Reply #70: Most discoveries are by accident

[nomatrix]

In December 1984 Stanley Watrus, an engineer at the Pennsylvania Limerick nuclear power plant, set off the alarms as he passed through the radiation detection gates on the way home. This would not have been terribly unusual except for the fact that the nuclear materials had not yet arrived at the newly constructed plant. The search for this radioactive contamination led to the Watras home, in Boyertown, where radiation levels caused by environmental radon were found to be 700 times greater than that considered safe for human exposure. Residing indoors at the Watras home posed the same health risk as smoking 280 packs of cigarettes each day.
Radon is probably the most dangerous pollutant on Earth. Silent, odorless, deadly.
(This is what originally led me to the book "The Day We Bombed Utah")

If he worked anywhere else (even on the plant) he never would have been near the detection gates to set them off. It took over year (if I recall correctly) to fix his house, and thousands of dollars. The Watrus family spent most of that time in a hotel.

1976 at Millstone Power Plant in Ct-Radioactive mist that escaped from the Millstone plants in Waterford activated nuclear alarms in nuclear submarines docked at Groton.

I know both of these from 1st hand experience.

http://prop1.org/2000/accident/facts4.htm