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."

Comments

Coal

[FlyingBishop]

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.

Re:Coal

[dbIII]

Read right to the end of the comments on that article and track it back to it's source and you will see that it's poorly researched bullshit based on an Oak Ridge Labs newsletter article written by a guy more famous for his books on "southern humour". It's a beat-up based on the situation that most people have never heard of background radiation.
It was a very low moment for Scientific American.
In case people haven't noticed coal kills real people in real ways already without this imaginary bullshit. This stuff really comes from a failed 1970s PR effort that went along the lines of "coal pollutes, why can't we do the same?" and should have died off before most readers here were even born.
I was looking at which elements were in fly ash with backscatter in an electron microscope in the 1990s for a while and never saw enough of anything heavy that made it out of the noise - and now we get this bullshit about it all being radioactive. Think about it - if there's all this stuff why hasn't anyone been able to detect it coming out of the stack sine the 1970s, after all the spectrometer you'd need to find it was invented over a century ago?
There's an easy answer - you've been conned by slick PR.

Re:Coal

[dbIII]

uranium goes up the smokestack

Then some time over the last 40 years somebody should have been able to find some of it going up the stack. No luck so far despite a lot of monitoring.
I mostly mentioned my experience because usually some idiot insists that 100% of all ash is nuclear waste, and at least this dispels the extreme view. When I was looking at the ash I'd never even heard of this bullshit because it emerged and was buried as a laughing stock in the 1970s (apparently) and then was regurgitated again around 2000 or so.
It's irrelevant anyway. Get enough of it in your lungs and it will kill you without any of this pretend nuclear waste bullshit.

Re:Tritium exposure is relatively benign

[HarrySquatter]

And the level of contamination in the surrounding soil and water is far less than what you get around even the cleanest of coal plants.

Fluffy bunny view of nuclear power is wrong

[dbIII]

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.

Irrational fear and misinformation

[beefubermensch]

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.

Re:Try the executive summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The nuclear industry must be held accountable for radioactive releases to air, water and soil;

Can we please stop with the confluence of alpha, beta and gamma emitters, elements with different chemical and biological properties, and short and long half lives, all under the same banner? A small amount of tritium is totally harmless. A large amount of strontium, not so much. Ignoring the difference is a tactic of propagandists, not scientists.