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

So says a site...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Working for a world free of nuclear power..." right in their masthead.

Re:So says a site...

[HarrySquatter]

mdsolar is a well-known troll. Basically about 90% of all the submissions from this tool is basically FUD against nuclear power.

Re:So says a site...

[Bing Tsher E]

For one thing, the story here is billed as kind of a 'breaking news' 'new findings' kind of thing.

But the summary makes it clear it's a rehash, a dredging up of every bad thing the anti-nuke site it is hosted on could dig up, going back to 1963.

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

[HarrySquatter]

The funny thing about this whining about nuclear plants is that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.

Re:Coal

[Shakrai]

The Soviet military invaded the plant for a "scientific test" and held the technicians at gunpoint while they bypassed every security feature that site had.

Umm, bullshit. The test was scheduled by the plant crew. It was originally supposed to be held during the day when more experienced operators were on duty but was moved to the night shift because the USSR's persistent electrical shortages would not allow the idling of a reactor during peak demand. The Soviet military had nothing to do with it until the disaster happened nor was anybody held at gunpoint and forced to conduct the test.

On a side note, I've often wondered why the thought of having the more experienced operators come in and work the night shift didn't cross anyone's mind. I guess communism doesn't encourage standing out from the pack and suggesting such "novel" ideas....

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.

Figures

[flaming error]

Numberous aviation accidents between the years 1905 and 2009 may indicate the FAA is not doing it's job, either.

Re:Figures

[jo_ham]

And since this submission is from mdsolar, I think we must take issue with the number of people who have died as a result of exposure to the sun between the years 1905 and 2009.

Or the number of people dying while digging coal and oil out of the ground.

Re:Figures

[Wyatt Earp]

More people died this month alone from coal power than have died from all the commercial nuclear power accidents in the US.

Tritium exposure is relatively benign

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Okay, but what does it mean?

[Mr Otobor]

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.

My attemp to actually read the article

[electricprof]

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.

Better Subject Line Needed

[darkwing_bmf]

I thought this story was going to be about the National Republican Committee, Virgina Tech and baseball.

This is not Chernobyl

[SovBob]

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.

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:Divide by zero error

[Divide By Zero]

Wait up, hold on a minute, I didn't even POST to this thread before now, there's no WAY I've screwed up already!