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.
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
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.
The U.S. has more watts of nuclear than any other country.
We also have more watts in general, so the above sort of gets lost in comparisons.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
But the big problem is that we have more 'wuts' in general. And they just get lost.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I can't see the nuclear reactors from where I live, but you'd think that the 30 or 50 of them would lead to numerous transformed monstrous animals, but all we've got are jackalopes. They do make a nice sandwich spread, but so far no buildings have been destroyed with laser beams coming out their eyes.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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!
They're dams, not damns, and bypass structures to allow fish to pass dams have been around since the 17th century. They're called fish ladders, and there are dozens of them in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. There's one under construction in Montana right now.
As for large scale solar and wind installations, they're connected to the grid the exact same way a nuclear power plant is: a high voltage transmission line or two. It's not like the nuclear power plant is going to be built inside the city it services. It will be built in a remote location, the same as any other power plant.
Environmentalists SAY they want the whole world to live in straw houses and wear hair shirts and never go further from their birthplace than they can walk. Of course the ones we can actually hear say this are the ones who live hundreds of miles from their birthplace in a typical middle class suburb and are using a computer, one of mankind's pinnacles of techno-industrial achievement, to talk to us. Their protests ring rather hollow.
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.