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?"

Comments

Re:Acceptable risks

[canajin56]

Man, sounds like you must not own a car. Way more than one in 100,000 people are killed by a car, every year! If you own one, you're basically a murderer. Tell the families of all those dead people that they aren't significant. Oh yeah, plus, bricks or granite emit way more radiation than the water in TFA. Go get a Geiger counter, you'll find that the radiation in TFA isn't IS insignificant compared to normal fluctuations in background radiation. You'll find that, if your counter is accurate enough to measure it out, you'll probably have hotspots that spike way hotter than the water in TFA, which I'll note is not drinking water, it was water sampled from near the plant to try and pinpoint the leak. Actual drinking water contamination is still well below the (highly conservative) safe limit. Plus, there are plenty of places that have naturally radioactive ground water that's way hotter than this, and not only do they not have higher rates of cancer...they have lower rates of cancer, and live longer. The "1 in 100,000" derrives from the linear, no-threshold model of radiation exposure. It says, expose rats to a shit load of radiation, look at their cancer rates. There, now you have two data points, background radiation and baseline rates, shitload of radiation and elevated rates. Bam, done, draw a line, and call it a day. It's quite wrong, and there is lots of evidence that halving the radiation drops the cancer rates by more than one half. And there certainly must be a threshold. Plenty of evidence that, even if high radiation elevation = more cancer, slightly heightened levels = no change / less. But scientists are incredibly terrified of ever saying so. When scientists make the observation that people fed food with 0 lithium always go insane, and places with higher lithium salt levels in their drinking water have substantially lower rates of suicide, Slashdot and the rest of the world exploded with RAGE at their "poor science": "Everybody knows that's medicine, high doses = dangerous, so all doses = dangerous, there's no such thing as safe limits of anything that's ever possibly bad at all ever!" and "OK so you're saying the government should medicate us all with powerful mood stabilizers? WAS THIS STUDY DONE IN GERMANAY????????????"

Re:Wow...

[tsm_sf]

No, it's usually when someone like this comes along. Your basic unstoppable force of nature.