Reply #36: Radiation is SO scary.

[Sirveri]

I've been exposed to high level ionizing radiation. I had my gonads about a foot away from a 1 rem per hour hot spot once.

Guess what, I'm perfectly fine. And so are the residents of Vermont. ENVY was actually one of the plants I applied for an operations position at. They're one of the older operating plants. BWR style reactors like this generally treat the entire plant as a containment structure, which means that any fluid which drips on the floor drains to special storage tanks to prevent discharge to the environment. Also since it is from the feedwater system, it is likely downstream of the condensate polishers, which means that all the short lived radioactives have decayed out, and most of the long term have been scrubbed out by the polishers.

So the public is entirely safe, and the only people at risk of contamination are the employees, and the contamination levels are likely so low that they won't even register anything above background.

And I also like how you decided to quote me out of context. What I said was that a three year old could run a MODERN plant during a LOCC casualty without causing fuel damage. Since the majority of the statement consists of technical terms, it's fairly important to keep the phrase intact. So since this plant was a second generation BWR and not a 4th gen, it really doesn't count. That said it was 'technically' a LOCC, however the leak rate was so slow it likely didn't impact core water levels, or require a scram. In fact it barely qualifies as a leak, since it's 60 drops a minute. Considering that the pressure in that pipe could be as high as 1000 psi, that's not very obscene, they likely get worse leakage if you combined the leakage rate from every single valve packing gland.