i was prepared to lose my job

[numbnuts240]

question: at what point, would you say "i'm not willing to do that, even though my decision will cost me my job"?

i know times are tough for many, and those who are employed are lucky to be so, but there has to be a line that you wouldn't cross. i'm just curious to see where your lines are drawn.

as some of you may know, i've been back working at the nuclear power station here in ct. a tank (roughly 10' diameter, 10' tall, round on top and bottom) was found to have a crack in a weld and it was leaking an water/boric acid mixture (very small leak, but a leak nonetheless). a plan was put together to repair said leak, which involved a small group of us carpenters to erect a scaffold inside the tank so the welders could attach a purge box over the inside of the weld and then repair the weld from the outside.
a small group of carpenters was hand picked (myself included) to be fitted for respirators in order to enter the tank and build the scaffold. now the respirators aren't for air supply, they're for the high levels of contaminant in the tank. awesome. how high, you ask? 9R/hour. 9 rem. the federal limit for an entire YEAR is 5R. and they were trying to get us in there without respirators since the smallest person on site couldn't effectively enter the man-way without getting hung up on his respirator. no thanks, i'd prefer not to crap in a bag for a week for their stupid tank.
long story short, we basically told our immediate super "f*** you, and your power plant, we're not going in that thing. find another way or get our slips and checks printed out". even though he really wanted to be the hero and have his guys build this thing, he finally saw it our way. we attended a meeting and they decided to just purge the entire tank with argon and weld it (nobody else involved with this repair was willing to enter the thing either).

sooooo, yeah. your experiences....

[snwbrdr435]

I walked into bathroom in the shop and found this



Boss told me to clean it up. I told him I wouldn't do it. Took him a week to finally hire someone.

[Dattebayo]

Well, mine isn't as epically dangerous or disgusting, but I have sales people tell me how to build machines for them all the time. I always ignore them and do it the right way.

When they "fix" said device when they find out I didn't follow their instructions, I always get paid again after they realize they have no idea what they are doing. And if normally you do your job well, no reason to worry about getting fired for something that is stupid like getting radiation sickness or getting ill from coliform bacteria... cause you don't want that sh*t anyway if that's how they're gonna be.

[Jesda]

My uncle once told me about someone who crapped all over the walls of the bathroom at least a couple times a week. They had to put a camera outside the mens room door (it was one of those single-person-at-a-time bathrooms) to catch the guy walking in and out of the poop-smeared lavatory.

You hear about a lot about that at fast food joints, but this was an engineering company.

[themadscientist]

question: at what point, would you say "i'm not willing to do that, even though my decision will cost me my job"?

s***, you lost me here, forget whatever followed it.

i've been back working at the nuclear power station here in ct.

I'd turn to crime before going anywhere near something like that.

[costa_rican13]

my boss told me to clean the bottom of the parts counter's at my store. and i straight up said no. and he said why? i said because i'm not stupid.(he's gay) and said well frazier(our DM) is coming in here tommorow. i said i dont give a f*** if the CEO is coming. i'm not cleaning the bottom of the counters. end story, i didnt do it. i threatened to call HR if he made me . lol

[Dattebayo]

my boss told me to clean the bottom of the parts counter's at my store. and i straight up said no. and he said why? i said because i'm not stupid.(he's gay)

[costa_rican13]

he has the hots for me and i'm not gay, he was trying to get me to get down on my hands and knees.

[Encryptshun]

I'm assuming that your story was meant to be funny and not serious. If not, you are a useless waste of oxygen and I encourage you to go off yourself in the most painful way possible.

[DrifterXRPS13]

I'm gonna concur with Chad on this one, go DIAF

[Dattebayo]

My uncle once told me about someone who crapped all over the walls of the bathroom at least a couple times a week. They had to put a camera outside the mens room door (it was one of those single-person-at-a-time bathrooms) to catch the guy walking in and out of the poop-smeared lavatory.

You hear about a lot about that at fast food joints, but this was an engineering company.

Was this in the news or something? I swear I've head the story somewhere else before...

[elwesso]

I have been asked on a couple of occasions to essentially "steal" another competitor's design on how they build a certain part or parts of a machine. Basically by measuring said component and trying to reverse-engineer it. While partly I didn't do what they asked because i forgot, I also wouldn't do it anyway because straight up trying to copy someone else's design is just plain wrong.

So going forward, if they ask me to straight up "copy" something that a competitor does, which means figuring out what they do, and duplicating it for our equipment, I'll simply state that I will no longer be working on that project.

[danshaz82]

I walked into bathroom in the shop and found this

pretty much the same thing happened to me when i worked at Home Depot.
some woman crapped her pants and left a trail of liquid poop from the front, all the way to the bathrooms in back.
my supervisor told me to clean it up, (because i was the cart pusher, so the lowest on the chain).
told him it wasnt sanitary and that i wasnt going to do it. he said ill be fired for not complying and then complained to the store manager, who then bitched him out for not calling the in-store janitorial service to do it.

[IBCoupe]

Glad you didn't lose your job, Tito. Radiation poisoning is not something to f*** around with. Stay safe!

[Encryptshun]

My circumstance was not nearly as life-threatening as Tito's, but at one of my previous companies I was asked to "play ball" with a no-bid contract (my job was to bid contracts). The executives involved from my company were getting kick backs from the supplier, but the deal was going to cost the company around $6 milllion a year more than the current arrangement for reduced service and no right to terminate (basically meaning it was a perpetual agreement with no buffers on future price increases).

For 18 months I fought every single time the proposal came across my desk, showing how the numbers didn't work. I called our office of ethics and compliance and filed a report on the entire deal. I was asked if I valued my job. My response was "I do value my job. I value it enough to do it the right way. And, as a shareholder, I choose to vote against it."

At the end of 18 months, my boss (who had had my back every step of the way) was squeezed out of the company and I was tansferred to a different group where I would no longer have any input regarding contracts. The executives signed the contract without involving Procurement at the house of the CIO on Christmas Eve night.

[IBCoupe]

...no chance that you'd share the name of this company, Chad?

[Encryptshun]

Sorry, Isaac. Not willing to do that. Only because the people involved are all gone now (eventually justice was served, but not before the damage to the company had been done) and it wouldn't do anything other than get the good people who are left into trouble.

[IBCoupe]

Ah, okeedoke.

[Encryptshun]

....ambulance chaser.

[IBCoupe]

Don't hate the player.

[themadscientist]

Hate the greed?

[IBCoupe]

[idahotuner]

one nice thing about working for a union, specially mine is that they are constantly telling you, if you feel unsafe, or is go against any safety standards you can say no and not be punished and we will back you up.

[IBCoupe]

one nice thing about working for a union, specially mine is that they are constantly telling you, if you feel unsafe, or is go against any safety standards you can say no and not be punished and we will back you up.

+1

[4cefed]

nubnuts...

Can you tell me what tank this is? I've never worked at Millstone (it is Millstone right?) but PWRs are all very similar. I'm trying to figure out what system you would have a borated water tank reading 9R/hr. Is it an equipment drain tank or some kind of sump? Something in radwaste?

Did you and your crew understand the pre-job briefing correctly? was the GENERAL AREA 9R/hr or was it just one or two spots? What was the contamination level? High enough to justify respirators I guess...

I'm an ANSI 3.1 sr. RP tech and I'll look out for the health and safety of everyone, jot just at my own plant, so I'd love to help you out with this. Did you get fit tested for an actual negative pressure respirator or some kind of PAPR? (The tyvek hood blower thing.)

As far as the respirator thing goes, dose is dose. Back in "the day" you were sucking rubber regardless. However, we've learned that wearing a respirator increases the time taken to complete a task. Building scaffolding is something that will definitely take longer while wearing a respirator. If you are hanging out in a 1R/hr area that is like 3 DAC, for an hour, your whole-body dose will be 1 REM + 7.5 mR (2.5mR/hr/DAC x 3 DAC) from breathing in contaminated air for a Total Effective Dose Equivalent of 1007.5 mR. If you wear a respirator you will take 30% longer to complete your task, so while eliminating the 7.5 mR, now you are exposed to that dose rate for 1.3 hours. Your TEDE will now be 1300 mR. That's an INCREASE of about 300 mR by wearing a respirator. You will be better off not wearing the thing as would be determined by the ALARA plan that was written for this job.... right? Ask to see it. Depending on the utility's procedures, usually an ALARA plan must be developed prior to wearing any respiratory protection.

Let's say you went ahead with this job while not wearing a respirator. You will most likely alarm the exit portals around your face and chest. After a few showers, they will send you to the body counter. Here they will measure and calculate your Total Comitted Effective Dose. I really doubt you would be s*** in tupperwear, most likely you get a green card to leave security everyday, get to hang out in the trailer all day until you can pass the monitors a few days later. I really doubt you would do down this road.

There has to be a way to reduce the dose rates in the tank first. Installing shielding would be great, unfortunately they would likely ask you guys to erect scaffolding to hand shielding from. (Sucks being a carpenter) Clean out the damn tank. They can get someone to hydrolaze that thing and knock down the dose rates.

Sounds to me like this is a permit required confined space. You can hammer them on those requirements like having a qualified rescue plan with rescue-trained personnel. Did they sniff the air this shift? This will also be a Locked High Rad Area that requires continuous RP coverage so you will have to have some kind of audible contact with the RPs and I hope some kind of remote monitoring of your dose. That's a lot of paperwork there.

If the dose the the whole body is really 9R/hr you would be allowed in there for about a half hour before reaching the NRC's dose limit. They won't do that. Most likely they have an admin dose limit of about 2 REM. That means you could spend a maximum of 13 minutes assuming you have no other dose this year. So realistically they would let you in there for about 10 minutes. They are going to go through all this for guys to spend 10 minutes a piece in there? Not likely.

We had to build a scaffold in an area that was about .4-.6 R/hr months ago and we made a huge deal about that. The plan was changed so they crew didn't have to be in there as long.

Still, even soaking up 1.5 REM is nothing to lose sleep over.It should be avoided if possible, but you will not endure any health effects.

Your post is two days old so I'm assuming this job is over and done with. If you have any questions please let me know if I can help.

[themadscientist]

Why don't you climb in the radioactive tank and save me a couple of dimes over those pesky guys that care about their safety.

[numbnuts240]

nubnuts...

Can you tell me what tank this is? I've never worked at Millstone (it is Millstone right?) but PWRs are all very similar. I'm trying to figure out what system you would have a borated water tank reading 9R/hr. Is it an equipment drain tank or some kind of sump? Something in radwaste?

millstone is correct. it was the volume control tank.

Did you and your crew understand the pre-job briefing correctly? was the GENERAL AREA 9R/hr or was it just one or two spots? What was the contamination level? High enough to justify respirators I guess...

the mop heads that they were using to clean the inside were reading 8R/hour. when hp stuck their survey probe thing in the manyway right after they opened up the hatch it was reading 9R/hour.

Did you get fit tested for an actual negative pressure respirator or some kind of PAPR? (The tyvek hood blower thing.)

a group of us were administered the physical and fitted for full-face respirators. now i gots me a nifty sticker on the back of my id badge. i felt special.

There has to be a way to reduce the dose rates in the tank first. Installing shielding would be great, unfortunately they would likely ask you guys to erect scaffolding to hand shielding from. (Sucks being a carpenter) Clean out the damn tank. They can get someone to hydrolaze that thing and knock down the dose rates.

for what they needed to do, setting up shielding would have taken more time than their initial goal, while having more guys getting dosed up. like i said, o.d. is roughly 10' and about 10' tall. shielding would have just made the inside that much more cramped.

Sounds to me like this is a permit required confined space. You can hammer them on those requirements like having a qualified rescue plan with rescue-trained personnel. Did they sniff the air this shift? This will also be a Locked High Rad Area that requires continuous RP coverage so you will have to have some kind of audible contact with the RPs and I hope some kind of remote monitoring of your dose. That's a lot of paperwork there.

definitely would have been a permit required confined space with hp personnel at the tank at all times. the rescue plan was in the works, but they came to a halt when the smallest hp tried to enter the tank and got hung up on his respirator. even if he did manage to get in, they still weren't sure how they would get him out in an emergency scenario.

Still, even soaking up 1.5 REM is nothing to lose sleep over.It should be avoided if possible, but you will not endure any health effects.

i didn't get my alara hat for soaking up dose, lol. we did a tear down the other night and i asked hp to survey the area since there was a sign posted on a nearby pipe claiming 30-90mR in the general area. my foreman made some snide comments about holding the job up blah, blah, blah. but of course he would be the one standing by the green sign watching us work alongside the hot pipe. he's a d!ck.

Your post is two days old so I'm assuming this job is over and done with. If you have any questions please let me know if I can help.

job was completed, but no one went in. we went to the big meeting with all the big cheeses and the various trades involved. nobody was all that keen on entering that tank and they decided to just purge the entire thing for the welding that needed to be done. just like we suggested from the beginning. but what do we know?

[4cefed]

job was completed, but no one went in. we went to the big meeting with all the big cheeses and the various trades involved. nobody was all that keen on entering that tank and they decided to just purge the entire thing for the welding that needed to be done. just like we suggested from the beginning. but what do we know?

That's what pisses me off with these guys. They get all antsy about sending guys to work RIGHT NOW without thinking about stuff. The outcome is just what I thought would happen, you didn't go in.

I went to college to be a mechanical engineer and I've seen similar jobs from every angle. From the guy digging the ditch (literally) to the engineer trying to design stuff. I quickly learned that the most important resource was the guy doing the work. I had to write a procedure once to make spool pieces for a piping replacement for the upcoming outages. They handed me an iso of the piping run and asked me to split up the fab into pieces for the outage. The pipe was in the condenser bay and I couldn't go see it. After a day or two of writing this thing I brought it to the fab shop for the pipefitter foreman to look over. He was being really nice but spent about 20 minutes asking for some changes. Finally I brought hum a new iso and asked him to split it where it would be best for his guys. I spent another couple days re-writing this thing. Months later in the outage when I could see the piping run I was shocked at how buried this thing was. The foreman knew exactly where he could squeeze these spool pieces in. If they had to do it my way they would still be in there. Most important engineering lesson I ever learned.

If I remember, Volume Control Tanks end up being some collection for seal leak offs, and other low volume drains. They get crapped up pretty quickly. So instead of interting the inside of the tank they were just going to throw guys in there huh? Brilliant.

I've seen a lot of outages over the years an management looks at carpenters and laborers as pretty expendable, there are so many of you guys. I've seen outages where after most of the scaffolds are built, they lay everyone off for like a week and a half then bring them all back in to take everything down.

I can't say how the politics in your own shop work as far as resisting doing work like this, but if you get the right RP they can help you out. I've come up with all sorts of reasons to stop work on BS like this when the crew was a little afraid of the foreman and they didn't want to be looked at as whiners.

Keep in mind that these plants have to abide by the Safety Conscious Work Environment rules. Even though you might not be regular plant personnel, Employee Concerns still has that anonymous phone line.

Fortunately times have changed a bit and I can't say I've seen someone go through with some project like that in a long time. If that happens again, stall them long enough and I'm sure they'll see the light. You can always post for advice on nukeworker.com too.

Stay safe.

[numbnuts240]

I've seen a lot of outages over the years an management looks at carpenters and laborers as pretty expendable, there are so many of you guys.

our carpenters would be more expendable if we weren't forced to hire travelers to fill the void left by the morons who either can't pass a drug test or their cbt's.

[4cefed]

Lulz. It's like they are paying you to stay clean and some people can't handle it.