Nuclear "Jumpers" offered big money to brave Japan's nuclear plant

[Poll_Blind]

From Reuters

(Reuters) - It's a job that sounds too good to be true -- thousands of dollars for up to an hour of work that often requires little training.

But it also sounds too outrageous to accept, given the full job description: working in perilously radioactive environments.

In its attempts to bring under control its radiation-gushing nuclear power plant that was severely damaged by last month's massive earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) (9501.T) is trying to get workers ever closer to the sources of stubborn radiation at the plant and end the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Workers are reportedly being offered hazard pay to work in the damaged reactors of up to $5,000 per day -- or more accurately, a fraction of a day, since the radiation-drenched shifts must be drastically restricted.

A TEPCO official said this week that the beleaguered company has tasks fit for "jumpers" -- workers so called because they "jump" into highly radioactive areas to accomplish a job in a minimum of time and race out as quickly as possible.
--snip--

Much, much more at the link!

PB

[slackmaster]

1. My friend the junkie worked three different identities as a jumper at San Onofre

So he could work three shifts in a day.

[FreakinDJ]

2. Junkie with 3 identities - made it into San Onofre

I find that a little hard to believe given all the drug testing and FBI back ground checks it takes to get in there

[slackmaster]

5. There was no drug testing in the late 1970s, even at nuke plants.

:hi:

[tahrir]

3. that's lame, $5K a day, to sacrifice your life? an American CEO makes more than 100x that before ben

It should be at LEAST 10x that if they are serious... how much do they value our environment? I'd say these numbers speak volumes.

:'(

[Rex]

4. We need an army of heroes.

I have a feeling the Japanese are going to bite the bullet on this one and send in hordes of people to stop this mess. Did we have a meltdown yet or is that still preventable if enough people can be found and trained to help out? Is it possible? They are dealing with a history making earthquake and the after effects of a tsunami, so that is three strikes out of the gate. Did they put up the cloth material yet around the plant?

Fighting oil fires is horrible, trying to gain control over an out of control nuclear reactor is something completely different.

People that compare oil to nuclear energy are off by a few powers imo.

Still, wish someone would make BP clean up the Gulf.

Dreams...

[Poll_Blind]

7. You mentioned the Japanese sending hordes of people to stop the problem and...

...I thought about that for a while, because that really is the next thing that you'd expect.

But another sort of thought (and it's a strange one, I'll admit) occurred to me, based on the movement of TEPCO and the Japanese government so far. What if they don't? What if they just leave it to smoulder for months if not years because they are simply incapable of dealing with the problem?

I've heard it seriously said that it's likely that engineers working at the Fukushima plant could begin becoming incapacitated by the radiation over the next 3-weeks or month, depending on their personal level of exposure. Apparently it's so radioactive (and I've heard this from a number of different sources now, also based on Chernobyl) that robots malfunction, only humans can work in the high radioactivity like that.

So...especially with the problem getting so bad- I'm just wondering- well- I mean, shit, it seems reasonable to conject at this point (and let me know if you think this is over the top) but that there might not be any way to actually address this thing for months and that it's just going to sit there and cook, 24/7 for a real long time.

PB

[Rex]

8. When they mentioned putting up fabric to 'catch the radiation'

my first thought was 'no you are going to hide the mass amount of illness about to take place' from prying eyes. Maybe the Japanese govt will have a different take on this now that they are running things...I can't believe they let TEPCO run around lying to people for so long. And no, I don't think anything is over the top at this point. All the people that were screaming 'this will never get as bad as chernobyl' have strangely fallen silent or are no longer posting here and that scares the hell out of me.

[Vodid]

6. San Onofre in the early 1980's...

Some o' the punk rockers I was hangin' with at the time were doing temp work at the San Onofre nuclear plant, so I know they didn't do much of a background check. The common term for these workers was "glo-plugs".

[Shagbark Hickory]

9. They should offer the uranium to kim jung il for free as long as they come and pick it up.