Slashdot Mirror
Report Blames NRC For VT Yankee Leak
mdsolar writes "A new report from a nuclear watchdog group finds that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 'is ignoring its oversight and enforcement responsibilities at the nation's increasingly leaky, uninspected and unmaintained nuclear power plants.' Because of this lack of oversight, 'at least 102 reactor units are now documented to have had recurring radioactive leaks into groundwater from 1963 through February 2009.' So, the leak at Vermont Yankee that Slashdot has been following is not just a fluke, but is systemic."
"Working for a world free of nuclear power..." right in their masthead.
So far nobody has died because of the nuclear industry's negligence. What we need is a probe of our coal industry, and expansion of the comparably clean nuclear engery, with research into minimizing and recycling nuclear waste for fuel.
Numberous aviation accidents between the years 1905 and 2009 may indicate the FAA is not doing it's job, either.
I couldn't tell the difference between that and Budweiser.
Oh look, another sensationalist anti-nuclear article submitted by mdsolar.
Nice try mdsolar. Maybe the mods are too stupid to realize you submit every story with a noted bias against nuclear plants but I'm not. All the other stories about the leak are submitted by this guy.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I used to think nuclear reactors were strictly regulated. Then I wondered why all the plants in my yard grew larger than normal. Considering I can see the coolant steam from my street, I guess now I can just assume the stereotype. After all, it's a navy training reactor, so why can't I assume?
at least 102 reactor units
You guys have that many? Good on ya!
mdsolar and kdawson? Quickly separate them! Before they become unstoppable and destroy us with bias, crap and FUD!
The NRC’s regulations focus on systems necessary to safely operate the plant or safely shut it down in case of an emergency. These safety systems’ buried piping is subject to inspection and testing requirements laid out in agency regulations and standards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. These standards call for regular flow testing and other surveillance for buried safety-related pipes, and NRC reviews have confirmed nuclear plants perform these tests several times every year.
NRC page on tritium http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/tritium-radiation-fs.html. Even the levels at so called "contaminated wells", assuming you drink from it every day for a year, are negligible compared to other sources of background radiation and even potassium in your body.
There are two links in the original article that supposedly point to PDFs of the list of events. Both links are returning Page Not Found.
Vermont Yankee is responsible for their own screwups.
There is no difference.
On balance nuclear power is one of the safest forms of electricity production we have. Do the math on coal's emissions of radioactivity and it is many times that of nuclear, even with a few leaks. Do the math on the environmental destruction which would be caused by massive roll outs of solar and wind and all the power lines running over the countryside and nuclear's footprint looks like the greenest of all technologies. Nuclear power is the only mature technology that can save us by producing a sizable portion of our energy needs at reasonable costs and without massive destruction of our environment that wind and solar would.
Just look at the environmental effects of hydro power, once praised as power without pollution now environmentalists want to take down damns whenever they can so that the fish can swim and the natural cycles can resume. Nuclear can sit on a few dozen acres of land and provide all the electricity needs of a major city.
If Vermonters don't want nuclear, I think it is their right. And maybe Vermont is small, quaint and rich enough to be able to get away with importing its energy.
I couldn't tell the difference between that and Budweiser.
Frosty piss tastes better.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this... for instance:
at least 102 reactor units are now documented to have had recurring radioactive leaks into groundwater from 1963 through February 2009.
(which is a broken link from the linked article/page)
So the NRC is a 50 year epic fail? That leaks are increasing? Increasing... post-Regan/post-90's/post-40-year-old-reactors? No implied pattern? Caused by what... maintenance failures? Expected wear? Unexpected wear? Lack of oversight?
Sorry, I just tend to take a somewhat guarded view to statements that amount to, "It's all f*cked up!" and not much more.
Think about it - background radiation is always supposed to be higher than a properly shielded radiation source.
You've been conned by a divide by zero error.
First, the quote, "Numerous incidents of unplanned releases of radioactivity have been reported to the NRC within the past few months." "These incidents of leaks, overflows and spills have resulted in contamination of areas outside of plant buildings. " is not actually in the article but rather it is in the link from the NRC in 1979 about responding to the leaks. The article then goes on the say "the NRC is capitulating to an industry decision to take almost three more years before announcing an action plan" but the link supporting this is broken, so I can't evaluate it. The next two paragraphs have no links or citations, just general accusations. The next paragraph seems to be supplying substantive information about tritium leaks, but both of the supporting links are broken, so again, I can't evaluate them. I downloaded the full report but just wasn't interested in reading 50 pages of stuff after trying to evaluate these few paragraphs.
Don't let him drag you down with the bullshit - people have been raving about nuclear material coming out of the stacks for 40 years but nobody has been able to find anything yet despite it only being a matter of setting up an absorbion spectrometer to look at the flue gas.
The whole misdirection to coal thing is a trick and a waste of time anyway. We don't want dangerous power plants of any kind when we can have well regulated ones.
Nuclear has to keep it's promises and argue on it's own merits. This sort of argument of "Billy hit Sally and got away with it so why are you picking on me?" should have been left in the playground instead of being taken up by ill-informed adults.
It's not just established energy sources such as coal that an experimental technology such as nuclear has to compete against, it's also all of the other alternative energies.
There are a few dead nuclear workers in France for one that disrupt your little fantasy.
Nuclear works - but there's no point of all this bullshit pretending it's clean, a solved problem and we don't have to be careful about safety when it's a dangerous, dirty process just like a lot of other things we use. The fluffy, clean, runs off magic beans without farting bullshit is counterproductive and has certainly held up research into waste management and better reactor designs in the USA. It's about 20 years behind South Africa, India and China in safe reactor design and 30 years behind Australia in waste management.
I thought this story was going to be about the National Republican Committee, Virgina Tech and baseball.
I seem to notice that there is a lot of FUD and misinformation out there (not just from mdsolar and Beyond Nuclear) regarding nuclear power. This is helped in part because of ignorance by the general public. It's important to understand that there is a wide range of radioactive sources. Most of them are naturally occurring, or occur is such small amounts that they present no health hazard.
Radiation exposure is usually measured in Rem (or mRem). Let's take a look at some common activities and see how they compare.
One chest X ray (8 mRem)
One mammogram (70 mRem)
One X ray of the abdomen (300 mRem)
One renal nuclear medicine procedure (310 mRem)
One CT head scan (3000 mRem)
CAT scan of whole body (5000 mRem)
As you can see, there is a wide variance of radiation sources. Most people in the US receive approximately 300 mRem / year from natural background radiation sources (primarily from radon and sun exposure.) So, how much radiation exposure do you need to cause bodily damage?
There is no agreed-upon level which is considered "safe", however there is relatively clear agreement on thresholds where radiation has noticeable effects on the human body. (NOTE: These are listed in Rem, not mRem)
Changes in blood chemistry (5-10 Rem)
Nausea (50 Rem)
Fatigue (55 Rem)
Vomiting (70 Rem)
Hair loss (75 Rem)
Diarrhea (90 Rem)
Hemorrhage (100 Rem)
Possible death (400 Rem)
Death within 1-2 weeks (1000 Rem)
Damage to central nervous system (2000 Rem)
Death within days (2000 Rem)
But what about cancer? The risk for cancer can be increased by radiation exposure, which resulted in increased mutation rates of cell growth. The EPA estimates that in a group of 10,000 people 2,000 of them will die from cancer. If each person received 1 Rem (not mRem) of non-natural ionizing radiation exposure accumulated over their lifetime, 2,006 people would die from cancer.
So, now that we have an idea of just how bad different levels of radiation exposure are, what about these tritium leaks that have got certain people so upset? The highest reading that these monitoring wells have read was 2.45 microcuries / liter. This translates into roughly 425 mRem / year (assuming it was not diluted). 425 mRem is substantially higher than the current NRC limits, but still much too low to present a health hazard.
When people hear words like "nuclear reactor piping leak" they naturally assume that high-level radioactive particulates are getting out to the environment. The fact is that the incident at Vermont Yankee represents a very small health hazard to the public.
Government regulation: BAD!
Lack of government regulation: BAD!
What the fuck, slashdot? Make up your minds already.
On top of all this, most plants are not designed to contain tritium, and those that can contain it must somehow transfer it to another containment vessel.
Kriston
Jesus H. Christ! How many times do I have to tell you! It's clean, not dirty! It's the cleanest of them all! Cleaner than coal! Cleaner than gas! Cleaner than oil! Cleaner than those stupid degenerate bisexual latte-drinking atheistic hippie socialist wind generators! Get it through your god-damned head already!
Canadian nuclear plants emit 40 times more tritium every day when functioning normally than the Vermont Yankee leak emitted in a year:
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-much-tritium-leaked-from-vermont.html
A 1 GW(e) natural gas turbine will emit about 9 curies/year,* which is 20 times the rate of radiation from the VT Yankee leak at its highest.
Oh, and natural gas "fracking" produces toxic and radioactive wastewater. This article from last summer discusses EPA tests that found nasties from the fracturing fluid in domestic well water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemicals-found-in-drinking-water-from-natural-gas-drilling
New York State is doing fracking in something called Marcellus shale. This article from last fall says that surface wastewater from these sites was found to contain Ra-226 in concentrations "thousands of times" the limit for drinking water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=marcellus-shale-natural-gas-drilling-radioactive-wastewater
This page
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/oilandgas.html
says, "more than 18 billion barrels of waste fluids from oil and gas production are generated annually in the United States".
-Carl
* Radioactivity of fossil gas. This abstract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/3/259.abstract
gives 200 Bq/m^3. It doesn't say where they measured, but given context of the paper I'll assume it was at the consumer end of the line, at STP. I don't know if gas used at electrical plants is any fresher, but I'll assume it's no more stale. Pure methane has an energy content of 55.5 kJ/g and a density of 667 g/m^3, or about 5 Wh(e)/L from a 50%-efficient combined-cycle plant. So about 40Bq/Wh, or 1 nanoCurie per Wh, or 9 Curies/GW-yr.
Since the NRC hasn't allowed any new plants to be built for 40 years (all the plants in operation now are based on 1960's designs), we've been stuck extending the life of our first generation commercial plants - well beyond the original design life of them, instead of building safer, more efficient plants as we learn and develop new technologies (like the ESBWR)
And this is why we actually need effective government.
There is something seriously wrong when a report can be written with a straight face that blames somebody other than the perpetrators for the problems they cause.
"You didn't make me stop" isn't a valid excuse for dumping waste, nor for ignoring existing LAWS.
Corporations need to grow up and have some personal responsibility, in a similar manner that Libertarians and Free Market Captialists, Randians, et at have been beating everyone over the head with personal responsbility.
Well, I believe in both. Unless all these nuclear reactors are in Government hands, shouldn't those Companies be Responsible? Nah, better to just blame the government, that way you don't have to do anything.
Regards.
not. T'ain't mdsolar who wrote that you dumbfuck, empty-headed, ass-licking, inarticulate little right-wing clown-turd.
Yes, coal is much dirtier than nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power is inevitably going to have to be part of our power generation portfolio for the foreseeable future (probably a fairly significant part). But you can't wave away the real issues involving nuclear power by saying "but but but... coal is worse!" Nuclear energy is safe when we make it safe - by putting a lot of time, expense, and effort into safety systems and processes. If/when we let safety systems degrade, we neglect to train in safety procedures, and we fail to conduct proper oversight of nuclear plant operations... then it won't be clean and safe anymore. And pretending otherwise is counterproductive... which is the point that the GP is trying to make.
Each new plant is different and increases our knowledge in the area - it is actually a good thing because we get improvements. Care to find a dictionary now?
That is one reason why nuclear advocates will never ever give you any sort of result for a single operating plant and instead give you a rubbery figure for the benefits of nuclear power in general. The figures are never going to look so good for periods when tests are being performed on the plants early in their lifetimes so it's not really a fair test against established designs of other technologies.
The exceptions are things like the tried and tested CANDU reactors popular in developing nations but they are an old design that does not perform well in terms of power output. Want some plutonium for your developing nation's weapons program? CANDU!
On the other side of things there are the small reactors developed from submarine technology, pebble bed (full sized prototypes in China now) and India's accelerated Thorium breeder that can even use expired weapons material. It doesn't make sense to rebuild a 1970s plant and slap a coat of green paint on it, plus those 1970s plants were each a unique experiment in search of a better design.
Really, the recommendations are basically what slashdotters have been writing regarding VT Yankee. It just turns out that the problem is very wide spread. http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/documents/LeakFirstFixLater_ExecutiveSummary_April2010.pdf
1. Regulatory oversight, authority and enforcement must be strengthened;
2. Buried pipes must be promptly replaced so that systems carrying radioactive effluent can be inspected, monitored, maintained and contained in the event of a leak;
3. The nuclear industry must be held accountable for radioactive releases to air, water and soil;
4. There must be more public transparency describing the source, cause and extent of radioactive releases from nuclear power plants; and
5. Radiation protection standards must be strengthened and applied consistently nationwide.
How may fission products does coal ash contain? None, since the coal was not exposed during above ground nuclear tests. How about nuclear waste? That is what it is. Fission products. Those are dangerous. Not the uranium in coal ash.
So there is tritium in coal now? Is that from spontaneous three body fission of uranium then? Not even close on this one....
The NRC's treatment of tritium is especially sad in this regard. They assume, in their assessment, that tritium remains bound in water. But, if that water irrigates crops, it will be bound is sugars and starches. When consumed, it will remain in the body for a much longer time increasing the dose. It seems to me that the NRC ignores basic biology when it claims tritium is benign. Ignoring science is a problem especially when government regulators do so to be propagandists for the regulated industry.