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When you are in a radioactive area in the hot zone, you must de-contaminate yourself.
I’ve witnessed several times a nuke worker moving from a crapped up (radioactive) area to the grey area to remove the duct taped respirator, gloves, and Tyvek body suit only to take a hot shower to rinse off rather than a tepid one. Sounds innocuous enough, but a hot shower tends to dilate the pores in your skin where radioactive particles can hide.
If a radiation source was detected on you even after decontamination, they’d be sent back into the grey area for another shower, but this time with a wire brush. The wire brush was used to scrape the radioactive particles out of their flesh.
Some of these guys would emerge from decontamination with pretty bloody self-inflicted wire brush scrubbing injuries. They would brag about how much it didn’t hurt over a couple shots of Jack at the local dive showing off the scab(s) a week after the fact. The sign of a true macho man!
