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Tritium Leak At Vermont Nuclear Plant Grows
mdsolar writes "The tritium leak into ground water at Vermont Yankee has now tested at 775,000 picocuries per liter, 37 times higher than the federal drinking water standard. 'Despite the much higher reading, an NRC spokeswoman said Thursday there was nothing to fear. "There's not currently, nor is there likely to be, an impact on public health or safety or the environment," the NRC's Diane Screnci said in an interview. She had maintained previously that the Environmental Protection Agency drinking water safety limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter had an abundance of caution built into it. ... The National Academy of Sciences said in 2005 that any exposure to ionizing radiation from an isotope like tritium elevates the risk of cancer, though it also said with small exposures, the risk would be low. ' At what level should the NRC shut down the troubled plant?"
Way to shoot yourself in the foot. Why aren't those leaks taken care of fast, whether they are or aren't actually dangerous? We've had enough issues with fear of nuclear power, no need to let such stories grow out of proportions. Otherwise, we'll never see the US convert to nuclear power instead of gas and coal.
Can't we just say 2.7 microcuries now?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
We have a limit, apparently, but of course we do not act in case we go over it.
Is the limit still a limit in that case?
As true Americans who cherish tradition, we should always take our raioactive elements in the traditional way. First mine it with coal, then burn it in a furnace, disperse it through smoke and then ingest it via the lungs. That is the American way. One second before you mod me down as a Luddite, remember I do support modern innovations, like mountain top removal and long wall mining.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I suppose when this sort of thing happens you'll be ok with taxpayers paying the clean-up costs ?
I think nuclear is something we're going to have to use, but I am _extremely_ worried it's going to be another privatize the gains and socialize the losses deal.
Absolute statements are never true
The water they're testing is, by federal limits, not drinkable. That said, the water they're testing is not drinking water. If this stuff was getting anywhere that humans were going to drink it, that would be a very serious problem...but they're saying that doesn't seem likely. So no, they're not ignoring the limits. They should act quickly, yes, but still.
Far-Right:
There's nothing to see here, it's just those damn liberals and their whining about nuclear power. It's all perfectly safe, there's absolutely no problems whats-so-ever with this plant or any other plant. A possible indicator of other problems around the country? Pshaw.. more liberal clap-trap. We can fix all our power problems with just building a lot of nuclear plants. Waste schmaste.
Far-Left:
This is just PROOF that the nuclear power industry are all a bunch of bastard weasels. We ought to shut the whole shootin-match down for good. We can get all of our power from wind and solar anyway. 37 times the standard! I bet the standard is set too high anyway! These plants are all rotting from neglect, and there's probably a ton they're not telling us! I recently saw The China Syndrome and Silkwood, and let me tell you that's all just the tip of the iceberg! Chernobyl!
I'm just really sick of the nonsense on both sides. They both insulate themselves from the other and don't want to hear any real truths from "the other side". The whole nuclear power issue is 90% a "side of the room argument" where nobody wants to be associated with an idea from "the other side". This is what needs to stop to make any progress on the whole issue.
AccountKiller
I'm not sure if you're joking, but a gigabyte is only 1000 megabytes. You're only lying to yourself if you think otherwise.
You said yourself that most of the currently operating plants in the US are ancient (by nuclear power standards). Newer tech and newer plants would be many times safer and less likely to leak. Replacing the old plants with new ones, or simply building new ones nearby and shutting the old ones down as soon as possible would be a good choice, but many people point to the old plants as examples (as you're doing) without regard for the fact that a new, re-engineered plant wouldn't have any of the problems the 30-year-old ones are having. And in 30 years, I'm sure we'll have the capacity to build even more and better plants, or improve the ones we have so that they will last. The problem is getting past the folks who think that an old standard is the only standard.
...because tritium's really expensive to make and they're wasting it.
A few years back I bought a bunch of glow-in-the-dark keyrings as stocking fillers for my family. These are little tubes containing tritium. The tritium produces very low energy beta particles, which excite phosphor on the inside of the tube, which cause them to glow. They have a half-life of 12 years, which in effect means that they glow usefully for about five or six years before they need replacing. (I should probably get them new ones.)
Let me repeat that: it's a little glowing thing that will glow for six years, continuously. They don't need recharging, they don't need their batteries changed, they don't need exposure to sunlight. They're fantastic for safety-critical things like exit signs. My father sails, and he has his tied to the end of the emergency torch on his boat --- it means that if he needs it in a hurry in the dark, he can find it. I know a nurse who uses them to find things in bags of equipment. They're really handy.
Naturally, they're banned in the US, because they're atomic.
(Tritium, being hydrogen and really hard to contain, will slowly diffuse out through the walls of the glass tube and into the environment. However there's a tiny, tiny amount of the stuff, and the radioactivity they emit is so weak it won't penetrate six millimetres of air, let alone anything solid. I suppose it is possible to absorb the stuff into the body --- we are largely made of hydrogen, after all --- but the low energies, short half-life and tiny quantities means that you're probably more likely to get radiation damage from Bikini Atoll than your tritium keyring.)
Incidentally, did you know that after the Chalk River reactor in Canada was shut down in 2009 due to overreaction, there is now a worldwide shortage of medical isotopes? There are only five reactors worldwide, sorry, four now, that produce the stuff. I wonder how many people that shutdown has killed?
Mod parent up, this is probably the most insightful comment in the thread. Using the tritium as a proxy for scarier things is a great point.
The amount of tritium they are seeing at this point really isn't a cause for alarm. Microcuries would be worrying, sub-nanocurie quantities in an onsite survey well, not so much. Continually drinking this much in your water could be a problem (hard to say), but if this is a transient problem that gets fixed quickly, what little is onsite will dilute out to irrelevant when it hits the greater water table. At this point public fear of the tritium will likely do more measurable harm than the actual tritium. I'm pretty sure they will evenutally detect it in the water table, but at levels below the limit. There is more significant pollution in a lot of drinking water systems than this, eg. downwind of older coal plants.
I don't think they need to shut down the plant or fine them or do anything alarmist. However, the plant operators now know undeniably there IS a problem and they need to diagnose and fix it, before it gets worse and it becomes a real problem. Leaks tend to change non-linearly,they should consider tehmselves lucky to get a warning when it is slow and get it fixed pronto. IF they wait, and it gets worse, or even stays the same for more than a few years, they are going to have a massive legal fight. Probably on the legal costs to bankruptcy kind of scale. Willfully ignoring the problem will bite them hard in a few years.
-sk
For the love of god, tritium decays by beta particle emission. Why the boy-who-cried-wolf nuclear panic over a beta emitter?
every _exit() is the same, but every clone() is different.
Maybe they're just waiting for the radioactivity to reach a high enough level that it will give them super-powers. Then they can deal with this and many other injustices in the world...
In the context of storage, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes.
In the context of networking, a gigabit is 1000 megabits.
In the context of physics, a giga-something is 1,000,000,000-something. Physics doesn't measure gravity in bits or bytes.
Next up in words that have different meanings in different jargons: Hacking
</troll>
DATABASE WOW WOW
It wasn't a PR guy. It was one of their chief engineers. And it was also their top executive for the plant. In sworn testimony. On several occassions. To both state regulators and state legislators. In a state where, when Entergy bought the plant, Entergy agreed contractually that the state legislature's approval would be required - unlike in any other state - for Entergy to renew the plant's license.
Also, Entergy plans to spin off this and several other plants into a new corportion that will carry billions in debt, and free Entergy from most future financial responsibility for any cleanup of the plant. There's a decommissioning fund, but since the stock market crashed it's way underfunded, and depends on some decades of extraordinary investment appreciation if it's to recover - which the NRC seems unconcerned about.
I'm pro-nuclear power. But Entergy hires chief engineers who are either incompetent or liars - or who've never reviewed a full schematic of their plant.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
That's the problem with nuclear. It's great on paper. Heck, on paper, it's way overbuilt and will undercut every fuel source on price. But it's been a magnet for "unforeseen complications". You've got a core being bombarded with a high neutron flux that weakens its structure, you have daughter products leeching out, you have products being bred from the neutron flux, etc. So your core and primary coolant loop is basically doing its best to damage itself. This then combines with the fact that a leak in the core or primary coolant loop is a Bad Thing(TM). Then you have the fact that you need (in order to be economical) to maintain a very high capacity factor (unlike, say, NG). This means you need to rush maintenance through. Then you have the fact that decommissioning cost estimates keep rising as we keep finding new expenses. The same thing happens with spent fuel. And bugs... in a conventional power plant, if something significant goes wrong, your plant shuts down and you have to fix it. The public never even hears about it In a nuclear power plant, if something significant goes wrong, your plant shuts down, you have to do a much bigger fix, you get a ton of bad press, you have to do an expensive cleanup operation, and if it's really bad, people get sick and/or die.
It's just a really tough situation to deal with. And even the most modern designs, like the CANDUs, keep having their own share of problems. It's the risk that's driving investment away, that's causing Moody's to downgrade nuclear power investments. Not so much direct, immediate health risks -- economic risk and liability risks. And don't underestimate the economic risks; even in the construction phase, nuclear power plant cost overruns have proven to be far too common.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!