A worker at Southern California Edison’s San Onofre nuclear plant fell into a pool shortly after a leak from a steam generator unit was revealed last week. This “reactor cavity,”--not the spent fuel pool--sits on top of the reactor, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s filled with water to a depth of 23 feet. No fuel was in the pool, according to commission spokesperson Victor Dricks. But there was radioactivity. Edison stated that the worker “lost his balance while working on our new reactor head project and slipped into the reactor pool.” The worker suffered a dose of about 5 millirems. NRC’s annual limit for nuclear plant workers is 5,000 millirems. Requests for comments from union officials were not answered by press time. According to Princeton University, an acute whole-body dose of under 50 rem typically causes changes in blood. A dosage of 150 rem can cause death and a dosage of 800 rem equals certain death. There are 1,000 millirems per rem.
