The water is borated and heavily purified. You don’t want stuff growing inside, but at the same time you don’t want to have chlorinated water slowly corroding the metal components.

Chlorinating the water would have adverse effects on material strength and longevity. Even irradiated and heated to 50c, I’ll bet there’s some extremophile bacteria in there somewhere.

That makes zero sense. Radiation is not a component of water; it is literally photons[0]. In the nanosecond after you fill the glass, all the radiation in it has left the volume.

I'd drink it. It's just extremely pure water, with a nuclear flashlight at the bottom of the pool - which no one could see, even if they had gamma-ray glasses on[1], because the water attenuates it so much.

[0] Or ions of hydrogen or helium, in the case of alpha and beta radiation.

[1] Which it turns out were way less cool than the Sea Monkeys(tm).

Fair enough - although this engineer didn't stand much to gain by impressing a bunch of 10 year olds.

Reactor h2o itself does not carry radiation, but any extra molecules in tend to do it, thats the reason why the water is as clean you can get, over-distilled. This by itself means that it is not potable (btw for disposal to environment it gets re-salinated), so they told the story of professor drinking it must be an urban myth. It is bad even for skin expose (swimming in it), but hopefully that worker got just a few seconds expose and is well. Source: training trip in a nuclear center.

The main risk is getting into a car accident as you outrun the cops down the freeway on your way to the reactor.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted.

See https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

“But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

> People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.

Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).

hell, I inhaled at least a tablespoon of banana daquiri just reading this. almost ruined my breakfast

Not only that, but CPM (Counts per min) is measurement device specific. Using a very sensitive pancake probe will generate much higher CPM than a geiger tube from the same source. You have to look at calibrated units (usV/hr for example). Of course uSv has it own problems given the exposure model.. but better than CPM!

CPM isn't a actual measure without the service in question being specified.

Nah, just take out the minerals

> "...we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly."

There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sai... ("7 Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court" (2018))

E.g.,

"He was issued iodine tablets—which are used to block radioactive iodine, a common byproduct of uranium fission, from being absorbed by the thyroid gland—and fitted for an NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit. He was also told not to drink water from the ship’s desalination system. [...] Torres, the senior petty officer, recounted, “One of the scariest things I’ve heard in my career was when the commanding officer came over the loudspeaker, and she said, ‘We’ve detected high levels of radiation in the drinking water; I’m securing all the water.’” That included making showers off limits."

Reminds me of the "your keyboard is dirtier than your asshole" and similar 'myths' that no one would bother to verify.

I mean I would rather lick a keyboard than a butthole (with exceptions of course)

Oh really? Huh, very interesting, thanks.

My experience so far has been that when people say "full stop", it usually makes a lot of sense to fact-check further what they said. In this case the notice says his hair is 300 counts per minute after decontamination. The typical background is under 100.

Here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”