I first heard about nuclear diving while I was getting my hair cut in downtown Manhattan. My stylist seemed out of place in an East Village salon, so I asked her where she lived. Brooklyn? Queens? Uptown?
“Upstate,” she answered. “I commute two hours each way a few times a week.”
I asked her why, and she stopped cutting.
“Well, my husband has kind of a weird job,” she said. “He’d rather not live around other people.”
I sat up in the chair. “What does he do?”
“He’s a nuclear diver.”
“A what?”
“A diver who works in radiated water at nuclear power plants.”
I turned around to look at her. “Near the reactors?”
“The reactors, fuel pools, pretty much anywhere he’s needed.”
“And is he . . . OK? I mean . . .”
“Is it safe? Well, he says it is. They monitor his dosage levels and all that. Sometimes they’re too high, and he’s not allowed to dive. That’s why we live out in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, I’d rather he didn’t do it. Who wants a glowing husband?” She laughed, a bit sadly.
I told her I was a writer and asked if I could meet him. She said probably not. Most divers don’t like talking about their work, and their bosses discourage the ones who do. “I think it all comes down to the radiation,” she said. “It spooks people. It spooks me! Not that the rest of the job is a picnic. The non-contaminated diving they do—around the huge intake pipes that bring water into the plants—is even more dangerous. Sometimes they get sucked in.” Her husband had survived the day-to-day hazards of his job, she said, but I wondered about the long-term effects. “Has he ever gotten sick?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“But you said he won’t talk to me.”
She put her scissors down. “He gets chest pains.”
“From the radiation?”
“He says probably not, but what else could it be from? He’s still young.”
She wrote down her husband’s e-mail address, and I tried over the course of the next few weeks to get him to talk to me. He wrote back eventually, but only to say that he was busy servicing a reactor in California. Maybe he’d get in touch when he had more time. By then I was hooked, though. What kind of person knowingly dives in contaminated water? I spent months sending queries to divers I found online, but none of them would talk either. Then came the Fukushima disaster, which changed the nuclear-energy landscape almost overnight. On a hunch, I started contacting plant operators rather than individual divers. An article about the hazards (and heroics) of nuclear diving might not be a plant manager’s idea of great publicity, but it sure beat images of helicopters dumping seawater on crippled Japanese reactors. Someone at the D.C. Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman, Michigan, agreed. More than a year after that East Village haircut, I was invited to see a dive in person.
by David Goodwillie, PopSci | Read more:
Photo: David Goodwillie
