Inside San Onofre Nuclear Power Fuel Pool and Spent Fuel Storage

so today i'm out at the san onofre nuclear generating stations actually being decommissioned and has been in the act of being decommissioned for the past nine years and i'm standing actually out in front of the dry fuel storage and we're going to take a look at this and inside of the fuel pool and check out this facility and actually see how radioactive some of these things are so let's get going so this is one of our whole body contamination monitors this is called a model ipm8 m and uh basically what this does is is we use this at the side to monitor uh radioactive contamination for all of our workers that go into the radio radiologically controlled area everyone has to pass through one of these successfully this does a whole body scan to detect contaminate the presence of contamination if there is contamination and so basically i'll step in and show you it'll do a whole body scan on both sides it'll do a 15 second scan then i'll rotate and it'll do another 15 seconds scan on the back side and then if i pass it'll give me a doorbell time ding dong and then i'm free to go if not then all these guys at the control point or radiation protection technicians would come in and they would do a frisk of me with a with a kyger mueller detector doug here's one of our rp technicians and um they would be looking for contamination okay and then if if they didn't find anything i would get checked again i would have to pass twice success successively to be able to be released from the area or maybe if i was contaminated they may have to maybe recover contamination from my clothing or for my skin via soap and warm water decon methods would be deployed so i'll go ahead and try this just to show you how there's a couple of things here there's a couple of paddles on the end in here that you have to depress also you need to break a couple of beams here's one beam and there's one down by your feet but you have to break that beam in order to activate the counter so you can see up there there's a yellow light on for telling me that it's checking me and so hopefully here in a few seconds it'll give me a chime to tell me to turn around like that one i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to press in not all the way but but in and then these green strips here i'm going to apply some pressure with my fingers okay and you have to apply pretty good pressure they would you think they would have gave you a simple button to push but they did they gave these strips and so you're kind of straining and hoping that the 15 second count will hurry yeah yeah and i'm clean ding dong i'm playing all right so now you're up okay can i go yeah now before you get in um let's wait for the green light so it's green now so it's ready for you so it does a reset we'll step in push the bars and just right exactly so that should do a count hold your breath don't move most people they do one of these and then they break the beam and then all of a sudden it stops yeah trying to get comfortable right yeah hey all right that's nice this thing is susceptible because um i don't want you to go shirtless i don't have a shirt okay um i would recommend you do that because what will happen is is this it'll create static and that's radon will actually it's it responds the same way as your best would any kind of polyester blend or polyester material for sure all right so let's go ahead and let's back up you guys are smoking there you go you can turn around and turn around and press all those green strips firmly and further down on that strip the better it's like the beginning of the running man i knocked them into the sled yeah i know i dropped down into a tunnel all right thanks all right check and see if our equipment is hot proximity detector and that's to make sure this thing is turned on and actually working this is just an access control feature that we use here just to make sure that people are going to be monitored while they're in the radiologically controlled area so if you guys want to do the same thing put your electronic temperature next to this this should release the turnstile and allow [Music] all right so the next thing we're going to do i'm going to reach across yeah normally we don't allow people to do that but i'm taking some executive privilege we're going to use one of these monitors this is like i said a small articles monitor we're gonna use this to do a baseline check on all of your equipment let's make sure this passes and it did so that was clean that's a good sign the next step will be to put your cameras in one at a time all right all right we're in the final count clean all playing okay you guys ready yeah all right you got your ppe ready to go yeah [Music] yes so we just left the rad waste control point that's our main our rp uh radiation protection access control point that um basically is the boundary the entry point for the whole radiologically controlled area for the uh for the power block here right now we're in the radways building a lot of plants call it an ox building auxiliary building this is where a lot of uh pumps and uh isolation systems and so forth all kinds of volume control systems for chemical injection stuff filtration all that stuff is housed in this in this area here we're going to head over to the fuel handling building [Music] all right [Music] all right so this is the outside of the spin fuel building uh this is a unit three side spin field building and um we had some security controls that were in place here that um still left over we'll go through the door and go into the building what you'll see when we go in on your right hand side is a large pool area it's the spin fuel pool where we used to store all of our spent fuel which is actually now stored over on the ssc pad all areas so this is the area when we were reaping at the control point the supervisor up there was talking about a yellow area or yellow pipe that's the pipe right there this is a just normal plant shielding that we have it's a lead shield and it's just coated in heavy plastic there's no contamination it's just for uh radiation dose level control this was actually a cooling pipe that would supply cooling to the plant or to the pool and so this was just an elbow where you know when the valve was closed or whatever we just create like a little fred traffic so rad levels would increase radiation levels to increase and so um we put this shielding in place part of our normal plant processes for controlling the worker exposure just to knock down the dose rates just so as people walked into the door worked in this general area who have reduced their exposure um overall so this is what we use here at the power plant this is common for all of the power plants uh in the in the nuclear industry this is a hebrew line ro2 it's an ion chamber design it's a little bit different than your rad eye your rad i use a different uh detector this is a geiger muller detector and this is an ion chamber detector and the reason which is better we use these they're both good um we use these in the industry only because the detector design is the most akin to bio absorb dose biologically all right so um so this is what we always use for for dose rate establishing dose rates so that we can you know we monitor and we set up all of our dosimetry programs based on what we get really from this type of instrument so for this one right inside the door here and um i've done all my preliminary operational checks you can see i can put my glasses on and i could tell you that i think what we'll see here is like 0.2 million per hour yeah i don't know if you're familiar with the scale the scale we have uh basically a times one it says five fifty five hundred it's basically times one times ten times one hundred obviously so we have times one would be one miller per hour we're down on the first line there which would be point two million per hour and if we went over this area that we're shielding minor increase in dose rates up to point six million per hour 80.8 check it out everything i've seen here so far i could find stronger stuff in an antique wall yeah yeah especially all of those um all that fiestaware got a lot of densely concentrated uranium and so yeah it's we have tours out here frequently i used to run the radius protection booth where we have all the stuff like we had an old piece of fiesta wear we had a smoke detector we had an old um not a not a radium dial watch like you pull out of an old world war ii airplane or something like that but an older older clock that still had some minor radium in it and you know you can take a frisker which has the same detector as well you have your rat eye and you put it on there you can definitely see some activity and so it's good demonstration for you know radioactive um components that were out there in normal living space let me fix the sign real quick this is where we stored all the fuel usually you see like on the simpsons you'll see something green glowing and something falling all over the floor and goo going everywhere it's really totally not what happens in a nuclear plant well it's solid yeah because it's like solid ceramic pellets exactly like in a zirconium right is that what it is it's um zircoloy um some special metal pins that are basically hollow and you feed fuel pellets in they're spring-loaded so that they compress and then there's a whole collection of made fuel assemblies or just a collection of those pens a large collection of pens and a specific square size so that they fit down in those slots and we had several hundred in there stored just from the life of the plant and so over on our independent spin fuel storage installation we call it estacy um we unloaded all those fuel assemblies into individual canisters which had a bunch of uh design shielding and uh like its own uh rack inside and loaded it up with uh fuel took it out after we cleaned it decontaminated it shielded it vacuumed uh all the water out through a vacuum drying process fill it with helium gas for continual internal cooling and drying and then shift it over to the pad where it's stored in the modules over there that we'll see later right after it came out of the court was being transferred in here and especially if the lights were dimmer you would see a glue of a blue glow all around the each fuel assembly and that's sharon cough radiation that's you know a lot of high energy betas and stuff coming off of the fuel assembly being refracted through elements in the water isotopes and uh and basically it creates the blue glow that you see that blue glow which is um i guess akin to this a little bit is is all you see as far as a a color element associated with radiation that's and that's the only place you would see it would be around a fresh freshly recovered fuel assembly that was recovered from the core right after a cycle of operation so so this is the spent fuel pool where the spent nuclear fuel would have sat and cooled down over a course of about three to five years it's very cool unfortunately there's no fuel in here today because all of it has been moved to where they're doing the dry casts of where they're storing the fuel on site and so it no longer needs to be in this pool any longer so this is very cool so while we're in here too we're also fitted with personal dosimeters here to check our radiation level while we're inside of the fuel pull storage area it's a very interesting place to be for sure there was our up ender pit and what it's called an updater pip floor is because down at the bottom of the pit there's actually an upender basically there's a tube at the bottom of the pit that connects to the refueling cavity over in containment next door so whenever they would do a refueling they would remove the reactor head after they flooded as they flooded up the cavity with pool water similar to this and then um all of the fuel one stick at a time one uh control assembly at a time would be removed from the reactor cavity put in an upender over there which is basically just a hydraulically operated um cell put the assembly in and then it gets down ended and then it goes through a conveyor type mechanism over to this side and then it would be up ended where it could be grappled with this machine the spin fuel handling machine would be grappled um with the tool uh this and then removed from the upender it would travel through this weir gate of course everything would be flooded it's empty now but it'll be flooded just like this pool is and it would go to a designated location in one of these uh racks designated location in a rack here in the pool then we would keep inventory on what um fuel assembly from what cycle of the outage went into what location so that we would have a record of that and so right now it's drained down as part of our process the the cavity is flooded over there but once they're done with all of the cut-up activities then they'll be removing that water as well and then all of this will be part of the decommissioning process now that crane right there essentially that's what it is right to remove where did they operate that from right on the bridge there that little white box if we were to look on the other side you'd see a console there's like a little chair that's there basically the bridge operator would sit there and he would he would operate the toys hook up there from that console those blower rays drive the bridge down this way to trolley that way and back and forth so that you know we have a coordinate system so the coordinates where they're going to move a certain fuel assembly that they pulled out of the floor during a refuel outage might be j72 or something i don't know it's called 72 but anyways they would they would use coordinate system to go to that location and record that this the uh fuel simply went to that location and um that's it but is he manually driving it to j72 or is that like they just type it in and it goes there kind of like he manually drives that would be a high stress job right there yeah yeah we usually uh we have uh in the industry uh a contractor group that specializes in operating the fuel handling systems at all the different power plants wow we usually contract them those guys they they go from power plant to power plant all year long and there's a team of them they rotate in and out and go around in their fuel handlers i'll tell you this too someone might actually ask the question yeah but uh if this pool was loaded with fuel what would the radiation levels be there and i can tell you i've worked here since uh january of 1990 i spent a lot of my life in this building and the adjacent one and the rad levels are very similar now to what they were when this thing was loaded up and the reason is because you have a fantastic layer of shielding right here by design it not only does the water keep the fuel cool as when it was stored here but it also provides a fantastic layer of shielding why is water such a fantastic shield well it it absorbs neutrons it absorbs gamma it deflects it's a good attenuator plus there's such a level here so basically the top of the racks are roughly 33 foot elevation we have about 27 or so feet of um of water so there's a lot of shielding there um there's uh some thumb rule equations that we use for a half value tenth value layer in other words how much shielding it would take to reduce a radiation level down to a half of its original value or a tenth of its original value normally that when it comes to water that's a few feet so we're talking 27 feet from the top of the rack to the top of the water so there's a lot of shielding here to knock those high rad levels down from the fuel assemblies all the clothing that they change out of that's just like that's what they actually consider really low level radioactive waste well not waste necessarily there's a if it if the protective clothing reaches a certain uh level of contamination um on uh usually the the laundry company that we contract with we'll monitor all the clothes that we send them that that have been used if it hits a certain contamination level they'll throw that away if not then they'll launder it and re-survey it and if the if the protective clothing is at a low level clean level if you will then they'll send that back for reeves the type of clothing that we use is a cloth material that has a tie back impregnated in it which is like a rubberized material so it's by nature the fabric it does breathe but with the rubberizing agent it also gives it a more more resistance to uh contamination penetrating basically particulate matter so um but yeah it could be that a worker is putting on something that has some very low levels of fixed contamination on them um that's again why we uh we monitor them when they when they come out of the air just to make sure they didn't get contaminated it could be that they got contaminated from the protective clothing although it's usually unlikely um anytime that we send stuff out like i said it's monitored before it's sent back and then as part of our process we'll do a contamination survey on everything that comes back to make sure there's no loose contamination so there's no transference as we left the fuel pool containment building we had to check our hands and feet to see if we picked up any additional contamination so the rule here is is a half inch away from the surface no more than two inches per second if we need to get a dose rate on something and we just can't reach like maybe we're going to pull something out of the pool that we were just at and um but we can't really reach out there but we want to check it as it comes out of the water because it may be hot and if it comes out of the water before we get a good dose rate on it it may you know increase the area radiation levels so we want to be able to check that thing before it gets close to us we use this because the telescope's way out so we can check those rates maybe way up in the overhead or someplace far away so you know what kind of like detector is on the end of there gm probe gm probe yeah zero 0.00 zero point zero one yeah but yeah so what is this all right so this is a tld everyone on site has one of these every nuclear worker in our our nuclear infrastructure for the whole country has issued one of these and this is our method of determining uh permanent record of dose and so basically this thing measures uh gammas and also has a window here for betas these can also be used for neutron as well if need be but this is a device that simply measures radiation exposure every nuclear worker has to have one of these required for regulation supposed to wear it on your chest along with that electronic disseminator we were talking about earlier and basically these things get sent off once a quarter they get read at a lab and that becomes their cumulative dose record um we record all the um all of the readings for every worker that's on site that's being monitored and um that record is uh updated every quarter so we have an annual total that annual total goes against a regulatory limit which is five thousand milligram all the utilities usually use a thousand they're conservative um of cumulative exposure and um it's a rare thing that anyone in the nuclear industry crosses a thousand there are some examples but um but most what happens with someone if they cross them well it's just more of an administrative thing there's not like a biological problem yeah i was just wondering like do they just like kind of sit out like until like they deem them to be back down usually what we'll do is we'll give someone an extension if they got a thousand if they got closer that was gonna give an extension up to maybe two thousand or fifteen hundred million but depending on the site um basically uh like i said the government allowance is five thousand million so there's a lot of buffer it says most of uh uh plants administratively they wanna control it to a very manageable low level and try to you know spread the dose out it goes along with the lower concept i shouldn't get all the doses should be you know actually distributed amongst you know several people so that you know as one guy isn't you know taking in all the the risk if you will it's not taking at all for the team right yeah team's working for him too the fuel is sitting six feet down below this level right through a lot of shielding yeah so we have a very hot canister dose rate wise temperature wise too as you can see from all the fumes that lids 35 000 pounds of steel and concrete and rebar and this really is just a convective heat style exhaust port and so there's a torturous path that any kind of heat would uh have to come up through to to exit the module itself and so the shielding is pretty robust the canister itself that the fuel is sitting in is very robust provides a lot of shielding through concrete and steel and the dose rates are really low as you saw our dose right over here was negligible less than 0.2 and it is barely more than that here right on contact with the module itself and all the modules are essentially the same dose rate this is a pretty low be curious to see what you get with your instrument uh so now how tall are these like when they're out when the the canister if their canister is 17 feet tall or 18 17 something like that you're talking about a structure that is a structure within a structure with a basket that contains fuel assemblies and and so there's a lot of material that goes into the construction of the the storage canister itself so a lot of built-in shielding for radiation have to pass through before it even gets to the structure of the uh of the vvm here and the lid and so forth so there's a lot of shielding that goes into the construction of these things and it's all about you know protecting the health and safety of the public health and safety of the workers from a radiological perspective keep those doses down keep that alar principle in play and what's laura loris is an acronym that stands for as low as reason reasonably achievable and it's all about managing uh occupational exposure using time distance shielding to manage everyone's exposure to the lowest level possible and that's really this is uh quite essential to that concept so now what would happen if there was a tsunami and water came over this well i think the first thought would be that okay all that cold sea water would probably cool everything down ideally this thing is is designed to uh have all air passages free so that air is free to go in and that convective heat discharge process would would work this postulated tsunami is i think 27 feet and we're sitting at 32 feet right here so yeah okay yeah that sounds sounds like it's all covered well then designed uh you know with with the maximum safety factors you know in mind really so now there was a thing that uh l.a times wrote about where they were saying that this was going to be the new chernobyl and blah blah blah and all this other stuff and they're talking about i think when one of the canisters were being moved in here like got hung up on something and you know they were saying that if that would have fallen and you know the very unrealistic uh hypothetical of it cracking open would have actually done anything it's like they were saying that that would have evacuated the whole coastline of california doing that and it's like that would have been a local problem it would have been contained to this pad and to clean up it wouldn't have been something to where it's like all of a sudden it explodes right you know it's like that's what they made it seem like they may sound like that were to happen it would like blow up and blow it'd be like a little mini chernobyl and blow material all over the place and it's like that's not how it works that's not how that operates yeah we have procedures and processes in place that are specifically designed and written to guide us in addressing a situation like that in reality that the canisters are are built so so strongly welded lids and everything that it's very unlikely that it would have split apart if it would have we would have had things in place though to mitigate a release i think that at worst it would have been a local issue where we would have controlled the release of rad material we would have entered our e-plan we would have made notifications we would have put actions in place right away to deal with the event as far as dose to the public primary method we'd use would be limiting access no one would be allowed in here except for mitigation teams which would probably be you know mostly our own on-site people and then the second thing that we'd be concerned about would be any sort of an off-site release of particular or primarily gas from the release of the can if it would even um broke open but you know like xenon gas or something yeah something like that or some sort of a krypton gas you know would be probably the big one but regardless of that you know there's a dilution factor that would you know be in play um wind direction uh there's a lot of things that would you know have to be you know just right for that worst case scenario to happen and fortunately we're bordered on one side by the ocean so there'd be limited concern there we have uh on the other side we're on the the marine corps base so there's not a big population zone it would have to be something where the wind was blowing directly north and you know um but you know i i don't think that that would have even been a problem because you know it would all been something that we would have been dealing with locally with our own mitigation efforts i was curious on what your take was you know about it because i already had my opinion about it and because it all seemed very far-fetched and what they're trying to sell people yeah that i think if you uh if you saw the design of the can it's unlikely it's super unlikely i mean it's 5 8 inch 316 l stainless steel and i mean you know the little coupon i have that's the size of my hand weighs three and a half pounds i mean it's just in in these way you know 50 tons loaded and you know holdtech did an analysis after that and and found that you know even if it had uh you know could have fallen from from 25 feet and not breached so you know obviously you would have had to you know deal with any damage to the fuel assemblies inside but yeah it would have been a very hyper local event we have three emergency action levels currently we had 82 when we were operating and we're down to three now and none of them involve radiological material leaving the site so you know that's why we don't have sirens anymore throughout the community we don't have a 10 mile emergency planning zone we don't have any of those things because they're just they just can't happen so you know okay the level of safety has gone way up so now i wanted to walk around and check out the radiation levels myself using my rad eye the levels i found were extremely low especially considering how radioactive the fuel assemblies are six feet below me i did see the readings shoot past 500 counts per minute but that is also extremely low this is the highest reading i got while checking out the dry fuel storage in this area now this dry fuel actually produces a decent amount of heat coming out of here it's around 120 degrees fahrenheit the air coming out of here so it feels pretty warm when you put your hand up in here when it actually the air comes and is pushed out but it's not the air that's radioactive that's coming out of here the air is completely uncontaminated it's actually the radiation i'm picking up on is from the fuel in the dry storage down here and so i'm getting around like 350 counts per minute i've seen it go as high as 400 and still that is extremely low and that's pretty reassuring that this storage system can actually keep this radiation under control like this because uh i find stuff way hotter than this not at a nuclear facility all right so this is the other dry fuel storage that's out here these are from units one two and three but it's of an older design of dry fuel storage and so these are really cool they're like super super big i mean you can't tell this is giant and uh yeah they are a little uh radioactive right here like down here by these vents right here and i'll show you that reading here in just a second [Music] now this may sound like a high level of radiation based off of the clicks coming off the geiger counter but this is about a hundred times above background radiation that's being detected out of this vent but now let's get a little perspective like we have before this again is the atoms house in malibu california and here on this tile i'm getting a level that is 17 times above what i was seeing at that san onofre fuel storage like i keep saying you know throughout this video i can find stuff at a antique shops that are more radioactive than the stuff i'm finding here granted a lot of the radiation that's coming out of this is gamma radiation which is more penetrating but i'm not getting anything out of this area i'm only getting it down by the vent and so that makes it kind of interesting like how the radiation exposure works at a place like this and right next to old fuel in dry storage i hope you enjoyed this video about san onofre nuclear generating station and the decommissioning process that's going on there this is a very interesting video to make as this was a subject that i've always wanted to know more about and to actually see this firsthand was quite an experience so if you enjoyed this video like it subscribe and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Radioactive Drew

Views: 2,027,633

Keywords: uranium, radiation, radioactive, Radioactive Drew, radioactivedrew, nuclear, nuclear power, decommissioning, SONGS, San Onofre, San Onofre Nuclear, spent nuclear fuel, nuclear fuel storage, dry storage, Southern California, Edison, Southern California Edison, radiation zone, contamination, Chernobyl, Fukushima, nuclear power plant

Id: I9nr6t9uUWs

Length: 36min 39sec (2199 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022