MELTDOWN MAN
On the 26th, they decided to run it no longer and not do any more testing. So all they could do is to go in to look at the full rods. The thing is we couldn’t get into the building right at the moment because it was contaminated. We had to clean up the contamination; start working at the door and going out by scrubbing the floors down and working on the high bay after letting it cool down just a little bit too.
What did you scrub it down with?
We scrubbed it down with soap, water and sponges. We tried mops. We used those floor scrubbers where you have those things that spin around. We went through plenty of those and that was getting expensive – they’d get contaminated real quick on that and it wasn’t doing what it really needed to do to clean the contamination up. So they discontinued the floor scrubber and they found out using all those sponges were getting contaminated and thrown away and that was getting pretty expensive too, so we ended up using Kotex I was part of that.
Did you have a respirator on?
We had coveralls, white, and they have a red band running around [them]. We had regular gloves or plastic gloves and booties on our feet. I took a week or two to really get cleaned up and try and pull fuel rods in areas of the reactor. We were using chemicals too and that’s what put a strain on my lungs. They used cleaning chemicals and other types of chemicals like something like paint thinner for example.
How long could you be in there for?
We could be in there for maybe a couple of hours, maybe. It was bad rad contamination but it wasn’t extra bad. We put some plastic down to keep from tracking from a dirty area back onto the clean area. So maybe over a week’s time they got enough cleaned up so that they could get over to where the reactor core was. We definitely didn’t use any water because there was any sodium it would explode because water and sodium explode. Sodium catches fire with air too.
You see, this never happened before so it was a learning experience of how to clean up contamination. This was all brand new to everybody then. On top of the reactor was a reactor shield of plastic that allowed people to get around it for a short period of time. There were other parts of the building that were blocked off, a good percent of the area of the building that was off limits. So we didn’t clean the whole building at that time. So we got down to the point to where we started pulling some fuel rods with a transporter. We called it “the coffin.” It carried the fuel rods back and forth from the reactor to the holding area.
What did the coffin look like?
It was a long apparatus, lead-lined, about 30 feet tall. The other kind they had was kind of an old boxy-looking thing with a lead-lined cylinder that went up to the ceiling from the early 1950s and another one from around 1957 that had a TV camera in it that made it really nice when lowering the rods. When we first started unloading the reactor, it had a window in it with a light so you could see the fuel rods in that coffin there and see what it was doing.
For safety they decided to go to the farthest point first and then work their way towards that area. Just like ‘boom boom boom’ they start pulling them up over a number of shifts, three shifts and they went through the easy ones until they got to the area that they thought was overheated.
They found definitely that’s what happened. The fuel rods that were damaged were seen upon removal. They finally got to the last fuel rods. I mentioned two transporters, two coffins, and they were using one pulling out a rod and it broke off into the reactor. A broken fuel rod is not what you want. This particular fuel rod was one of the last two in the reactor core. I’m the only one who has knowledge of it that’s still alive because they were all older than me; 10, 20, 30 years older than me. I’m 70. What are the odds of anyone being alive when you add in all the radiation [exposure] too?
So a fuel rod broke off on them. I wasn’t there at that exact moment but I know the story. The guy was pulling on the thing real hard, and it was stuck in the reactor because that tetralin made a bunch of goo in the bottom of a pool and they were damaged. Then the goo freed up and they went ‘what the hell happened there?’ In that coffin, you see in that window there the broken fuel rod coming up and stopping to see what it was. He realized what happened and he panicked even more and pushed the wrong button and lifted the lead safety shield. All he could think of doing is run. And as he was running, he was pulling alarms – it was a night or a swing shift when that happened – and ran out of the building and got outside.
Now you have the safety shield up. They were realizing radiation was leaking out in the atmosphere. Somebody volunteered to go back in and put the safety shield down on the fuel transporter. So then what happens is to go get some equipment to monitor the radiation that had leaked out they come discover that it [had spread] about a mile radius. That’s where they had to barricade the road because of the radiation. They didn’t want people going any farther than that. For about two weeks they kept people out while they cleaned up the SRE building offices.
