Re: Data on Rate of Personnel Contaminations

[Doug Turner <turners@earthlink.net>]

The rate of personnel skin contaminations as a goal is a carry over from the
nuclear navy program into the commercial nuclear power industry.  INPO
ratcheted the commercial nuclear power industry into accepting a rate as one
of several indicators, and enormous resources were spent trying to achieve
these atrificial goals.  With todays revised 10cfr20 I would suggest you
treat skin contaminations like internal depositions- calculate the dose
equivalent( if the contamination is significant) and control as part of the
shallow dose equivalent.

Of course even nuiscance skin contamination take time to document,
decontaminate and if the program requires perform a whole body count.  If
individuals repeatedly get skin contaminations from poor work habits or
lackadasical attitude you might want the supervisor to retrain or replace
the individual.

When I was working for GPU in the 1980's the goals were 3 per 10,000 RWP
hours.  We had the same goal at Oyster Creek, TMI-1 & TMI-2.  While I was at
TMI-2 we were never able to achieve this low level despite extraordinary
efforts including almost continuous observation of the workers, undressing
the workers, investigating each contamination, several trips to the laundry
vendor site etc.

There are limited funds for decomissioning, and you might want to consider
the financial impact of skin contamination goals very carefully on achieving
the overall goal of removing and burying radioactive material.

Doug Turner <turners@earthlink.net>
 At 11:34 AM 9/2/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I am currently developing radiological performance measures for the power
>station decommissioning project at the Haddam Neck Plant (Connecticut Yankee).
>
>Not unexpectedly, one measure has generated a rather broad range of opinion
>among plant staff and the large group of consultants present with regard to
>where to set the goal. This measure is the indidence/rate of personnel
>contamination incidents.
>
>Accordingly, I am interested in any impirical data OR anecdotal information on
>industry experience with the number of RWP hours logged per personnel
>contamination event in similar situations (i.e. very large outages or
>decommissioning projects) and what people consider a "acceptable" rate or use
>as goals.
>
>I understand that there are huge variabilities in this issue, such as plant
>source term, threshold and criteria for defining an event as a personnel
>contamination, etc. so I would like to hold the discussion to raw data and
>specific experience with using such a measure in equivalent situations.
>
>Thanks.
>
>D.J. Richards
>Radiological Services, Inc.
>richadj@gwsmtp.nu.com (work)
>djrichards@email.msn.com (personal)
>
>