Loading ...Besides economic shut downs and food disruptions from COVID it’s also affecting power plants. For those invested in these areas not to mention possible accidents.
Not just electric power but nuclear power.
The attack of the coronavirus has even altered the business of nuclear plants. U.S. nuclear plants “will be allowed to keep workers on longer shifts to deal with staffing problems in the coronavirus pandemic.”
Naturally, this is raising worries among watchdogs and people living near nuclear plants about employee exhaustion possibly causing accidents.
The nuclear industry is “scrambling to keep up mandatory staffing levels through what will be weeks or months more of the outbreak.” Extending shifts would allow workers to work up to 86 hours per week.
Nuclear plant workers are currently having their temperatures taken as they arrive for each shift, and employers are considering having workers live at plants full-time for a while, during this outbreak.
Federal inspectors on and off site would monitor employees to make sure the plants do not work any employees to the point of exhaustion, and if necessary, they could revoke the expanded shifts.
Expanded hours, say supporters of the idea, could reduce crew rotations and minimize exposure to the coronavirus.
However, fatigue has “often been deemed a factor in accidents at nuclear plants,” so this is definitely a concern.
In recent days, U.S. nuclear plants “are reporting some of the first coronavirus cases among their workers.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it would “consider on a plant-by-plant basis 60-day exemptions that would let plants keep workers on the job for up to 86 hours in a seven-day period.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group, however, says this solution to preventing COVID-19 in nuclear workers, by making them work 14 12-hour days in a row, is “untenable.”
Nuclear plants are also considering bringing back former plant operators, and perhaps “sequestering crews on site.”
If things get worse, sequestering crews “remained one of the options.”
That would probably not be much different from what some of the refineries do when strikes occur, the senior management starts working long shifts to keep the plants going.
We will wait and see what happens with the coronavirus, and we hope nuclear workers don’t get so tired, accidents occur.(Associated Press, Sunday, April 5, 2020.)