out.
I resorted to spraying myself with anti static spray before going in and watching what clothes, cotton vs polyester I'd wear etc before going in too.There was never much alarm about it.But all these years later I'm wondering if I should have been more cautious in my youth.

fiveeleven:
Sorry about your health issues. The individual and collective knowledge on this site on the technical aspects of pretty much the entire spectrum of all things nuclear is for sure impressive. In your situation, to obtain a more comprehensive assessment that could mean something, you would need to talk to an attorney who specializes in radiation related illness. Good luck on your upcoming procedure.

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