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Comment by sparky_z | Hacker News Reader

Is it relevant? It's writing about a pool for storing spent fuel, which is not a part of the actual reactor system.

  This incident report says that the worker fell into a "reactor cavity" containing water and that there was a measurable amount of radiation detected in their hair after the initial clean-up. The two situations don't seem remotely compatible to me.

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I guarantee you there's 'a measurable amount of radiation' in your hair right now. Unless you're bald, I suppose.

Yeah, no shit. But, come on, don't play dumb. By measurable, I obviously meant "above normal background". Something that shouldn't have been possible if, as described in the xkcd post, the water should have had less radioactivity than normal background. Combined with the fact that the post was literally about a different kind of pool than the one involved in the accident, it was reasonable to question whether the post was actually relevant.

I agree this was not a serious incident, and I never really though it was. (I'm extremely pro-nuclear, for the record.) But at the time I posted, the comment section was about 8 people posting the xkcd link at once (with no additional commentary), and few others reading it and saying "oh, no problem then", with literally nobody pointing out the discrepancies, or explaining exactly what a "reactor cavity" means in this context.

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