MPR: Working Nights

Working Nights
Part 4

SOUND: Supervisor giving instructions (fade under)

For thirty years, the Connecticut Yankee atomic power plant split atoms so that lights and factories could glow throughout the night. In the main control room, shift supervisor John Piontkowski briefs his crew on what to expect in the coming eight hours, which isn't much.

Tape: we have no new tech specs, no new fire watches and nothing on the work schedule…(fades under and holds).

The power company shut down this plant in 1996 after 30 years of service. The cold reactor looms on a bank of the Connecticut River about an hour south of Hartford. By law, a full operating crew must be on duty while the plant is slowly decommissioned.

Piontkowski: First off, we're just monitoring the spent fuel, all the fuel that's been taken out of the reactor plus all the fuel from previous cycles of running, is in a pool being cooled.
Smith: To put it in blunt terms you're staring at a pool of…
Piontkowski: ..water.
Smith: That's really boring.
Piontkowski: That's boring. Real boring.

Tedium makes staying awake all night even more difficult for these highly trained technicians. But they've also got a new ally in a set of new, specially-designed overhead lights that can actually shift their circadian clocks. Based on technology patented by Harvard, the lights help push the body's natural 2 - 6 a.m. low-point well into the later morning hours. That makes it easier to stay alert on the job and to sleep at home.

Piontkowski: Before the lighting it was like: I'm on midnight, I'm in my cave, leave me alone. When midnights are done, then we'll talk again.
Dick Willis: Between three and six you hit what we call the bone zone. You have to get up, walk around, drink lots of coffee. And hopefully at a nuclear power plant, it stays boring, so it's hard to stay awake.
Jim Borowitz: Every time we're on midnights you always have the same conversations. How do you sleep. Do you sleep when you first go home? Do you sleep when…and you're always talking, like: "Aw, I slept lousy today, I woke up every two hours." Always the same conversations. And once the lights came in, you noticed those conversations didn't happen.
Willis: I love the lights. I've been here at CY 22 years and this is the first thing I've ever found that helped me on midnights.
Piontkowski: I find I sleep a deeper sleep, I'm able to sleep a longer period of time, and if I'm interrupted with a phone call or anything during that sleep I'm able to get right back to sleep.

The trick to these lights are their intensity; ten times brighter than average office illumination. They're still dim compared to an overcast day outside ,but bright enough to affect the circadian pacemaker. The lights are designed by Boston-based Shiftwork systems. Company president Ted Baker says knowing how to use light correctly, almost like a medicine, is the next stage in a revolution that started a century ago.

Baker: When Edison lit up that first grid in Manhattan, the Edison Electric Company, he really opened a whole new world which allowed continuous operation. Unfortunately, the light was not bright enough in most industrial settings and still is not bright enough in most industrial settings to even come close to having this necessary circadian shifting effect.
Smith: Because no one was thinking about the necessary circadian shifting effect.
Baker: Nobody was thinking. Light was viewed as a means to see things only. We put in enough light to read the page that's on our desk or put in enough light to see the gauges on the control panel but we don't go much above that.

Studies show that most night workers never get enough sleep during the day because the internal clock is screaming at them to wake up. The average night shift worker loses a full eight hours of sleep over a week. But bright light systems cost upward of a hundred thousand dollars, so it'll be some time before they get installed in a typical factory or all-night convenience store. And bright lights wouldn't do much good in a police cruiser or the engine of a freight train. So researchers are looking for other solutions.

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