Pa. nuke plant event - 100 workers contaminated

ensho

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Sun Nov-22-09 11:06 AM
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Pa. nuke plant event - 100 workers contaminated

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php

A radiation leak at Three Mile Island contaminated about 100 employees Saturday afternoon, according to a TMI official. Diane Screnchi, spokeswoman at Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), tells ABC News that Exelon was doing maintenance work at TMI. Speaking to WHTM in Harrisburg, Three Mile Island spokesperson Ralph DeSantis said work was being done in Unit 1 reactor building. Workers were cutting a large number of pipes when a radiation alarm sounded. Unit 1 had already been shut down for weeks due to overhauling of new steam generators and other equipment. Exelon tells ABC News that once the alarm sounded they then cleared everybody out of containment. According to ABC News, Exelon is in the process of evaluating everybody to see if they had any kind of occupational exposure. "This does not appear to be an occupational threat nor a threat to the public health and safety. Exelon is working to understand what happened, why it happened and what they need to do to prevent a recurrence," Screnchi said. However, DeSantis told WHTM about 150 employees were in the reactor, all were wearing protective suits, but about 100 were still contaminated. Late Saturday, DeSantis told WHTM that all workers have been decontaminated. He also pointed out that the public was not in any danger and the nonthreatening level of contimation was contained to Three Mile Island. The cause of the leak is under investigation. The entire plant is shut down. ABC News says NRC is sending a radiation specialist to Three Mile Island Sunday.
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and

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/21/epa-uranium-from-polluted_n_366529.html

EPA: Uranium From Polluted British Petroleum Mine Found In Nevada Water Wells

Peggy Pauly lives in a robin-egg blue, two-story house not far from acres of onion fields that make the northern Nevada air smell sweet at harvest time.

But she can look through the window from her kitchen table, just past her backyard with its swingset and pet llama, and see an ominous sign on a neighboring fence: "Danger: Uranium Mine."

For almost a decade, people who make their homes in this rural community in the Mason Valley 65 miles southeast of Reno have blamed that enormous abandoned mine for the high levels of uranium in their water wells.

They say they have been met by a stone wall from state regulators, local politicians and the huge oil company that inherited the toxic site – BP PLC. Those interests have insisted uranium naturally occurs in the region's soil and there's no way to prove that a half-century of processing metals at the former Anaconda pit mine is responsible for the contamination.

That has changed. A new wave of testing by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that 79 percent of the wells tested north of the World War II-era copper mine have dangerous levels of uranium or arsenic or both that make the water unsafe to drink.

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now they should research and chart the cancers, etc. this has caused.