Reply #41: Since "rem" is an idealized approximate absorbed dose, your claim to have

[struggle4progress]

had your gonads a foot away from a 1 rem per hour hot spot really doesn't make sense: the emission type and source matter, and what constitutes suitable shielding matter varies accordingly; the length of exposure will generally also matter. Deliberately or otherwise, you're unclear about whether your location would have produced a whole-body dose or a dose to your gonads of 1 rem in an hour. I myself wouldn't deliberately subject my my gonads anything like a 1 rem dose, absent some justifying medical need: since BEIR estimated a 15 rem testicular dose would produce temporary sterility, it is prudent to assume that even 1 rem dose is likely to produce some unrepaired damage to germ cell DNA, that might appear in a following generation

Your claim that the entire plant is treated as a containment structure actually means the entire site is treated as a containment structure -- and it's not always a particularly effective one. Offsite radiological contamination is not unknown, despite frequent industry claims that it is impossible: the following example took me about 30 seconds to locate

UNITED STATES
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
OFFICE OF NUCLEAR REACTOR REGULATION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20555-0001
July 10, 2006
NRC INFORMATION NOTICE 2006-13: GROUND-WATER CONTAMINATION DUE TO UNDETECTED LEAKAGE OF RADIOACTIVE WATER

... Braidwood Nuclear Power Plant
In March 2005, the licensee was notified by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of tritium detected in a nearby residential well ...

Dresden Nuclear Power Station
... Following the 2004 leak, the licensee sampled the private wells of nearby residents. One of the residents’ wells that had shown detectable tritium for a number of years had tritium levels of approximately 1,000 pCi/L. Additionally, three other residential wells were found to have measurable but lower levels of tritium ...

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/2006/in200613.pdf

Anyone who wants to consider the credibility of your claim, that a three year old could handle a loss of coolant accident at a modern nuclear plant, should read the beginning of the Scientific American article I posted down-thread, which discusses the corrosion at Davis Besse (discovered, at best, only a few months before loss of reactor head integrity) -- where further investigation found major coolant system problems

The dishonesty of nuclear industry propaganda continues to suggest that we should generally regard its claims with some skepticism