After posting this morning that "chemists know how to use PPE" and then reading a separate thread about BSL-3 precautions, a memory came back out of nowhere.
I used to work at a national laboratory, in a nuclear laboratory. There was a certain lab that required full, head to toe PPE to enter, and then after you took it all off you had to use a dosimeter to scan yourself before leaving.
There would always be this subset of people who were in a hurry, or whatever, and didn't want to be "bothered" with the full precautions. If you forgot to do even the tiniest of things when you were in there it was a whole procedure to get back in and out again. Therefore, some people would occasionally try to sneak in and out. Inevitably then you'd see someone *else* see that, and think *they* could get away with it themselves.
Because of this, there would be safety officers running around with dosimeters trying to make sure that idiots didn't spread nuclear materials around. At the end of the day everyone would have to single-file walk though a huge portal-dosimeter and god forbid that thing went off, because then everyone would have to wait to see if they needed to be decontaminated, or their offices decontaminated, because some idiot wandered around with radioactive dust on their shoes or something.
Anyway, this is now forever a story about COVID in my mind, except the idiots got rid of the dosimeters so they could do whatever they wanted without thinking about it.
You would the think the people who know the most about how dangerous a thing is, would be the most concerned about doing things right.
@BE Such folks would read something like "An Epidemiological Study of Mortality and Radiation-Related Risk of Cancer Among Workers at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory" and say no big deal? Guess where my dad worked for about 1015 years. Guess what he died of.
@BE in high school we got a tour of Pickering or Darlington nuclear power station. I can’t remember which.
Well we sort of got a tour.
We hadn’t been on a tour long when someone came down the hallway in a panic and told the guide to get us out.
I remember having to stand on various sensors at each doorway, and then out through the whole body scanners where you put your arms in holes and pressed your body up against the sensor.
Later found out someone took and preive of equipment t down the hallway we were in without properly wrapping it up first.
@BE
Scenes of 'Silkwood' come to mind, esp. the sound of the dosimeter.
Wish we had a huge beeper for Covid.