Worker was wearing a life vest.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Nuclear_Generating_S...
[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
it sounds like "guy felt down in a volcano, but fortunately, he had a life vest"
I hope I'm misremembering that but it's a pretty strong memory that totally locked in for me that that water is not necessarily dangerous.
I bet there's some good chance of getting wacky extremophiles though!
Hot spring baths usually top out around 42-43C
edit: sorry for being lazy, I scrolled a bit more and found it.
But now 100% sure that actually happened. Also it was likely a professor and not a working engineer drinking the water which makes much more sense.
While I do see this as a form of hazing which I am morally opposed to-
8oz (.237 liters) of primary coolant in a properly maintained pressurized water reactor might contain up to 13mrem of orally ingestible radiation, or approximately the radiation of a chest x-ray. (For comparison you get between 3-8 milirem on a 7 hour transatlantic flight)
Don’t make it your primary source of hydration and you’ll be ok. If the fuel is degraded or there is a leak (unlikely in properly maintained PWRs) the radiation dose is significantly higher.
I'd drink it. It's just extremely pure water, with a nuclear flashlight at the bottom of the pool - which no one could see, even if they had gamma-ray glasses on[1], because the water attenuates it so much.
[0] Or ions of hydrogen or helium, in the case of alpha and beta radiation.
[1] Which it turns out were way less cool than the Sea Monkeys(tm).
The primary coolant is not simply pure water; it contains boric acid, lithium hydroxide, dissolved hydrogen, and trace corrosion products like iron, nickel, cobalt, and chromium. Under power level neutron flux, some of these elements become short- or medium-lived radionuclides. Once removed from the core, most of the activity decays within minutes, but during operation the water is measurably radioactive.
An eight-ounce sample taken from the loop at power would carry roughly the dose of a chest X-ray before it decayed away, due to these activated isotopes rather than residual photons [EPRI PWR Primary Water Chemistry Guidelines; NUREG-1437][0].
I was on site for the mid cycle outage of three mile island unit 1 around 2005. I did the data sync and transfer for the steam generator inspection, but got tutored by some old PHDs during the down time.
[0] https://downloads.regulations.gov/NRC-2020-0101-0142/content...
Do you mean because it's distilled? Distilled water is perfectly safe to drink.
And "resalinated" is nonsense. Water isn't safe because it contains salts.
See https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
“But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
The site contains the most dangerous poison on Earth, that is also a key component in the most feared weapon on Earth. Do you suppose in the UK they just put up signs saying "Sir or madam, kindly do not steal our plutonium"?
Apparently they do have concerns.
Well yeah. If someone falls in water at work, you get them checked out at the hospital. The paltry amount of radiation is kind of the least of your worries if there's even the smallest risk you got some water in your lungs.
People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).
> In the past, these terms were used to try to explain that some fatal drowning victims had very little water in their lungs at autopsy. Now it is understood that little water enters the lungs during drowning. Moreover, when water enters the lungs, it is rapidly absorbed when breathing starts again. The amount of water that enters the lung does not determine the amount of injury or determine the treatment of drowning. The amount of injury from drowning is due to how long the victim is without oxygen.
Source: Red Cross
Even a tiny amount of water in your lungs is a trip to the hospital.
The amount of radiation that guy was exposed to is roughly the same as eating a banana, or driving through the middle of Aberdeen with your car windows down inhaling all the radon off the granite.
You’re probably thinking of something along the lines of pneumonia, which is different than breathing some water and coughing it back up.
For the record, I think the GP comment is way off-base saying drowning is uncommon.
If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
My water rescue course is up to date. When's yours due for renewal?
If you aspirate a surprisingly small amount of water, especially if it's not very clean, then you are risk over the next few hours, not days.
Maybe don't set too much store by AI-generated nonsense.
Allow me to quote an article from Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine https://www.ccjm.org/content/85/7/529 (AI generated nonsense of course)
> Secondary drowning, sometimes called delayed drowning, is another term that is not medically accepted. The historical use of this term reflects the reality that some patients may worsen due to pulmonary edema after aspirating small amounts of water.
> Drowning starts with aspiration, and few or only mild symptoms may be present as soon as the person is removed from the water. Either the small amount of water in the lungs is absorbed and causes no complications or, rarely, the patient’s condition becomes progressively worse over the next few hours as the alveoli become inflamed and the alveolar-capillary membrane is disrupted. But people do not unexpectedly die of drowning days or weeks later with no preceding symptoms. The lungs and heart do not “fill up with water,” and water does not need to be pumped out of the lungs.
> There has never been a case published in the medical literature of a patient who underwent clinical evaluation, was initially without symptoms, and later deteriorated and died more than 8 hours after the incident. People who have drowned and have minimal symptoms get better (usually) or worse (rarely) within 4 to 8 hours. In a study of more than 41,000 lifeguard rescues, only 0.5% of symptomatic patients died.
Maybe don't set too much store by what some random "water rescue course" instructor tells you, especially if it sounds like complete bovine excrement.
Anytime someone claims knowledge based on common sense, it's a red flag. Or, as we used to say, "Common sense tells us they're a witch! Burn them!".
More like "send 'em to the ER, my ass is covered".
There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sai... ("7 Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court" (2018))
E.g.,
"He was issued iodine tablets—which are used to block radioactive iodine, a common byproduct of uranium fission, from being absorbed by the thyroid gland—and fitted for an NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit. He was also told not to drink water from the ship’s desalination system. [...] Torres, the senior petty officer, recounted, “One of the scariest things I’ve heard in my career was when the commanding officer came over the loudspeaker, and she said, ‘We’ve detected high levels of radiation in the drinking water; I’m securing all the water.’” That included making showers off limits."
I mean I would rather lick a keyboard than a butthole (with exceptions of course)
At any rate 300 is widely recognizable as not an alarming value for a typical contamination detector in a typical configuration, but the report is likely slightly deficient because it does not specify how the measurement was taken. However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
Of course it varies for "civilian" devices from EBay.
They put that count into NRC report. It means that it has pretty specific calibrated meaning for that regulated environment.
>However, even if we accept 100 as the background CPM value, 300 on 100 does not represent significant contamination in a typical environment (but does imply some occurred).
report mentions 300 clearly as something above normal, whatever normal is there. And that is after decontamination. Clearly the source of contamination - the pool - is much higher than 300.
Anyway feel free to explain why supposedly not calibrated value was put into an official NRC report instead of some calibrated value.
It is counts per minute in an undefined, arbitrary sensor. Which could have a alpha radiation transparent sensor (and hence show alpha particles), or be from a low sensitivity geiger counter which can only detect high energy gamma radiation (for say fallout/emergency use). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter
It could have a small sensor, and hence require high flux for a given CPM, or a physically large one - and catch more disintegrations per minute/CPM for the exact same actual amount of radiation.
As to why it is in a government document is why we’re all wondering what is going on. It certainly isn’t the only WTF thing the government is doing right now, is it?
Mind linking to something concrete?
What I did find was numerous documents noting that Geiger counters needed to be calibrated to generate useful dose rates because CPM by itself is useless without a bunch of other work to characterize the sensor and radiation type.
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
It was a quote of the linked article:
"Holtec International, which owns the closed nuclear facility, reported the worker was a contractor who was wearing all required personal protective equipment, including a life vest while working near the pool without a barrier in place."
From the linked xkcd in various threads it seems like a life vest should keep you in the "safe" zone
However it doesn't actually say how much is safe to drink
He was not working in a volcano.
Yes, radioactivity isn't good. You should not, for example, drink this water, or swim in it once a week for good luck. But, it isn't magic death fluid, the worker will have been decontaminated - destroying clothing, washing skin and so on, and the additional exposure means they might get more monitoring, but they're probably fine.
> The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair.
This event will result in acute hair loss. From shaving machine.
Maybe there is a problem elsewhere, maybe the pool is contaminated, maybe the sensor used is very sensitive and 300 cpm is not as concerning as it would seem.
It sure would be nice to have actual data, wouldn’t it?
Regulatory bodies have adopted the LNT (linear no threshold) model and for good reasons. Every exposure increases your likelihood to get cancer eventually. Many things do, such is life, and radiation is one of them.
And it should show up in realtime monitoring of the water, unless they just turned that off.
the deeper you get, the worse for you. I assume the first second was critical.
The usual reason for this is it keeps your mouth from being far from the air. In this case it also helps because the radioactive stuff is close to the bottom. And exposure depends on distance from the bottom.
There are also plenty of jobs where people are in close proximity to insanely hot/dangerous liquids.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
On a tangent, I kinda love the fact that I've learned more about nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, and relativistic speeds from a poorly drawn webcomic than I have from any other source. (Ok KSP might actually have xkcd beat on orbital mechanics)
I used to work at UC Berkeley, and one of the buildings on campus previously held a research nuclear reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Research_Reactor). There's a sign there now "Nuclear Free Zone"; (https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-berkeley-nuclear-free-...).
Note that they did have to do extensive decontamination on Gilman Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formerly_Utilized_Sites_Remedi...) where plutonium was first isolated.
Edit: ok, I’m probably the fiftieth person to point this out. It’s still a good video.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. They literally wrote up a safety report and transported them off-site.
Wow, people are really clueless about how to avoid reacting angrily. It's funny to append "they were wearing a life vest" to "they had a nuclear safety accident"
(Am I doing it right yet?)
If said junk was alpha- or beta-emitting, it could be enough of a danger for cancer.