Tritium Leak At Vermont Nuclear Plant Grows 295
mdsolar writes "The tritium leak into ground water at Vermont Yankee has now tested at 775,000 picocuries per liter, 37 times higher than the federal drinking water standard. 'Despite the much higher reading, an NRC spokeswoman said Thursday there was nothing to fear. "There's not currently, nor is there likely to be, an impact on public health or safety or the environment," the NRC's Diane Screnci said in an interview. She had maintained previously that the Environmental Protection Agency drinking water safety limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter had an abundance of caution built into it. ... The National Academy of Sciences said in 2005 that any exposure to ionizing radiation from an isotope like tritium elevates the risk of cancer, though it also said with small exposures, the risk would be low. ' At what level should the NRC shut down the troubled plant?"
Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
I would shoot myself in the foot, but it's dark and the tritium seems to have leaked out of my gun sights....
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All the competitive shooters who can use holographic sights (which are really just illuminated sights with zero power magnification) and they're pretty much standard equipment anymore on military rifles. Bullseye shooters all seem to prefer red dots; I have one on my Model 41 and its wicked accurate.
For defensive guns, its hard not to see the advantages of tritium -- much faster and easier sight picture in low light. I use TruGlo sights that also have fiber optics; its the same sight picture/color in dark
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
"On Jan. 7, it was reported that radioactive tritium was leaking from the Vernon reactor into groundwater; the source of the leak has not been found. The following week, it was revealed that Entergy officials had misled state regulators and lawmakers several times in 2008 and 2009 by saying Vermont Yankee did not have the type of underground pipes that could carry tritium."
I very pro-Nuke power... Well regulated, well maintained nuke power, that is. What I don't understand is why we have standards about acceptable contamination levels and then allow corporations to exceed them without severe recourse.
Not being able to find the leak after a month makes it sound like Entergy doesn't even know how their own plant works.
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Um......
That's because they (the people there now) DON'T know how their plant works.
VY went online in November 30, 1972...
How many original employees do you think still exist there? I'd bet its zero. Or close to it.
How many of the original engineers are even still alive?
They operate at 120% of designed capacity right now too.
Just another example of not taking care of our nations vital infrastructure. Altho in this case it can kill us. BRILLIANT!
captcha:radiator (LOL)
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, losing entire pipe systems suggests that your organization is suffering from severe failures in the area of documenting and controlling complex systems over time.
Keeping a handle on your complex system, whether it be a plant or a program, is hard; but if you can't do it, you really should consider a career change to something less important.
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Wait long enough and any technology can be lost. Lots of old cities still have wood water pipes. Good luck finding someone who knows where they are or can repair them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/us/18water.html [nytimes.com]
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who design and build complex systems are always going to leave, retire, or die. Advances in medicine have modestly extended the time horizon on the last two of those events, and sufficiently large sums of money can reverse the first(though, in general, there seems to have been a trend toward people moving around faster than in times past).
Certain sorts of knowledge and experience are, at least without really creepy brain implants and other sci-fi stuff, basically impossible to capture. The muscle memory of a skilled technician moving through a complex series of manipulations, the emotional conditioning of a soldier continuing to function under extreme stress and danger, or the performance of a scientist or engineer(or, in more mundane cases, a support tech) who is so familiar with a system's parts that he can troubleshoot it as though by intuition.
Barring substantial advances in man-machine interfaces or assistive technologies, the best we can really do to try to capture these is to foster the correct funding and HR environments. This doesn't mean unlimited lavish funding for everybody, that would be unrealistic; but it does mean trying to avoid boom/bust or feast/famine cycles. You want a steady continuity, with new hires having time to absorb experience from veterans, rather than having a purge/binge cycle, where efficient, well operating systems are cut to the bone(because hey, if they can keep the lights on with 5 engineers, 10 is clearly just a waste, just in time is the future, man!) until they start to fall apart, and then a whole bunch of noobs are hurridly hired and forced to reverse engineer the pieces and get things running again.
Other aspects of institutional memory, while hard to capture, are at least in theory amenable to technological solution, if a serious and conscious effort is made to do things properly. Digital archivists and aggressive format standardization are one part of the puzzle. If your power plant/factor/whatever was CADed, your staff today should be able to call up the plans. If changes were made, they should be able to know when, where, what, why and who(similar, in principle, to the revision control systems used in software production). This is, admittedly, hard. It is quite possible that some 3rd party contractor CADed the place using an obscure, industry-specific CAD package from the 80s, and may or may not have shared the full specs with you. It is, however, necessary, and we as people with a stake in complex industrial society, need to do something about it.
The other half of the puzzle, since keeping records in sync with reality is extremely hard and is inevitably going to fail from time to time, probably lies in the development of embedded sensors, "smart dust", and suchlike projects. Ideally, we should not only have the records of what the world is supposed to look like; but be able to programmatically interrogate the world and determine how closely it is adhering to our records, both in the sense of "Hey, look, the tertiary Toxin Shunt is developing stress fractures, it should be replaced within the next 100 hours." and "Hmm, flow-rate readings on the 2nd street water main look off compared to water meter readings in the area, we should check for possible tree roots, leaks, unauthorized diversions, or other deviations from the design."
These are hard problems, and I don't actually suspect that the Vermont nuclear guys are unusually incompetent about it(though, losing tritium is more serious than just leaking water, so that is still kind of a problem); but this is an example of a very complex, very serious, and very important problem that we will have to come to a solution to. Complexity is hard; but if we want its benefits, we'll have to figure something out.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
"At what level should the NRC shut down the troubled plant?"
When the projected costs of liability for cancer exceed the projected profits? Oh sorry, you said "At what level should", I read that as "At what level will they". My mistake.
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That would probably ensure that inspections were thorough and the chains squeaky clean.
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It wouldn't affect the NRC at all, and would be absurd.
Do you fine the guy who you pay to look for problems when he finds a problem? That's a genius idea, what could go wrong with that?
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More like they don't care to actually spend the money. It's exactly the short sighted nothing but the quarterly report matters thinking that is busily torpedoing the U.S. economy. A rational person would rather fix the problem now than create yet another public backlash against nuclear power.
I'm not shocked they didn't know (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the 10000 or so jobs I have over the years was working in a refinery for a few months. During that time some of the workers tried to find some pipes for maintenance. No one knew where they were. There were the design diagrams, the "as-builts" and numerous additions and removals by contractors upgrading and doing maintenance. Some new ones were out in, some ripped out, and others abandoned in place.
Metal detectors did not help, there was too much metal buried and scattered around.
The situation was so bad they resorted to dowsing. I'm serious!
Lately I've heard of small robots using GPS to travel a pipe and map it out. But with so many old plants and old pipes, it will be a long time before the situation is unsnarled.
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GPS underground?
I'd rather imagine robots equipped with accelerometers, ie a technique that'll start getting errors in the % range after just some m...
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Accelerometers? Stepper motors and/or rotary encoders are your friend.
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What's the purpose of a safety limit and abundance of caution if you're going to turn around and claim that it's got lots of caution and therefore can be ignored? Or put another way, does this mean that she consi
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As I understand it, the out-of-spec contamination level is measured inside the plant, not at the standard distance for test wells. The test wells are still within spec. They'll get there eventually, in all likelihood, but they're not there yet.
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I agree about the need for _well-regulated_ nuclear power. If the plant is exceeding the legal limit, especially by a factor of 37 or so and even more-so with the stone-walling that appears to have taken place, it's time to shut it down. If the legal limit is set too low, that is a separate matter from the fact that they are violating the current law. If I'm going 90 in a 65 MPH zone, I can't defend myself by saying that 90 is a safe speed on that road, even if my analysis is correct that the road is safe
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I'd be less skeptical of the Nuclear Industry if they weren't run by people with PhDs in subjects like "Controlling Product Life Cycles". Same as not buying Chinese Baby Food, this is just a groundless prejudice of mine; YMMV.
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Sure not all top Chinese officials have that risk, but it's still better accountability than in my 3rd world country (Malaysia), where the agency that investigates corruption is a poor joke - they don't even seem to have video recordings of "interviews" (I don't see any evidence of recordings of an interviewee that somehow jumped/fell from the 14th floor of their building).
And it's certainly a big difference from ruining o
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a big difference between a pinhole leak in a coolant pipe and a fundamentally flawed reactor design with no containment vessel and unsafe control rod designs operating way outside its safety margins. There's a difference between not knowing where every single coolant pipe is located and and deliberately ignoring safety alarms. I don't think there's much chance that this could cause a Chernobyl-level event in the near term.
Should the reactor be shut down? Probably, if only because A. there's probably no way to fix an underground pipe leak without doing so, and B. if one pipe is leaking (and there have been *several* leaks at this plant lately), they're all probably on the verge of leaking, which means these problems are only going to get worse until they actually do pose a real risk.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would wonder how it is that Tritium is in the coolant. Unless it's the (primary?) coolant stage that's leaking, in which yes - fixing it is a bitch because the coolant is otherwise very hot and radioactive.
If you've got tritium in your (secondary?) coolant stage, you've got bigger issues.
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We have the answer... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...
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2017 Aliens remake quote: “Nuke it from the river water! It’s the only way to be sure!”
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade (Score:2)
Surely there's plenty of potential for making heavy water (d2o), right?
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2.7 million picocuries (Score:5, Informative)
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pfft, I've been using "decahectometers" ever since I saw the term "megagig" on Smallville.
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I'm not sure if you're joking, but a gigabyte is only 1000 megabytes. You're only lying to yourself if you think otherwise.
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:4, Insightful)
In the context of storage, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes.
In the context of networking, a gigabit is 1000 megabits.
In the context of physics, a giga-something is 1,000,000,000-something. Physics doesn't measure gravity in bits or bytes.
Next up in words that have different meanings in different jargons: Hacking
</troll>
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that is called a gibibyte. Yes, it sounds funny, but hey, it's he standard :)
Actually, not quite right. (Score:3, Informative)
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you are, of course, completely correct. I wrote too fast.
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's because incults who don't realize that the OS counts in binary and the makers in metric (which IBM already did in the 80s) sue.
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Oddly, if you were an astronomer, you'd express it in centimeters....
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Hmmm...this has potential. (Score:2)
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Can't we just say 2.7 microcuries now?
Only if we can also say that it is mixed with dihydrogen monoxide [wikipedia.org] so that it sounds especially menacing; a veritable toxic stew that will have your kids glowing in the dark from 10 miles away! No more nuclear power...boo.
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:4, Informative)
That's good. That reading is a sump inside the plant. It's about the level of the process water, so it's near the leak. They're getting close.
The hazardous readings are all within the plant perimeter. Additional monitoring of off-site wells has been started (ten locations are normally monitored by the State of Vermont, but monthly) and those aren't showing any significant radioactivity.
actually, the levels only doubled (Score:5, Informative)
The article says the levels in the well from before doubled and are still below the federal level. Levels at another existing well dropped. And a new well was drilled to try to find the leak and it has a much higher concentration of tritium.
Unless you're drinking from the new well (and no one is, it's a test well), this doesn't really affect you at all. It's not like you're getting 37x as much radiation now (at least as far as the data we have says). And it's part of the process of finding the leak and fixing it.
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How nice from the contaminated ground water to stay inside those wells .... oh wait, d'ooh it doesnt!
this will move to other areas, and do not forget that the water might be drunk and while we humans can take a little radiation -outside- our bodies, having this stuff in water we drink is a big recipe for cancer (and do not forget, radiation levels are cumulated over time in our bodies - they do not get lower, they add together!)
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and do not forget, radiation levels are cumulated over time in our bodies - they do not get lower, they add together!
Citation needed.
Re:actually, the levels only doubled (Score:4, Informative)
Of course it doesn't stay in those wells, that's how it was found in the other well too. And it's surely in other wells even further away, just at lower concentrations.
That's why they're looking for the source of the leak by drilling more wells. Once they find the leak they can fix it.
Some say they should shut down the plant while they find the leak. Which is an interesting concept. Do you know how they find leaks in underground pipes? They put in radioactive tracers and then detect for it.
http://www.darvill.clara.net/nucrad/uses.htm [clara.net]
So, as long as the levels of radiation at wells outside the plant are low enough it's safe to keep running the plant while the leak is found.
Also, radiation doesn't build up in your body. There is a model for body damage from radiation that counts cumulative exposure over a long period. But that isn't because the radiation stays in your body the whole time, it's because the damage from the radiation takes a long time to repair so it's useful mathematically to sum it up over time.
Either way, the radiation levels have not increased 37x. The danger has not increased 37x. There's not even information (at this time) that the leak has grown at all, they're just measuring at a new spot. This would be like jumping in a pool at the shallow end and saying it's 3 feet deep, then walking to the deep end and saying the pool got deeper. It was 6 feet deep at that end before, you just didn't measure it in that spot before.
I hope they get this problem fixed soon.
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Yes, the drinking-water limit isn't particularly useful, since these levels aren't being found in drinking water. As such we should be comparing to "safe" limits for the scenario (or at least levels for the "general environment*").
I think drinking water levels however are often used - seemingly out of context - in this way because they are perceived as more reliable. People reason that much more scrutiny would be placed on whether something is safe for human consumption than for any other purpose. They the
Re:actually, the levels only doubled (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that always bothers me about these environmental stories is that when some Chemical X is reported to be floating around, it's never 20% over the regulatory limit, or even twice the limit, it is always at least one order of magnitude too high. The regulatory limit may be conservative, but I really doubt it has a safety factor of 37 built in.
we do not apply limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the limit still a limit in that case?
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Tritrium in water? Unacceptable. (Score:5, Insightful)
As true Americans who cherish tradition, we should always take our raioactive elements in the traditional way. First mine it with coal, then burn it in a furnace, disperse it through smoke and then ingest it via the lungs. That is the American way. One second before you mod me down as a Luddite, remember I do support modern innovations, like mountain top removal and long wall mining.
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How can anyone phoo phoo...
I wonder how Stewie Griffin would pronounce this.
Super Powers (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they're just waiting for the radioactivity to reach a high enough level that it will give them super-powers. Then they can deal with this and many other injustices in the world...
How are they allowed to keep running? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was under the impression that the whole purpose of testing groundwater was to find and STOP contamination. If they've repeatedly failed this test, how are they allowed to continue operations?
to all the nuclear proponents (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose when this sort of thing happens you'll be ok with taxpayers paying the clean-up costs ?
I think nuclear is something we're going to have to use, but I am _extremely_ worried it's going to be another privatize the gains and socialize the losses deal.
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This isn't a serious problem, and taxpayers _aren't_ paying for it.
But if it _was_ a serious problem, then yes, taxpayers should pay for it. Just like taxpayers pay for it if my house catches on fire. And taxpayers would pay for it if a wind turbine collapsed, and taypayers pay to clean up the pollution left by coal plants and coal mining. You do realize that cleaning up the acid mine drainage from coal mines is mostly paid by taxes, right?
If it's a small leak or a small accident, then yes, the plant should
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You do realize that cleaning up the acid mine drainage from coal mines is mostly paid by taxes, right?
If it's a small leak or a small accident, then yes, the plant should and will pay for it. But in a serious emergency, do you really _want_ them to take care of it? The government has more training in disaster management, and they have more resources. Plus I'm not really gonna trust the people that caused the problem to fix it properly. So yes, taxes pay for disaster relief. That's the way it's always been.
Wait for the 3 eyed fish to show up before going i (Score:2)
Wait for the 3 eyed fish to show up before going in and go to sector 7g at the start.
---MR X
Now everyone go to your corners and rant. (Score:5, Insightful)
Far-Right:
There's nothing to see here, it's just those damn liberals and their whining about nuclear power. It's all perfectly safe, there's absolutely no problems whats-so-ever with this plant or any other plant. A possible indicator of other problems around the country? Pshaw.. more liberal clap-trap. We can fix all our power problems with just building a lot of nuclear plants. Waste schmaste.
Far-Left:
This is just PROOF that the nuclear power industry are all a bunch of bastard weasels. We ought to shut the whole shootin-match down for good. We can get all of our power from wind and solar anyway. 37 times the standard! I bet the standard is set too high anyway! These plants are all rotting from neglect, and there's probably a ton they're not telling us! I recently saw The China Syndrome and Silkwood, and let me tell you that's all just the tip of the iceberg! Chernobyl!
I'm just really sick of the nonsense on both sides. They both insulate themselves from the other and don't want to hear any real truths from "the other side". The whole nuclear power issue is 90% a "side of the room argument" where nobody wants to be associated with an idea from "the other side". This is what needs to stop to make any progress on the whole issue.
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I'm an old leftie and a fan of nuclear power, so you can't categorise it like that.
All categories are wrong in some fashion. You can call it "pro-nuclear" and "anti-nuclear" if you like. The labels are irrelevant. The whole point is the insulation and people digging in their viewpoints. Being labeled a "troll" only highlights this point.
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I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power. That blows my mind. To this day I can't figure out how a focus on the environment would lead you *away* from nuclear power, when it is so clearly the safest way to produce abundant electricity with minimal environmental impact.
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I was astonished the first time I realized that typical 'environmentalist' groups oppose nuclear power.
To some degree it's an artifact of the sidedness of politics. Nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons (right or wrong, people think of them in the same breath). Nuclear weapons are "bad" for the "the left", and "good" for "the right". Most people have no real understanding anything about nuclear power or nuclear reactions so they turn to these kind of simple associations and dig in for the long
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With modern nuclear plants, I'd agree. Unfortunately, the U.S. has no modern nuclear plants, and the existing reactors are often well past the age where any conventional plant would have been completely gutted and rebuild, but they don't do that because these things are so darn expensive and you'd never be able to get permission to start it up again once you shut it down anyway. We should be building new nuclear power plants and shutting down these fossils.
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Hear hear. Yes the limits are being exceeded - a lot -, but the limits have not been exceeded outside the plant perimeter (yet). No actual drinking water has been found to be contaminated. The problem is being investigated, and it looks like they are close to finding the leak. Their latest sample well came up at pretty much the concentration of the raw tritium in the plant.
On the other hand, if they know where tritium _can_ come from, they should be able to estimate the size of the leak based on how much is
Gee, I wonder if they're hiding anything? (Score:3)
"Yeah, the water is 37% more deadly.... you should be fine"
Uh thanks.
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Not 37%. 3750%
750,000 vs. 20,000
</pedantic>
Ready with the caulk gun (Score:2)
Where's that leak again?
Acceptable risks (Score:2)
If one person in one hundred thousand starts to glow in the dark and dies, it is considered an acceptable risk for everyone except that person. No one can prove that that cancer that killed that person was caused by the leak so they can get away with it. It is statistically insignificant. I do not like to think that manslaughter is insignificant but these people think that way.
They need to stop this fast... (Score:4, Insightful)
...because tritium's really expensive to make and they're wasting it.
A few years back I bought a bunch of glow-in-the-dark keyrings [glosticks.co.uk] as stocking fillers for my family. These are little tubes containing tritium. The tritium produces very low energy beta particles, which excite phosphor on the inside of the tube, which cause them to glow. They have a half-life of 12 years, which in effect means that they glow usefully for about five or six years before they need replacing. (I should probably get them new ones.)
Let me repeat that: it's a little glowing thing that will glow for six years, continuously. They don't need recharging, they don't need their batteries changed, they don't need exposure to sunlight. They're fantastic for safety-critical things like exit signs. My father sails, and he has his tied to the end of the emergency torch on his boat --- it means that if he needs it in a hurry in the dark, he can find it. I know a nurse who uses them to find things in bags of equipment. They're really handy.
Naturally, they're banned in the US, because they're atomic.
(Tritium, being hydrogen and really hard to contain, will slowly diffuse out through the walls of the glass tube and into the environment. However there's a tiny, tiny amount of the stuff, and the radioactivity they emit is so weak it won't penetrate six millimetres of air, let alone anything solid. I suppose it is possible to absorb the stuff into the body --- we are largely made of hydrogen, after all --- but the low energies, short half-life and tiny quantities means that you're probably more likely to get radiation damage from Bikini Atoll than your tritium keyring.)
Incidentally, did you know that after the Chalk River reactor in Canada was shut down in 2009 due to overreaction, there is now a worldwide shortage of medical isotopes? There are only five reactors worldwide, sorry, four now, that produce the stuff. I wonder how many people that shutdown has killed?
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The tritium keyrings look pretty cool! I'd love to order some, but does anyone have any experience with shipping these things internationally (into other EU countries, not necessarily to the US)? I'd imagine the "nucular" aspect makes it a pain in the ass to ship (or smuggle), but maybe I'm overestimating the paranoia.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I stand corrected. Thanks for the link --- now I have something to point people at (because they are very cool).
Interestingly they're considerably cheaper here in the UK. I know the expensive part is the tritium --- they come in two brightnesses which differ only in terms of how much gas they put in. I wonder which of us is being ripped off...
We also get them in pink, blue and orange as well as green. Green's brightest.
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Tritium lights are perfectly legal in the United States. Do a google search and there are lots of places that sell them in the US - they are quite common for Exit signs. WalMart was recently fined for improperly disposing of them because they use them in all their stores.
Your quip about Chalk River is just off-topic flamebait. There's a lot of screwed-up stuff happening on that reactor, and it can't be summarized in this conversation. Suffice it to say, I work with someone who has a lot of experience in
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Tritium is not banned in the U.S.; I have one of the tritium keychains, a tritium compass, a gun with tritium sights... I don't know, there might be something else I'm forgetting. I have some old cockpit dials that contain radium. My smoke detectors are all radioactive (americium, I think). If I wanted to, I could buy uranium ore, trinitite, and more.
Heck, check this place out: http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_5 [unitednuclear.com]
Note that they are an american company that sells to americans (and
Re:They need to stop this fast... (Score:4, Informative)
What a bunch of numbskulls. (Score:5, Informative)
We get far more exposure from radon outgassing from the granite countertops in our kitchens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/garden/24granite.html [nytimes.com]
Let's pay attention to something we can actually get exposed to.
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My countertops are totally non-toxic melamine, you ignorant clod.
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Well I guess we'll have to change our granite countertops to something more exotic, they were starting to look nouveau riche
*sighs*
Simple decision not weasel words (Score:2)
Its a hard job to set safety standards for radiation as there really is not any 100% safe level other than absolute 0.
The standards are probably irrationally low for all practical purposes, but regardless of that, there is no dispute that the standards have already been significantly exceeded.
If they were doing their job properly, they simply need to decide to either immediately fix the leak or shut the site down. They can review the safety standards later if they want. To do that properly would require a
EEEEK! GIANT ANTS! (Score:3, Interesting)
Spend your time wading in 775,000 picocuries of tritium, or spend your time downwind of a coal-fired power plant.
Betcha I know which one will kill you first....
];)
Tritium (Score:3, Informative)
A list of some scientific studies on the effects of tritium with references in case there is any doubt regarding Triated water's effect on living beings.
Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.
It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
References;
Nobody's drinking it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit worrying that standards were set, but after they were violated we hear that it's no big deal. You can't argue that is consistent with effective and rational regulation. Either (a) the standards were set irrationally low, or (b) the public's interests are being shortchanged here.
It is quite possible for both to be true. Allowing silly, unenforceable regulations means that you don't have any rationally defensible ones when you need them.
Re: (Score:2)
If you set the standard to be right below the dangerous level it would mean that any time anything went even slightly wrong, the concentration could easily rise to an unhealthy level. Also for poisonous things the amount s
Canary in the coal mine (Score:5, Interesting)
If the reactor doesn't produce much tritium, then wouldn't that imply that tritium would be a small proportion of the radioactive material released when a leak occurs... but it is detected early because it IS so mobile and easy to detect.
That is, the tritium itself is not the direct cause for concern, but rather an indicator that will lead to locating the real problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't a PR guy. It was one of their chief engineers. And it was also their top executive for the plant. In sworn testimony. On several occassions. To both state regulators and state legislators. In a state where, when Entergy bought the plant, Entergy agreed contractually that the state legislature's approval would be required - unlike in any other state - for Entergy to renew the p
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (Score:5, Funny)
Directions
Take the shovel and dig a "Safety" hole three feet wide, 4 to 6 feet deep, and about as long as you are tall.
Put on the detection badge. Please wear the detection badge at all times.
You will note the badge has the words "Hell No, We Don't Glow" printed on it.
If those words fad out OR if the badge does in fact begin to glow you should take the bag and climb into the Safety Hole.
Get in the bag and zipper it up from the inside to keep the radiation out. Now lay quietly in the bottom of the Safety Hole until help arrives.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The plant is in extreme southeastern Vermont, near the Connecticut River, which flows south to Long Island Sound. Springfield, MA and Hartford, CT are on the river. Boston does not get water from the Connecticut River.
Re: (Score:2)
care to do a calculation of the LD50 of tritum in water?
Re: (Score:2)
Odds are they'll just ramp up capacity at a more expensive power plant.