The Fermi Chronicles - Part 2: A week of training

In anticipation of teaching the first nuclear engineering course at Oakland University in the fall semester of 2010, I am spending my summer at the Fermi 2 nuclear facility learning anything and everything I can. Experiential knowledge is simply invaluable in engineering courses.

At the very beginning of the experience, we had to go through training. A whole week worth of training. Every day, all day. Background checks, fingerprints, the whole security thing (the guy with the rubber glove was surprisingly gentle! - kidding) while we trained. I wasn't the biggest fan of a 600-question psychological evaluation either, but do see the necessity of it. The training had one primary goal - safety. It appeared that everyone had to go through the training, even truck drivers that were going to simply haul cargo in and out of the facility. There are specific procedures for everything.

The training courses that we took were primarily online. So I would sit in front of a computer all day looking through slide after slide and then taking tests. It was quite mind-numbing after a few days of this. We had to get trained on radiation basics that culminated in us donning radiation garb and entering a mock-up of a work area where we were challenged with scenarios that we had to critique on paper. Proper dressing and clothing removal to avoid contamination were a must. Radiation detection is done with sensors on the body and through bigger, more sensitive frisk tools and whole-body units as you go into and come out of certain areas.

I should note, however, that workers at Fermi 2 are exposed to less radiation each year than the general population at large. The major radiation types are alpha, beta, gamma and neutron radiation, and I will talk about these in more detail in the next installment.