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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/nyregion/26nuclear.html
. . .
Plant officials have been searching for the source of the leak for the past two months. They have lowered remote-controlled cameras into the 35-foot-deep pool that stores the plant's spent fuel rods, and they even sent a diver wearing radiation monitors to look at flaws found by the camera for evidence of the leak, with no luck.
. . .
Indian Point's first plan for stopping the leak was to bring in a diver that Entergy hired, Tim Fisher, 39, of Tucson, who said he has been working as a commercial diver for 17 years. His company, Underwater Construction Corporation of Essex, Conn., has sent him into lakes and rivers and to about 15 nuclear plants to repair parts that must be kept submersed to limit radiation. Mr. Fisher examined three spots in the Indian Point pool, but none of them were the source of the leak.
Mr. Fisher goes into the spent fuel pool with a radiation monitor on each arm, each leg, his back and his head. Readings are instantaneously fed to the surface.
After a series of dives, he recently sat with a colleague, Rene Breault, as they dubbed video images of the pool's inner liner and of Mr. Fisher's dive onto compact discs. Stuck to the wall near his workstation with a piece of duct tape, a hand-written note showed how much radiation exposure he could absorb before the end of this year. Under the plant's rule, he is limited to 1,167 millirem, the amount that the average American absorbs in about three and a half years from natural and man-made sources. He said he was unlikely to get close to that amount on this job; in his last dive, he absorbed about 15 millirem, he said.
He professed little concern about working a few feet from the highly radioactive fuel, which is stored in water that acts as a radiation shield. "Whatever it takes," he said.
He has explored almost all of the pool area that is accessible to humans. Soon Entergy will begin with a smaller camera that can squeeze into the bottom 15 feet of the pool, the area between the side of the fuel rods and the wall. Finding the source of the leak there would be reassuring, company officials say, because they would know where it is, although it is not clear how they would repair it.
. . .
. . .
Plant officials have been searching for the source of the leak for the past two months. They have lowered remote-controlled cameras into the 35-foot-deep pool that stores the plant's spent fuel rods, and they even sent a diver wearing radiation monitors to look at flaws found by the camera for evidence of the leak, with no luck.
. . .
Indian Point's first plan for stopping the leak was to bring in a diver that Entergy hired, Tim Fisher, 39, of Tucson, who said he has been working as a commercial diver for 17 years. His company, Underwater Construction Corporation of Essex, Conn., has sent him into lakes and rivers and to about 15 nuclear plants to repair parts that must be kept submersed to limit radiation. Mr. Fisher examined three spots in the Indian Point pool, but none of them were the source of the leak.
Mr. Fisher goes into the spent fuel pool with a radiation monitor on each arm, each leg, his back and his head. Readings are instantaneously fed to the surface.
After a series of dives, he recently sat with a colleague, Rene Breault, as they dubbed video images of the pool's inner liner and of Mr. Fisher's dive onto compact discs. Stuck to the wall near his workstation with a piece of duct tape, a hand-written note showed how much radiation exposure he could absorb before the end of this year. Under the plant's rule, he is limited to 1,167 millirem, the amount that the average American absorbs in about three and a half years from natural and man-made sources. He said he was unlikely to get close to that amount on this job; in his last dive, he absorbed about 15 millirem, he said.
He professed little concern about working a few feet from the highly radioactive fuel, which is stored in water that acts as a radiation shield. "Whatever it takes," he said.
He has explored almost all of the pool area that is accessible to humans. Soon Entergy will begin with a smaller camera that can squeeze into the bottom 15 feet of the pool, the area between the side of the fuel rods and the wall. Finding the source of the leak there would be reassuring, company officials say, because they would know where it is, although it is not clear how they would repair it.
. . .
