🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov4.210346.2724@aoa.aoa.utc.com> carl@aoa.aoa.utc.com (Carl Witthoft) writes:
>
>There have been newspaper articles on and off thru the years 
>which describe "gypsy" workers who do maintenance on nuclear
>power plants.  By being mobile and lying a bit :=), they get
>lots of cash and lots of radiation.
>Whether this still happens I don't know.

This certainly still goes on.  Of course, these "gypsy" workers are 
almost the exact opposite of a cloistered monastic group maintaining 
a storage facility, where the main job is to make sure no one breaks 
in and to monitor test wells for leaks.  A storage facility would 
be filled up (mostly by remote control) over a number of years and 
then sealed for "all" time.  The processing of the material to be 
stored does not require exposure to extremely high radiation areas. 

The opposite is true of maintenance work inside the containment 
building of a reactor.  There you can get your 3-month limit in a 
few minutes.  Since the reactor staff need to be able to work in 
a "radiation area" -- they would be excluded from certain areas 
if they reached their limit -- it is common to use temporaries 
trained to a single simple task (say turn a bolt) and send them 
on their way when they are done.  Quite a few were used at the TMI 
cleanup if I recall correctly.  These people are supposed to go back 
to their regular jobs, since they should get no more radiation for 
another 3 months or more, but sometimes they lie and work at another 
site.  The SS-number based system is *supposed* to keep this from 
happening, but ... 

--
J. A. Carr                                    |  "The New Frontier of which I  
jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu                           |  speak is not a set of promises
Florida State University  B-186               |  -- it is a set of challenges."
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute |   John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)