Archive for March, 2009
Handheld Gas Detectors-which ones are best?
Handheld gas detectors are those portable gas detectors that can be held in your hand. These gas detectors include toxic gas detectors, oxygen meters , explosive gas meters (also known as lel meters, lel being the acronym for lower explosive limit) or PID meters used for workplace monitoring of VOCs and other compounds. This post is to get reader feedback about such instruments, which ones are best? Best technologies? Makes? User friendliness?
I must say that we have come a long way since the early 70s and even 80s, when many of these technologies were not developed and not as reliable as they are today. Workers and professionals working in process plants used to rely more on chemical tubes (also referred to as Drager tubes) and other methods to check for presence of toxic gases, or for workplace monitoring. Now the monitoring has become simpler for the end user with lost of competing technologies, sophisticated instruments and powerful data storage and handling capacities. Today’s handheld gas detectors can sense the gas/ vapor, store the readings over a 8 hour period and record & calculate values such as the Time Weighted Average. This was not possible with the earlier technologies. However these newer gas detection instruments require the users as well as the Instrumentation staff to be trained, as the performance of the instrument is highly dependent on the selection of the sensor or technology (like photoionization versus electrochemical for instance), calibration of the instrument and general maintenance and upkeep. My question to all of you is, do we have a winning model of a handheld gas detector that has excellent performance, is easy on today’s shrinking safety budgets, yet does an exemplary job of sniffing gases? If so, please name it and the reasons why.
You can use the comments form below.
Yet another fire at Japan’s Tokyo Electric Nuclear Power Plant!
These incidents really send a chill down my spine! Yet another fire has been reported at a Japanese nuclear power plant (TEPCO). This is reportedly the eighth such fire at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear station, since it was last shut by an earthquake sometime in the year 2007. Talk about consistency.
Regarding the earlier 2007 fire that was caused by an earthquake, it was scandalous- as the plant was not even designed for a magnitude 6.8 quake that hit it. Talk about robust designs! This quake triggered radiation leaks and a fire.This latest fire is now the eighth such fire after the 2007 earthquake incident.
This latest blaze happened when workers were doing some cleaning work on a pump. Reportedly there was no radiation leak, but a worker suffered burns on his face and had to be admitted to hospital. The fire was extinguished successfully.
This incident really brings to the fore one nagging issue that many of us as well as the general man on the street has-how safe are nuclear power plants? Do we really know? It is well known that Japan is an earthquake prone country, how come the design was not capable of withstanding a Richter 6.8 earthquake? And this is also supposed to be one of the world’s largest nuclear power plants! Wow!
Is any international nuclear watchdog monitoring these installations? (to the best of my knowledge-no, they are only running after plants that are suspected to produce weapons-never mind that a poorly designed plant can be worse than a well designed weapon, in the scale of mayhem that it can cause).
However people are waking up to the dangers. Al-Jazeera reports that “Civic groups opposing a restart of the generator submitted a petition with up to 600,000 signatures to Tepco last month, the company said.
Any comments on this issue are most welcome.
