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NYC's Nuclear Power Plant Leaking 'Uncontrollable Radioactive Flow' Into River (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: New samples taken from groundwater near New York's Indian Point nuclear plant show that contamination levels are 80% higher than previous samples, and experts say the leak is "a disaster waiting to happen." The Indian Point nuclear power plant is located just 25 miles north of New York City, and it is a crucial source of power for the greater metropolitan region.
No one is living in this river so don't you worry none. All going out to sea.
They can always import water from Flint ... at least the lead will block a bit of the radiation .
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Don't worry -- it's leaking into the Hudson, which is already so polluted, nothing can live there and it it does, it's already got three heads....
Hey, New Yorkers are tough -- what's a little radioactive water?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Didn't we already have a story from this ridiculous website? The hysterical cry of "80%" never addresses the actual numbers nor discusses the conservative limits set by the NRC. Yet another "ZOMG nuclear!" hit piece.
so happy. They hate NYC.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in real life!
(or maybe Godzilla, I'm not sure which)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is basically just standing on a street corner shouting, "REPENT!" No actual facts here.
90% chance after investigation money was skimmed during maintenance or construction.... which is causing the issue. No one will be going to jail and it will cost the tax payer more money...
If shutting the plant down stops the flow doesn't that by definition mean that it's controllable?
Trump must live right next to this place. He's glowing orange.
Bad article, clickbait title. Quotation in title is unattributed until you click through two more references, at which point you find out it came from a Huffington Post blogger. The only person quoted in the article with a relevant degree is "John J. Kelly, former director of licensing for Indian Point and a certified healthy physicist, said that tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is found naturally. 'It’s more of a regulatory problem than an environmental problem,'".
Another article referenced by this one gives a very similar quotation from an actual relevant source:
"'An uncontrolled, unmonitored pathway to the environment — in this case the Hudson River — is unacceptable' an NRC spokesman said".
http://www.lohud.com/story/tech/science/environment/2016/02/15/indian-point-what-happens-next/80288826/
But that doesn't sound nearly as sensational.
Why does it seem that the HR department at nuc plants uses Matt Groaning to screen applicants?
... nine ... eight ..."
"And thank you most of all for nuclear power, which is yet to cause a single proven fatality, at least in this country."
"Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button."
"And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."
"Yeah, you know, boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a woman. You just have to read the manual and press the right buttons."
--Homer Simpson
Bart: Dad, wake up. [Homer was sleeping at nuclear plant.]
Homer: I'm awake. I'm awake. I'm protected member of the team. You can't fire me, I quit! Please, I have a family.
[One lazy afternoon at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, Homer is asleep at his workstation and a dog is sleeping on the floor next to his chair. In his sleep, Homer slumps over, falling onto a button labeled "Plant Destruct" and triggering an alarm.]
Computer Voice: "Core meltdown in ten seconds
[The dog wakes up, walks to the console, and pulls a lever. The alarm and the countdown stop.]
Computer Voice: "Meltdown averted. Good boy!"
[Later that same lazy afternoon, inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission arrive at the power plant in their van. A woman inspector presses the buzzer at the front door.]
Mr. Burns [on intercom]: "What? How dare you disturb me during nap time!"
Woman Inspector: "We're from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is a surprise test of worker competence."
Mr. Burns: "There must be some mistake. We, uhh, we make cookies here. Mr. BurnsOld-Fashioned Good-Time Extra-Chewy-" Man Inspector: [cutting Burns off] "Get the axe."
[Now in college, Homer interrupts the Nuclear Physics Professor's lecture.]
Homer: "Uhh, excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years and I think I know how a proton accelerator works."
Professor: "Well, please come down and show us."
Homer: "All right, I will."
[The scene shifts to students screaming and fleeing the building while a green radiation glow fills the windows. Homer casually walks out just as two technicians in radiation suits are walking in.]
Homer: [gesturing over shoulder] "In there, guys."
Technicians: "Thanks, Homer."
It is true that a careful reading of TFA suggests there is probably not much to worry about. However, it is wise to be cautious. We know older nuclear plants often have design flaws. We certainly would not want major nuclear contamination this close to a major metropolitan area.
This is from the same yahoos who though LA's methane leak was a disaster on a par with thousands of people dead, so I'd take it with a pretty big chunk of salt.
Except that the article is mostly alarmist FUD simply shouting contamination 80% higher than previous, or 65,000% increase in another case. You know what, there is an INFINITE % increase in people in a room when a single person walks into the empty room....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Another benefit brought to you by the magic hand!
Semi-paywalled source of more accurate information here
From back on the 15th:
and
No current absolute numbers, but the article reports:
33 times the drinking water limit? Not scary. Find the leak, fix the problem, make a rational decision whether the maintenance risks are beginning to exceed the benefits of the plant to begin a plan for refurbishment or retirement.
Not making this up!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
This of course would be a serious issue if the 80% increase werent from ... wait.. it doesn't say how much...
Oh Well.. Probably part of Obamacare.
From a linked article... some actual numbers:
According to initial reports, the radioactivity levels are quite high and the leaked materials contain tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope. At one location, levels shot up 65,000 percent from from 12,300 picocuries per liter to over 8,000,000 picocuries per liter.
The usual denial from the power plant operator (nothing to worry about here...):
Despite the size of the leak, Entergy, the company that owns the plant, has argued the radioactive materials only leaked into the groundwater and should not impact drinking water sources.
(Not sure how radioactivity leaking into groundwater is not a concern for drinking water.)
The Governor seems to be concerned and has called for an investigation:
Cuomo has called on Entergy to shut down the Indian Point facility while the full scope of the problem is assessed.
Further denials... yes, it's leaking but "no problem":
“While elevated tritium in the ground onsite is not in accordance with our standards, there is no health or safety consequence to the public,” Entergy said in a statement late Saturday.
Old nuclear plant has had problems before:
This isn’t the first problem with tritium leaks at Indian Point, which supplies around 30 percent of the electricity used in New York City. The plant had three emergency shutdowns in December, and there have been a number of leaks in recent years.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
“These values remain less than one-tenth of 1% of federal reporting guidelines,” the company said in a statement, adding the higher levels are “fluctuations that can be expected as the material migrates.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
And it's Tritium being leaked. Aka Relatively harmless
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/...
Both the tragedy in Flint and the horrors that took place in New Orleans could have been stopped or moderated if really sudden responses had taken place. A nuclear power plant under suspicion of defect should be instantly shut down. If tat means evacuating New York City then so be it.
Oh, please. And I wouldn't want major nuclear contamination 10 minutes away from my house, either. Which is where Indian Point happens to be. We get ill-informed fear-mongering agenda-driven Luddite "just want to be cautious" elbow-patched knuckleheads like you getting bused up here from NYC all the time to join in one noisy ignorant picket-mob or another. Take a course, or at least read a real newspaper once in a while.
"Careful and expeditious investigation is prudent" Christ, who even talks like that...? Wait, are you trolling? You're trolling, aren't you?!
Sorry, my bad...
plus your descendants may have SUPERPOWERS at no extra charge,
There are two obvious questions to ask here. First, does anyone drink directly out of that well? Second, does shutting down the plant stop the leak? The answer to both is NO. The point of these wells is to find problems before they hurt other people. Let's give them a chance to fix this.
Why don't we switch to nuclear FUSION for power? It's safer, way cheaper, and allows wireless transmission of power, which isn't really doable with fission, which also produces all kinds of hazardous waste, and has all manner of other problems?
When the ancestors of humanity were climbing out of the muck, there was a nuclear fusion reactor already in operation for billions of years, and it's projected to last billions more, and it was located a safe distance away from all the populated parts of Earth. Convenient!
Also, we don't have to fuel it, we don't have to deal with its waste products, generally... and if we do, it won't matter if we are using this power source or not, we'd have to deal with it anyway, so...
Why are we still choking on exhaust fumes, and inhaling or imbibing bits of radioactive material let to contaminate the environment, in 2016? Is humanity fucking STUPID?!? (What's that, Donald Trump has won another primary election?!?)
Apparently so.
http://www.amazon.com/Glow-Fob...
Why is it that when you apply a Kalman filter to http://inhabitat.com/ all the content vanished?
I don't expect that anyone drinks out of the monitoring wells... they are for, well, monitoring.
However, groundwater is mobile. It flows through different layers of the, well, ground and eventually ends up downhill somewhere (i.e. NYC metropolitan area).
(Interesting fact is that surface water flows such as rivers are only about 10% of fresh water flows. The rest are underground.) It's pretty obvious that the water will move to a place where someone has drilled a drinking water well... it's only a matter of time.
Best to take care of this at the source.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
According to initial reports, the radioactivity levels are quite high and the leaked materials contain tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope. At one location, levels shot up 65,000 percent from from 12,300 picocuries per liter to over 8,000,000 picocuries per liter.
Ok, finally some numbers. So in other words, it went from 0.0123 microcuries per liter to 8 microcurie per liter. So it went from under safe drinking water limits to about 400 times the safe drinking water limit in a monitoring well.
Is there a problem? Yes. The monitoring wells detected that there is a leak. Is the sky falling? NO. We don't drink from the MONITORING wells, especially the one well that is the closest to the leak, and thus has the highest concentration of the contaminant. You mix that water with 399 liters of other water and it is under safe DRINKING levels. And if you don't think that water would mix with other water as it disperses away from the plant, I don't know what to say to you other than you are a complete alarmist, anti-nuclear FUD pusher. As the scientist in the linked article said:
It's more of a regulatory problem than an environmental problem
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
However, groundwater is mobile. It flows through different layers of the, well, ground and eventually ends up downhill somewhere (i.e. NYC metropolitan area). (Interesting fact is that surface water flows such as rivers are only about 10% of fresh water flows. The rest are underground.) It's pretty obvious that the water will move to a place where someone has drilled a drinking water well... it's only a matter of time.
First, it's going to be heavily diluted before it ends up anywhere that someone can drink it. Second, that matter of time is important. If it takes a few centuries to get anywhere, then in addition to the dilution, you have several halvings from radioactive decay.
Best to take care of this at the source.
I think this is the point of testing. Shutting down the plant doesn't serve that purpose.
I don't have the numbers at hand for the region of new york, but in the region I was (with underground mostly chalky and silimars) it takes a hundred year and more to percolate as rain water down to the aquifer and back to the pumps, even more if the soil is dense and more water proof with high clay content. It is not an instant process and there is no underground river or such like it is all percolation into a gigantic sponge. So for one the possible tritium would be diluted in the process, and since its half life is 12 years about by the time it comes up there has been so many half life it is probably mostly gone. But that is assuming it is going to the aquifer first before being pumped back. If it drains into a river and then is pumped and purified from there, that's another story, but that would still most probably be highly diluted to the point it disappear in the backgroudn radiation.
That is not to say it is a non story, it does not sound like a catstrophal story, but it sounds like the plant director is trying to downplay a leak, and in the current climate it is probably worst to downplay it than to admit the reality and dfemonstrate there is no impact.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If you have a way to instantly shut down a nuclear reactor, then why didn't you speak up 5 years ago?
It would be good to remember the amount of tritium found in self illuminating emergency exit signs. I have seen signs that contain something like 0.7 TBq of tritium per sign. This is equal to 18 Ci or 18000000 microcuries of tritium. This is enough for contaminating more than two million litres or 2000 cubic meters of water with a level of 8 Ci per litre.
In one floor of the building there were something like 30 of the signs. This was not a site for storing tritium waste but a normal European office building in an industrial park. In the whole building there were about one hunderd of similar signs containing altogether 1800 Ci of tritium. This would contaminate 200000 cubic meters with the abovementioned level of tritium.
80% higher than a tiny amount is still tiny. And radiation is a lot safer than you would think.
This could make one great energy drink if you have a bottling plant- 5 eon energy! Warmer and more energetic than normal water! Hey- it worked in the 1910s-20s, so why not the 2010s-20s?
Uncontrolled leaks and a clueless Entergy led to an atmosphere where Vermont Yankee had to shut down.
From a linked article... some actual numbers:
According to initial reports, the radioactivity levels are quite high and the leaked materials contain tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope. At one location, levels shot up 65,000 percent from from 12,300 picocuries per liter to over 8,000,000 picocuries per liter.
OMG! That's 7 times more than...the fire detector you have in your house! You'd get radiation sickness after drinking only a few...hundred thousand liters over the course of...a few days...wait, what was the panic about?
You can buy tritium glow rods, sticks, rings, watches, keychains, exit signs, etc. that contain anywhere from .5 to 2+ Curies of tritium at several places online. That's only a few orders of magnitude more than this inspection well water but whose counting?
Tritium is a low energy beta emitter with a very short biological half-life. It can't even penetrate paper, much less your skin. Unless you're drinking or inhaling it, you're going to receive more radiation exposure from an airline flight. At the concentrations mentioned, it would be physically impossible to ingest enough well water to induce radiation sickness, much less affect long term likelihoods for cancer. You'd piss it all out long before you could reach any significant accumulation levels.
Now if this were cesium 137 flowing directly into the water table, that would be cause for concern. But tritium? I'd be much more concerned about the fly ash from a coal plant than tritium.
~X~
Parts of this story were puzzling to me, so off to Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Tritium is also produced in heavy water-moderated reactors whenever a deuterium nucleus captures a neutron."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Indian Point is a Pressurized Water Reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
PWRs are light water reactors, not heavy water --- so I'm still puzzled about the origin of the tritium. Is there enough deuterium in ordinary (light) water to produce it? At any rate, it sounds like their primary coolant loop is leaking, which has to be a worry.
From TFA: "John J. Kelly, former director of licensing for Indian Point and a certified healthy physicist, said that tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is found naturally."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ... Worldwide, the production of tritium from natural sources is 148,000 terabecquerels per year."
"Tritium occurs naturally due to cosmic rays interacting with atmospheric gases.
However I'm thinking that the natural concentration of tritium is going to be many orders of magnitude lower than what they're finding near the plant. If so, this statement is wildly misleading - while technically true, it has no bearing on how hazardous this leak is. That arsenic is present in trace quantities in ground water doesn't make it safe in large doses.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
(Not sure how radioactivity leaking into groundwater is not a concern for drinking water.)
Because the area (and all of New York City) gets its drinking water piped in from the Catskills watershed.
It's kind of like "I only drink Evian, so I only care about the Mount Blanc region of France."
I lived in Warwick, NY from Mar 2001 to Sep 2001. After living in the area for a few weeks, I began to feel ill. A general feeling of malaise and kidney pain, specifically.
10 years later in 2011, I'm thinking back on old times and do a little research about my former residence. It turns out the mountain I lived on had 2 uranium mines that had been closed ~40 years before I moved in to the area. If you look at the EPA map for radon, there's a big red spot there in Orange County. Turns out there is significant amounts of naturally occurring uranium and radium and the mining may or may not have caused said elements to reach the water table.
I have all kinds of strange aches and pains and doctors have yet to find anything causing it, but I have a feeling (I'm 33 now) that 45 might be a realistic upper limit of my lifespan.
TLDR: Don't drink uranium.
That sort of failure only happens in corrupt regimes, banana republics or third world hellholes, not first world, high tech, educated and properly governed first world countries, where the free market will automatically mean that any such company failing this badly will be punished by the investors and customers going elsewhere and another, better, competitor taking their business with them.
Please don't ask me what happens to the nuke plant the now defunct company owned but can no longer work on because it no longer exists.
Or is that some sort of world-ending, capitalism-destroying, NWO-creating catastrophe?
If so, why? It's only 8%.
But you rethuglican libertards don't need to know any more than "it's not going down", because unless it goes down, it's a NWO creating catastrophe and you won't have any of "your" money, poor and undeserving nigger lesbian trans androgyne leftist vegan commies will be living off your sweat and tears while they destroy capitlism and the free market and remove all your freedoms with your money they stole at government gunpoint.
You're a dimwit. Enough of anything is highly dangerous.
you cannot trust left wing enviro groups to report the truth.
a number of leaks in recent years.
My father and his colleagues worked on leaks at Indian Point in 1973, so if recent means longer than the median /. demographic has lived, then yeah.
I noticed they were very careful not to mention even a hint of what those horrible evil dangerous life-threatening "make NYC glow in the dark" tritium levels.
Get smart on the laws and numbers before you panic:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/...
I'll bet the levels they're shrieking about are WAY below what's being emitted in the subspace beneath my house.
because Trump.
That one molecule per BILLIONS will have no fucking effect you uneducated moron. We use higher levels of tritium in biological tracer experiment. Dimwit. Fuck /. is full fox networking loving dumb cunts.
Total FUD without numbers.
80% higher can mean increase from 1 to 1.8 Bequerel or it can mean increase from 100 to 180 Curies. Without real numbers to show scale; nothing but alarmist twaddle.
NRRPT/RCT
In upstate NY today, there was a massive spill of Solar Radiation. Dermatologists warned of a possible increase in skin cancer, but with the temperature at 20 degrees, risk is minimal.