The York Daily Record... Roughly 50 workers at Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station were exposed to low levels of radiation early Tuesday after a discharge of contaminated steam.
At 1 a.m. that morning, workers were loosening a two-inch vent on top of the Unit 2 reactor vessel head when a "puff" of radioactive steam escaped from a flange, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Radiation monitoring alarms sounded as workers, dressed in bright yellow radiation-protection suits, hurried to close the vent. In total, the length of the release lasted about 2 minutes.
The reactor is offline for a planned refueling outage. About 2,000 contracted or outage workers at the plant will spend the next several weeks completing maintenance work and replacing nearly one-third of the reactor's fuel.
Initially, 51 of the 138 workers stationed in the area of the Unit 2 reactor vessel early Tuesday didn't clear the plant's radiation monitors, meaning that they still registered a higher dose of contamination, Sheehan said.
After a change of clothes and a shower, seven of the 51 workers no longer triggered the monitors.
