had received a complaint that I was infringing on millwrights’ work by wiping the machine and had better desist immediately. Some gung-ho union men with nothing else to do are always on the lookout for a carpenter with a shovel in his hand or a laborer with a hammer, for which they can apparently send the offender “ down the road.” On the maintenance crew, all the workers were issued blue hard hats while the foremen wore white hats. After a while I began to notice just how many white hats there were, and I started keeping a list. These white hats never did a lick of work, they just wandered around checking on their crews (if they could find them) and chatting with each other. When my count reached 25 I gave it up; I would estimate one white hat for every seven or eight blue hats. The white hats performed other important tasks such as running the weekly check pool. They would collect $1 from anyone interested and determine the winner from the configuration of numbers on our paychecks. In our carpenter-laborer pool there was usually about $100. Winners were pressured to buy a keg at the local tavern after work. The Flood During my second week on the job there was a serious mishap in containment. Some workers were asked to remove a metal plate from a boiler, and when they did so, out poured 1,500 gallons of highly radioactive water, flooding the entire ground floor of the reactor silo. For some reason, a lot of the drains did not function at all, and so we (the laborers) were called in to clean up the mess. For this job we were provided with full-face respirators as well as the usual protective gear, and wore two pairs of galoshes instead of one. With njops and brooms we got the water into buckets or swept it into the drains that did work, while all around us geiger counters buzzed like angry wasps. Many parts of the ground floor are a maze of pipes and boilers, and consequently this was slow and awkward work. The task of wiping down and thoroughly decontaminating the whole ground floor areas was apparently too much for the plant management to contemplate, so this was done only in areas where maintenance work had to be done and the other areas were cordoned off with warning barriers for the remainder of the shut down. Around this time I began to take a personal interest in all this radiation, and one day I picked up a geiger counter and began to check for myself. Some areas of containment appeared to be relatively uncontaminated, while others (such as the cordoned off areas mentioned above) emitted a blast of radiation that set my instrument to chattering wildly. In the subsequent weeks I was seen with a geiger counter so often that a lot of people began to assume I was a radiation control engineer. Sometimes I would find a group of men lounging in a particularly hot area and would tell them so, but they usually ignored this information and went back to their chatting. A lot of men seemed to have the attitude that “ a little more radiation isn’t going to hurt me now,” and a fatalistic black humor was bandied about in their conversations. Radiation is unseen and unfelt and, once you have taken this attitude, easy to ignore. In the aftermath of the flooding accident there was increasing attention paid to the changing of gloves and galoshes when passing from the ground floor to other less-contaminated areas, and I was assigned a daily detail of collecting, bagging, and packing out contaminated gear, and bringing in fresh supplies of galoshes and gloves. This usually took less than an hour, and there was nothing to do on the outside except firewatch and broom patrol, so I searched around for a quiet spot to nap. I finally found a spacious cubbyhole well off the beaten track, and checking with the geiger counter found it to be virtually free of radiation, though I was only about 50 feet from the reactor’s core. Following the example of less reclusive sleepers in containment, I fashioned a comfortable air mattress out of the big plastic trash bags and brought in a small alarm clock to wake me up for lunch. The long, boring days at Trojan, the two hours driving back and forth from Astoria, and nighttime domestic wrangles were ameliorated by the three or four hours of daily sleep I averaged in my reactor rest house for as long as the work went on in containment. When the mopping up operation was concluded, a team of experts came in to research and repair the cause of the accidental spill. They set up a battery of instruments and TV monitors in a decontaminated section of the ground floor, and I watched with interest over their shoulders as they sent remote control TV camera probes into various parts of the reactor. To sit and watch somebody else not work does something funny to one's sense of values and the idea of making an honest living. What the cameras picked up was displayed on the monitor screens, and this process went on for several days. A few feet behind us in the corridor there was a leaking water pipe overhead, and remembering the fellow who’d gotten a free haircut after our first day in containment, I decided to file a report on this hazard as we’d been instructed to do during our orientation days. When I handed it in to my foreman, he gave me a blank look and said, “ I don't know what to do with this—try the boys in radiation control.” The rad-con men glanced at my report and told me to deliver it to so-and-so on the top floor of the adjacent building. When I arrived by elevator at the top floor, I suddenly found myself in the main control room. It looked just like “ China Syndrome” — a vast array of meters, lights, buttons, knobs, switches, and monitor screens of every size and description. Nobody paid the least attention to me, so I wandered around for a while taking it all in before delivering my note and returning to terra firma. Several days later I ran across a pair of very nervous plumbers wandering around in containment. (I recognized them by the tools they carried.) This was their first trip into the reactor and they weren’t a bit pleased about it. I showed them the leak and went off to have a nap. When I awoke several hours later, I found that they'd taped a sheet of plastic to the leaky pipe, diverting the drip to one side of the footpath, and gotten the hell out of there. (I might mention here that it seemed as if leak-repair was the main activity during shut-down maintenance. Pipes, valves, boilers—drip, drip, drip everywhere.) Watch the Cranes One morning my foreman approached me with a huge grin on his face. Trying his best to be serious, he explained that he had an important “special assignment” for me. Word had come down from on high that a number of men had been found, upon emerging from containment, to have somehow contaminated their private parts with radioactivity. This epidemic was thought to have resulted from an influx of pornographic literature apparently smuggled into the silo. My job: find and confiscate these fuck books. Armed with this warrant and a plastic bag, I began a thorough search of the area, taking my time as always. Whether you favor or oppose nuclear power, the technology is awesome. As I toured the reactor building I contemplated the massive complex from every angle. At the top of the silo, a gigantic crane spans the diameter, big enough to lift anything that lies below. The operator reaches his control booth on the crane by means of a small metal ladder fasted to the wall, climbing another 100 feet from the highest scaffolding—about 200 feet above the ground floor. From this dizzy height you have a Zenith Supplies 63I9 Roosevelt Way NE Seattle WA. 98115 I-2O6-525-7997 1905 THIRDAVE DOWNTOWN 343-0101 INTHEMARKET (FORMERLYSKYKING) ACROSSPOSTALLEYFROMTHE PIKEPLACECINEMA 624-6137 619 BROADWAYE ONCAPITOL HILL 329-8044 DREAMLAND KOOLKLOTHESNOWIN 3 LOCATIONS Clinton St. Quarterly 23
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