A Worker Fell Into a Nuclear Reactor Pool
Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago
nrc.govResearchstoryHigh profile
heatedmixed
Debate
80/100
Nuclear SafetyRadiation ExposureIndustrial Accidents
Key topics
Nuclear Safety
Radiation Exposure
Industrial Accidents
A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool, prompting discussion on radiation safety and the nuclear industry's transparency, with some commenters expressing concern and others downplaying the incident's severity.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
14m
Peak period
149
Day 1
Avg / period
32
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 25, 2025 at 9:15 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 25, 2025 at 9:29 PM EDT
14m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
149 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 3, 2025 at 3:54 PM EST
2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45708292Type: storyLast synced: 11/22/2025, 11:47:55 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Unfortunately radiation medicine is pretty complicated and the report gives us very little info, presumably mostly because they don't have very much info. It will take some time and effort to establish more.
What we do know is that they measured 300 CPM at the person's hair, which was probably where they expected the highest count due to absorbed water (likely clothing was already stripped at this point). CPM is a tricky unit because it is something like the "raw" value from the instrument, the literal number of counts from the tube, and determining more absolute metrics like activity and dose requires knowing the calibration of the meter. The annoying thing here is that radiation protection professionals will still sometimes just write CPM because for a lot of applications there's only one or a handful of instruments approved and they tend to figure the reader knows which instrument they have. Frustrating. Still, for the common LND7311 tube and Cs137, 300CPM is a little below 1 uSv/hr. That wouldn't equate to any meaningful risk (a common rule of thumb is that a couple mSv is typical annual background exposure). However, for a less sensitive detector, the dose could be much higher (LND7311 is often used in pancake probes for frisking because it is very sensitive and just background is often hundreds of CPM). Someone who knows NRC practices better might know what detector would be used here.
That said the field dose here is really not the concern, committed dose from ingesting the water is. Ingesting radioactive material is extremely dangerous because, depending on the specific isotopes involved, it can persist in the body for a very long time and accumulate in specific organs. Unfortunately it is also difficult to assess. This person will likely go to a hospital with a specialty center equipped with a full body counter, and counts will also be taken on blood samples. These are ways of estimating the amount of radioactive isotopes in the body. In some cases tissue samples of specific organs may be taken.
I believe that the cavity pool water would be "clean" other than induced radioactivity (activation products from being bombarded by radiation). Because water shields so well the pool should not be that "hot" from this process. Most of those products have short half-lives which, on the one hand, means that they deliver a higher dose over a shorter period of time---but also means they will not longer forever and are less likely to be a chronic problem if they are not an acute one.
I suspect this will get some press coverage and we will perhaps learn more about the patient's state.
Another way we can get at this question is by the bureaucracy of the notification. An 8-hour notification as done here is required in relatively minor cases. Usually for a "big deal emergency" a one-hour notification is required. The definition of such an emergency depends on the site emergency plan but I think acute radiation exposure to a worker would generally qualify.
As others had said, more alarming part is that they ingested the water, which could go like defected Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. But it could also be like man eating few bananas seasoned with expired Himalayan salt. The report just doesn't say how much of what was ingested.
All that disclaimer aside: a banana produces about 15 Bq (which is s^-1), i.e. 900 cpm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCfapqYy00
Among other things, he had to sit inside an enclosure made of scintillator material for a period of time, to make sure he wasn't contaminated. Then he also got blood tests for heavy metals etc. They pretty much went by the book for all of these tests.
Also, the facility is the only place that's equipped for this kind of situation.
I find it highly informative that the required PPE for working in that location is a life jacket so you float in case you fall in, rather than a tether and fall arrest harness so that it's not possible to fall in.
300 CPM is nothing, background levels might be 150.
He went back to work the next day. They don't provide much detail about the minor injuries but it seems that the biggest issue is maybe a bruised shin from the fall.
I agree this was not a serious incident, and I never really though it was. (I'm extremely pro-nuclear, for the record.) But at the time I posted, the comment section was about 8 people posting the xkcd link at once (with no additional commentary), and few others reading it and saying "oh, no problem then", with literally nobody pointing out the discrepancies, or explaining exactly what a "reactor cavity" means in this context.
Wow
The reactor vessel can contain heavy water or water with boric acid in it, neither of which are good for you. Additionally, neutron radiation from the reactor will cause the formation of radioactive tritium in the vessel water, so the liquid itself becomes radioactive.
I guess in a nuclear reactor there is a lingual shift and the word emergency cant be used for just any old 911 call.
Like how Australians apparently call a jellyfish bite "uncomfortable"
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-08/vinegar-makes-box-jel...
If you ever become prime Minister of Australia, and find yourself on an oceanside bombing range, don't go spear fishing.
Not sure about spiders. Are their fangs considered to be teeth? Platypus have venomous spurs, not sure what that’s called.
If you fell in a lake and accidentally ingested some wayer known to contain some pathagen dangerous to humans, you might seek medical care, but I don't think most people would consider that an emergency. This is similar.
In this case, not much. It's still an exposure event and absolutely worth giving medical attention to assess continued exposure levels from ingested contamination and generally be overly cautious. But that doesn't mean it's ultimately going to be a significant factor in this workers risk for radiation induced disease. It's certainly better than living in the vicinity of coal mining and processing plants.
Even drinking it I would think would be completely fine. The water itself doesn't get activated.
The linked report doesn't say how radioactive his hair is or give any indication of whether the person in question is threatened by this reading. Could be bad, could be nothing, we just know it is higher than normal.
EDIT The report below it seems to literally be "nothing interesting happened". The thresholds here for something to be reportable are very low. Frankly I don't know why this story is upvoted so much but I'm not about to make a bigger deal about it than one sentence.
I found this:
Ok so 300 for an hour (we'll assume the hair is cut off and the exposure either stops or 90% reduces) means no problem. Don't do that every day that's all.But it's from a prepper site that doesn't cite their own sources.
I found this: https://www.energy.gov/ehss/articles/doe-ionizing-radiation-...
Which uses rem instead of cpm. An on-line converter of unknown quality says 300 cpm is 500 rem, and the pdf from the .gov site says 500 rem is "death probable in 2-3 weeks", but I think that chart is saying that's whole body & no therapy. Where this is probably mostly hair that can be just cut off totally let alone washed, and so the elevated exposure is probably both low and short duration, and medical therapy (whatever that means, if any in this case) on top.
I can't tell, could be the same as just visting a country with a slightly higher background that isn't a problem for anyone, to dead in a month. Leaning towards no problem just because of the short time and apparently mostly external and removable source.
However, it's not nothing either. It's maybe no problem for this person only because they avoided ingesting the water and the water was very quickly washed off and presumably their hair was cut off and all clothes etc removed as fast as possible. It's clearly at least "rather hot" and you can't just play in it and have prolonged exposure and ingestion. It doesn't seem to be "basically zero".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counts_per_minute
Assuming this website was used, it looks like it does a naive multiplication by 5/3, which seems... simplistic? The rest of the page doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either. No indication of how the conversion factor was derived and there's a bunch of links to other CPM -> <radiation-related unit> calculators. On top of that, the landing page for the root domain boasts about AI capabilities and their AI page prominently features "Elevate Your Content Creation" and "Generate high-quality AI content with ease!"
[0]: https://www.inayam.co/unit-converter/radioactivity/counts_pe...
It's worth noting that humans are typically radioactive to the level of 3 kBq, or 3000 disintegrations per second, so if I ever realised I had 300 cpm of radiation on my skin as measured by a device that is sensitive to alpha, beta, and gamma, I probably would just shrug and wash it off. Where it might be a problem is if I am dealing with only alpha and beta isotopes, and I'm getting 300 cpm on a gamma-sensitive detector, meaning that the _secondary radiation alone_ is 300 cpm.
(Realistically, I and the radiation safety officer overseeing whatever I was doing would be in serious trouble and have a ton of paperwork, but I just mean it in the abstract)
I mean, 10 grams of potassium has ~300 Bq (that is 300 disintegrations per second) of radiation, so I think I should be able to get my hair far more radioactive than 300 cpm on a beta-sensitive geiger counter if I just slather myself in low-sodium salt from the grocery salt. The salt might be bad for my scalp, I don't know, but the radiation is fine. My point here, though, is that I don't know what equipment the 300 cpm is measured with, what the thresholds are and what the window material is, and that can change things greatly, but my non-professional opinion as the wrong kind of doctor is that it's...probably not a big deal.
We've actually used KCl as a low-level radiation source before, and we joked that when the experiment is done we can just take it home and use it to season dinner.
Tritiated water is a reality of reactor pools.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...
Emily Austin, Hilary S. Myron, Richard K. Summerbell, Constance A. Mackenzie, Acute renal injury cause by confirmed Psilocybe cubensis mushroom ingestion,
Medical Mycology Case Reports, Volume 23, 2019, Pages 55-57, ISSN 2211-7539,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mmcr.2018.12.007. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...)
Abstract: Psilocybe mushrooms are consumed for their hallucinogenic properties. Fortunately, there are relatively few adverse effects associated with their consumption. This is the first reported case of acute kidney injury (AKI) secondary to confirmed ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. A 15-year-old male developed symptomatic AKI 36 h post-ingestion of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. He was admitted to hospital with hypertension, nausea and abdominal pain and a creatinine of 450 mmol/L. A sample of the crop of mushrooms was confirmed by mass spectrometry to contain psilocin. On day 5 post-admission, he was discharged home. Outpatient follow-up confirmed complete resolution of his renal function.
Keywords: Psilocybe; Nephrotoxicity; Mushrooms; Kidney injury
I wonder if there was an accidental polyculture issue, either with a different mushroom or a freak mutation that caused that particular shroom to synthesize toxic compounds. When growing directly from spores, you get mixed genetics, so your various mushrooms will grow slightly differently (if you want consistent genetics you grow clones from an isolate via agar plate or tissue sample from fruiting body).
This is well researched and just like with semaglutide I believe a big part of the population should take daily tadalafil.
Better cardiovascular health, more erections and many positive downstream effects (lower E:T ratio, weight loss) that are beyond the scope of this comment.
The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.
Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.
Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.
Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis
Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?
No, it doesn't.
however any kind of "pill" that would have anywhere near the same health effects as exercise is decades away at least.
hips and knees acls tend to be a failure point but the non-existance of said "pill" is probably a fairly big tick for the excercise side, and our tech for repairing those failure points continues to progress at speed
I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.
Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.
Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.
This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.
One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.
Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).
The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.
Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.
This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.
"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
Agreed - low dose daily cialis/tadalafil (e.g. 5mg/day) is very common among elite athletes, bodybuilders, etc. As are GLP-1's despite elite athletes rarely being overweight.
Tadalafil is taken for its endothelial benefits (erections are a convenient side effect), and GLP's for its nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitization effects.
Medications are very often most effective when paired with good lifestyle habits, rather than one of the other.
It also depends on what your goals are, obviously.
Beyond that, if goals are for specific performance targets, in some athletic or competitive activity, you'll want to tune your training toward that. Again, the baseline is remarkably consistent, it's the high-performer tuning which varies.
Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks. If you're lucky, it's only wasted money. If you're not, it's markedly worse.
The biggest hurdle I've encountered personally is primary care doctors deal with very sick people every day (terrible diet, terrible body composition, terrible alcohol/drug habits, etc). And that's who they optimize their care for.
If you show up to a PCP and you're in shape, all vitals on point, all bloodwork looking good, the last thing the PCP wants to do is prescribe anything because "you don't need it" and "you're not sick".
Most doctors simply don't care about helping you optimize your health once you've reached "healthier than average" status.
This leads a lot of people to doing their own research, and finding health clinics outside of insurance that cater to health optimization, anti-aging, and non-standard treatments (like prescribing GLP's to people who aren't overweight, or Cialis for people who don't have ED). These clinics also aren't very good because, while they are indeed doctors or NPs, they make money off selling you prescriptions, so they are biased and usually push medications you might not really need or want. (Which again emphasizes the importance of self-education and doing your own research).
For drugs like GLP-1's, there are a whole lot of anecdotal benefits outside of weight loss. The problem with the drug industry is once a drug is approved for its most profitable use case, drug makers don't bother to pursue additional FDA approvals for additional indications because the headache isn't worth the (marginal) extra revenue.
I very much wish there were a category of doctors specializing in treating healthy people looking to optimize their health further.
Every person has a limit of how much time and energy they can put into exercise. If they can go beyond that with a pill (with no other cost), why wouldn't you want everyone to take it?
One of many, looking at just one detail (sitting): https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/sitting-may-i...
From a personal experience, so it's just a guess, a contributor may be fluid movement in the body. Fluid in blood vessels are pumped directly, but must fluid is not in blood vessels. The heart has a diminishing effect outside the vessels (capillaries have small holes to let water and small molecules through into extracellular space, and then to collect it back, rest goes through the lymphatic system which also drains back into the bloodstream). Muscle and body movement helps. From what I experienced and experimented, just walking did a lot more than running. I focus on this specifically due to personal health experiences that I don't want to go into that let me feel a clear difference, where intensive running did hardly anything but then just walking did, an experiment I performed during a period of my life when "getting stuff out from all over my body" mattered.
Personally, I choose to run only when my brain/body tell me to, when I feel like it. Definitely not when I would have to fight myself to get going. (If your body/brain tells you the opposite then it is what it is, personal feel over generic advice)
5mg daily tadalafil is fine for me though and that‘s also the normal daily dosage.
TL;DR you're always getting some ionizing radiation, how much matters.
Are you sure about that? 6200 mSv is 6.2 Sv, which I understand to be near-universally deadly. That dosage would be profoundly incompatible with the news that the worker was being sent offsite to seek non-emergency medical attention.
Poking around, it looks like "counts per minute" have to get converted to a dosage using an instrument-specific formula. I CBA to go find that formula, but you're quite welcome to.
Would you provide a link to the source of this average instrument specific rate?
I'm interested in knowing which instruments designed to detect low-to-medium-level radiation sources on a human are configured so that five detections per second would equate to a "You're fucking dead; there's really no hope for you" dose.
(Did you ask an LLM to "convert counts per minute to mSv" and fail to sanity-check the confident-sounding result it gave you?)
> ...everything emits...
Given that the crust and sea and air of this planet are chock full of radioactives, and that every living thing on the planet builds itself out of that material, that goes without saying.
PS 300 CPM is nothing. There are places where people live where the natural background radiation is higher than that. Also, background radiation is mostly Gamma rays which is more dangerous than what comes off of fission products or nuclear fuel.
That depends on the instrument. It's an instrument-specific rate. I'd say that saying "300 CPM is nothing" absent any information other than the CPM is foolish.
As I indicated earlier, given all of the other context we have, we can reasonably suppose that 300 CPM from whichever instrument was used in this incident is nothing to be concerned about.
There are 4 types of ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, gamma/x-rays and neutron flux. Each one has a different rate it is blocked by different materials (water, air, etc). Each one has a different risk to people. You have to compute counts per unit time emitted from a point source for each of the different types of radiation. Then you have to compute the amount of "arc" the person is in. Then you have counts being absorbed and you next multiply each count by a fixed factor depending on the type of radiation. This final number gives you total Greys per unit time, then you then have to divide by the mass of the person. Then you multiple that number by the total amount of time and that gives you total Greys absorbed. That's the number you use to assess risk to the person. For reference, this guy probably got less than 1 Grey. Someone getting radiation treatment for cancer might get 75 Greys.
So please stop trying to calculate this stuff yourself. I'm pretty sure you are doing it wrong. This guy will be fine.
PS Sieverts are a physical measure, Greys are a measure of biological "harm".
The US's NRC disagrees with you. From [0], they say this about the sievert and rem:
and have this to say about the gray: Grays seem to be "amount of radiation absorbed per kg". Looking further, the "Measuring Radiation" page at [1] directly contradicts your claim. Speaking about rems and Svs, it says: I'm definitely not an expert, but the NRC is pretty official, and their explanations sound pretty clear to me. Is what they're saying here incorrect?> 6.2Sv in a single year is probably less than average for a human from background radiation.
Are you sure about that? <https://xkcd.com/radiation/> claims 4 mSv per year as normal radiation dosage, and 50 mSv per year as maximum permitted annual dosage for "US radiation workers", whatever that means.
I think you're off by a factor of a thousand for the typical exposure level and off by a factor of a hundred for the exposure level where they stop letting you work near the radioactives for a year.
[0] <https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/full-text>
[1] <https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/measu...>
"Dose absorbed" is a physical measure of ionizing radiation that is directed at something. That's measured in rems or sieverts (or Grays, notice the spelling). "Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A). Both those measures combine the count rates for the 4 different types of radiation into 1 amount. "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person. Even more confusing there is a Gray (dose absorbed) and a Grey (biological impact of a dose absorbed, or dose equivalent); they are different.
The part about beta and gamma radiation is about establishing a baseline for converting between the two units but should never be used for calculating "dose equivalent" in practice. Its how we determine the value of 1 Grey. It isn't a way to convert from "dose equivalent" to "dose absorbed".
I'm trying to simplify this stuff for an audience without the necessary background information. Doing that requires me cutting out a bunch of details. The NRC text on the other hand is technically precise but also is mentioning a lot of things that are true but confusing or only useful for calibrating instruments. They are also explaining one tiny part of this and you left out the parts where they talk about how to combine the different counts for each type of radiation into one measurement. That's something else I'm also trying to explain at the same time. So I'm covering more ground and trying to do so with simpler terms. That's going to mean you can cherry pick stuff but doing that will to give you the wrong impression.
Natural background radiation varies by location on earth by a factor of 300. That 4 mSv per year is for natural background radiation at the low end of the scale which happens at sea level in places without Uranium or Thorium deposits. However, there are places where people live (and have lived for 1000s of years) where the natural background radiation is 300x that amount or about 1.2Sv/year. There is no observed increase in cancer rates in those locations despite decades of study. I'm also assuming that the "normal person" will take a flight or two and potentially be near other sources of radiation without knowing it (like your smoke detector).
PS The 50 mSv/year number is absurdly low. Its one of the main complaints about how the NRC handles nuclear radiation. Its literally lower than the natural background radiation at sites in India and Brazil.
Neither the NRC nor the EPA nor the NIH nor the NRC seems to know about the "Grey". Everyone in the US seems to know about the "Gray" (abbreviated as "Gy"), which is used to measure dose and doesn't factor in biological harm.
What country uses the "Grey" unit? What's the abbreviation of the "Grey" unit? Would you point to credible sources for the answers to those two questions?
> "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person.
Yes. That's biological harm. Getting hit on the skin from outside your body with a large amount of alpha radiation is far less harmful than getting hit with the same amount of gamma radiation. AFAICT, "dose equivalent" is measured in Sv or rems.
If you can demonstrate a credible source for the "Grey" unit, then I can dismiss this as a time-wasting misunderstanding, but I've yet to see any reference to a "Grey" unit of radiation exposure.
> Its literally lower than the natural background radiation [at some places on earth]...
Yep. ALARA is a scourge. And I -too- have read Admiral Whatshisface's open letter from the 1980's or 1990's or whenever about how the regulation of the civilian nuclear energy program is batshit nuts by way of being negligently overcautious.
They will still try to decontaminate you of any radioactive materials they can scrub off as a matter of course, but 300 counts per minute, while noticeably higher than background radiation levels, is pretty benign in the grand scheme of things. The fact that you can still count individual radioactive emissions is incredibly good news compared to how bad things could be.
Especially since the reactor will have been shutdown for some time by definition, if the reactor cavity is open enough to fall into. Hopefully the low rate of radioactivity evidenced by the counts on the person's hair is matched by the level of radioactivity in the water.
And on that note, medical attention would also be provided as a matter of course after a fall like this, but it seems to me that the physical injury of falling some distance and possibly hitting metal on the way down is going to be more of a danger than the radiation, especially compared to the sources of radiation people naturally run into (especially cigarette smoke, whether primary or secondhand).
Or to put it another way, 300 CPM (which is a rate) is less than how much radiation you get when on a flight, or how much radiation you get at higher elevations. Even giving a simple explanation of how to calculate Greys (the actual measure you are looking for) takes up the better part of a page. Hell, your bones are radioactive. Yet there are plenty of people posting that somehow the risk to this guy is radioactivity. In reality, his biggest problem is probably going to be finding a new job.
For his job, depends on the dose he took. In my country he would have been on benefits until the dose was calculated, then if possible, reintegrated in the team, or directed towards a new job if not (paid formation and everything). I've studied with a diver who couldn't work with radioactive trash anymore, he wasn't meant to be a SWE in the end, he now dive for unexploded WW2 stuff in the north sea/Baltic I think
This sort of place is safe enough to bring your kid into without significant precautions (I got to do this as a kid—it was really cool). The biggest risk by far is drowning.
Relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
0) If you've not read this chart, do carefully read it: <https://xkcd.com/radiation/>. If you've read it before, take some time to carefully re-read it.
1) The guy's getting sent off to seek non-emergency medical attention. I bet you an entire American Nickle that that attention is almost entirely for injuries sustained in the fall, rather than for radiation exposure.
The NRC would make you attend training and get decontaminated if you had to cross a street if they operated the roads.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
347 more comments available on Hacker News