The ghosts of Trojan: 5 ways Oregon’s only nuclear plant still haunts the Northw

[Marlin]

I have a lot of good and interesting memories of Trojan. Unlike other unionized plants I did know it was unionized for a couple of weeks. Working Zion a heavily unionized plant we could not use any of the facilities in the plant and when given a job we had to wait in the hallway outside the HP office. At Trojan one of the supervisors while surveying in the basement of the containment heard a noise and while exploring it a fuel bundle was transported by in the transfer tube resulting in 25 R exposure. The first evolution each outage afterward was the construction of shield walls that had to be removed prior to criticality. He was a good guy to work for. Some of the fuel bundles were deteriorated and while inspecting some of the bundles some pellets spilled to the fuel pool floor. During transfer of these bundles' debris would be stirred up from the bottom and we would have back away from the pool until it settled back down to the bottom and dose rate dropped back down. Locals claimed that the plant was causing a smell ignoring the paper mills. There was detectable contamination in the river that locals blamed on the plant but if you followed it upriver it increased on the way to Hanford where there had been "once through" reactors for plutonium production. There was a good night life there with a number of clubs nearby. I met a young lady that I am still married to 44 years later. 

Reminiscing of an old Nuke worker over 

https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/21/ghosts-trojan-nuclear-power-plant-portand-oregon-rainier/