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What DOES John Do For a
Living?
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What DOES John Do For a
Living?
Saturday, April 24, 1999
Dear Diary People,
Some people wonder what I do for a living. Most people know I'm some sort of engineer and I am over here working on "the Chornobyl thing". That's a good start. My specialty is an arcane part of the business called "licensing". Every nuclear facility in the world needs to get their national government to give them permission to build a new facility or to significantly change an old one. That permission process is called licensing.
As you can imagine, it's a government process filled with paper and meetings and more paper and more meetings. The most significant part of the paper is the part that describes the safety of the new or changed facility. Designers of new plants or of new pieces of old plants must perform a wide range of calculations to show what will happen day to day and what might happen as rarely as once in a million years.
It's a sophisticated science which I admit I do not do. But I've spent a lot of time listening to very good practioners of the art and I recognize good art - and bad art - when I hear it. So 99% of the time I read or listen to others and occasionally throw in some question I probably learned from some other licensing type or safety professional. All in all, not too exciting even though I can assure you I take this business very seriously.
Every once in awhile, I break away from the paper and go in the field. And every once in a great while, I am reminded that this indeed serious work. Last Thursday was such a day.
My office mate Peter and I got in the company van and headed north. But today, instead of going north and east to Slavutych (near Chernihiv on the map), we went straight north. It's Spring now and it was a bright sunny day with farmers plowing for spring planting. Some farms had huge John Deere tractors, some had small tractors and some had horse-drawn plows. But is was nice to see farms of all sizes spring (bad pun) back into production.
About an hour out, we came to a crossing gate that meant there would be no more farms for the remaining 15 miles or so of our trip. We were entering the Chornobyl Zone. After getting our permission papers checked, we continued on roads that looked the same as the earlier ones but the fields and villages were empty. We passed through the town of Chornobyl which does have some residents but they are all workers at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant - ChNPP in English shorthand. They rotate out every few weeks. The only permanent residents of the Zone are a few elderly people who are allowed to spend their last years in old family cottages.
We go through another gate on the outside of the town and ten minutes later, the first of the power plant buildings comes into view. ChNPP is a very large industrial site. We pass power plants 5 and 6 which were under construction at the time of the accident. The dozen construction cranes shown around the red brick of units 5 and 6 still stand guard around the never-to-be-finshed buildings.
Finally, we come up to the power structures for ChNPP Units 1 through 4. Units 1 and 2 (black buildings in picture) are the oldest nuclear plants in Ukraine. Both were restarted after the Unit 4 accident. Both were later shutdown by equipment failures and are now being decommissioned.
Units 3 and 4 are back to back, under that large ventilation stack in the center of the picture. Unit 3 is normally still operating although Ukraine promises to "soon" shut it down permanently. Meanwhile, it is temporarily shutdown for maintenance. Unit 3 is the last of the RBMK-type reactors operating in Ukraine. Personally, I agree with most Western safety engineers and would prefer the shutdown to be permanent. Soon indeed.
Unit 4 is now covered by the black steel "Shelter" that was built over the debris of the 1986 accident. The word is capitalized like the name of a deity. It is an intimidating sight. It is also the reason Peter and I and a few dozen other engineers from the U.S. and Western Europe now live in Ukraine. You see, the shelter leaks and may fall down. The U.S., Canada and several European countries have committed a few hundred million dollars to strengthen and stabilize the Shelter so it won't. The project goes by the acronym "SIP" for Shelter Implementation Project.
It seems like so far, all we Western experts have done is write reports and have meetings. My normal kind of work. But this summer, support structures called "Beam 1/Beam 2" will be extended and strengthened in the first "real work" under SIP. Today's field trip for Peter and me is so we can look at the beams and get a sense for the work involved. Look at a couple steel beams - no problem right? We'll see.
After the mandatory meeting with Shelter management, we went to the visitors center and walk through yet another gate. By now we have two escorts and have been joined by Dick, one of our counterparts from SIP. Our party also included Andreas, a co-worker of Peter's and our driver Yurii. Yurii had worked here during Shelter construction and Andreas had been a German exchange-student engineer here two years before the accident. We're all volunteers for this excursion. Andre our translator on the other hand showed better judgment and agreed to stay outside in the van.
After the gate house, our first stop was the building where we got new clothes. We got socks, boots, pants, two shirts, two hats (one hard and one soft) and two pairs of gloves. We also got little surgical masks. Freshly outfitted, we start our stroll up to the black Shelter. After passing through yet another guardhouse, we stood at the end of the building looking at the place where a new crane and a new elevator will be placed to facilitate work on Beam 1/Beam 2.
Notice the staircase on the left side of the Shelter wall. These stairs have been there since the building was finished. They are very vertical and a bit rusty. They are also the only way up to our goal. I don't have pictures of the ascent because I was too busy huffing and puffing and holding on. My legs have still not recovered.
But we did all make it up those stairs. And then we had to go up another set of stairs but they were only another 20 or 30 feet. Did I mention that Peter's and Andreas' radiation dosimeters are going off during much of this climb? Their company issues them continuous read-out dosimeters but doesn't expect them to be climbing around the most contaminated spot on earth. Anyway, we made sure we didn't spend any extra time going up these stairs. Now we see why the project makes such a big deal about getting a good, quick elevator.
On top, we looked into the Shelter at one set of beams. Notice that the Shelter is not sealed. Rain and snow come in and air goes in and out. Another goal of SIP is to determine the best way to stop this but it's a surprisingly difficult task. A major part of the difficulty is the radiation field. Just inside where we are standing, we could receive in one or two minutes the equivalent exposure of a year's normal background radiation. (3 to 5 Rem/hour for the technically interested.) This will be very difficult work.
I stuck my camera inside the hole to get a better view. The picture shows the pair of beams coming in from the right. They rest on a steel frame that is on top of the wall that runs from the bottom of the picture. They are held in place by the weight of the roof. The problem is simply that the wall was fractured during the accident and appears to be moving to the left. It's easy to see that the beams and roof will fall if the wall moves another foot and a half. That's why people will take on this very difficult job to strengthen the wall and extend the beams. .
Turning the other way, I snapped a view of Pripiyat in the distance. This was the town where the workers and their families lived before - and for two days after - the accident. Reportedly, the flames at Unit 4 were visible from some of the apartment blocks. The contamination plume went right over the town. After thirty years in this business, what happened 13 years ago - and what did not happen - is inconceivable to me.
After this we descended the stairs and went inside the building. We went to the old control room. We went to one of the rooms that held the pumps that provided cooling for the reactor. We walked past rooms with sealed metal doors. It was like touring the Titanic or, more closely, like walking through the ruins of a long-dead civilization. Frankly, I was glad when the tour ended and we went back outside.
We walked the a hundred yards in the sunshine over to the control building. We reversed the dressing process, took very cold showers and put back on our normal clothes. The technician surveyed my camera and said it was clean. I also got a certificate that said I had received "0.12 Rem". That's not a lot by any objective health standards but it's more than I had received in all the time I have worked in nuclear power plants.
Back at the van, we picked up Andre and said good bye to our hosts and escorts. We drove past the unfarmed fields and, later, the newly plowed ground. A couple hours after leaving ChNPP, I was home looking out the window at the neighboring thousand-year-old church. Will the Shelter last as long? It might have to.
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Originally mailed April 24, 1999. Reformatted June 3, 2001.
This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.