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, 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.
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:5, Insightful)
we do not apply limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the limit still a limit in that case?
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.
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.
Nobody's drinking it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow... (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:2.7 million picocuries (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I know it's a troll but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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.
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.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Canary in the coal mine (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod parent up, this is probably the most insightful comment in the thread. Using the tritium as a proxy for scarier things is a great point.
The amount of tritium they are seeing at this point really isn't a cause for alarm. Microcuries would be worrying, sub-nanocurie quantities in an onsite survey well, not so much. Continually drinking this much in your water could be a problem (hard to say), but if this is a transient problem that gets fixed quickly, what little is onsite will dilute out to irrelevant when it hits the greater water table. At this point public fear of the tritium will likely do more measurable harm than the actual tritium. I'm pretty sure they will evenutally detect it in the water table, but at levels below the limit. There is more significant pollution in a lot of drinking water systems than this, eg. downwind of older coal plants.
I don't think they need to shut down the plant or fine them or do anything alarmist. However, the plant operators now know undeniably there IS a problem and they need to diagnose and fix it, before it gets worse and it becomes a real problem. Leaks tend to change non-linearly,they should consider tehmselves lucky to get a warning when it is slow and get it fixed pronto. IF they wait, and it gets worse, or even stays the same for more than a few years, they are going to have a massive legal fight. Probably on the legal costs to bankruptcy kind of scale. Willfully ignoring the problem will bite them hard in a few years.
-sk
totally safe (Score:1, Insightful)
For the love of god, tritium decays by beta particle emission. Why the boy-who-cried-wolf nuclear panic over a beta emitter?
Re:to all the nuclear proponents (Score:0, Insightful)
I'd prefer tritanium over mercury, but then I don't have a choice in that matter whether coal power plants spew mercury/thorium/uranium all over me. Who pays those cleanup costs?
Seriously, tritanium is also known as Hydrogen (2n+p). Half life is short (12 years if I remember correctly). It dilutes. Biological half life is 10 days or something like that. But who needs real information if there is you got fear?
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.
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...
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>
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (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 plant's license.
Also, Entergy plans to spin off this and several other plants into a new corportion that will carry billions in debt, and free Entergy from most future financial responsibility for any cleanup of the plant. There's a decommissioning fund, but since the stock market crashed it's way underfunded, and depends on some decades of extraordinary investment appreciation if it's to recover - which the NRC seems unconcerned about.
I'm pro-nuclear power. But Entergy hires chief engineers who are either incompetent or liars - or who've never reviewed a full schematic of their plant.
Re:totally safe (Score:2, Insightful)
Because once tritium ends up inside a cell, beta particles have all the subtleness of a bull in a china shop!
Re:to all the nuclear proponents (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Yes and no. Taxpayers only pay to stop the fire (so it doesn't spread to other taxpayers' houses). Your insurance (if you have it) pays to repair/rebuild your losses.
And taxpayers would pay for it if a wind turbine collapsed
...? Really? Why would taxpayers pay if a privately owned tower collapsed on privately owned land? Just because it's big???
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?
Governments were unaware or paid off by various coal companies to ignore the problem for years. Legislation wasn't in place to force the coal company to account for the environmental cost of producing power from coal. Do tax payers pay for it? Yes. Should they? No.
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?
Are you arguing about who is going to _DO_ it or who is going to PAY for it? There IS a difference.
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.
Working backwards: argument by tradition??? (tossed)
Yes the government is better at this, and certainly I trust them more to fix the problem better than the company that caused the problem. However, that shouldn't prevent the government from saddling the company and the owners with the cost of fixing their mess.
But when was the last time there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in the US?
Umm, beyond right now you mean? How about the problems they had during the great eastern power outage a few years back?
I can give you several places where the government is paying to clean up after coal just within a few miles of my house. But the only instance of them cleaning up after nuclear that I can think of is Three Mile Island. And that wasn't exactly expensive.
Not expensive? "The cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactor system at TMI-2 took nearly 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million. " [world-nuclear.org]
Even now 1 Billion dollars is not something to sneeze at. That's what it cost from 1979 to 1991.
Taxes ARE NOT government insurance for corporations. Taxes are payed by individuals of society for the benefit of the individuals of that society. The government is not an insurance company for other companies, despite what they currently seem to think.
Re:to all the nuclear proponents (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
And that's why we keep having abuses.
The trouble is these mines are on so-called 'public' lands. A 'corporation' is given mining rights and the owners have no personal liability, so they don't bother to do it carefully and they don't get sufficient insurance.
If they were facing polluting private land and the owners were personally responsible, they'd do it right or get sufficient insurance (which would insist on it being done right or have enough money to hire out competent remediation).
We get this kind of reckless pollution due to multiple bad government policies stacked upon each other. Meanwhile, the mining companies pay off the politicians.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
That would probably ensure that inspections were thorough and the chains squeaky clean.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:tl;dr. Here's my response (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the problem with nuclear. It's great on paper. Heck, on paper, it's way overbuilt and will undercut every fuel source on price. But it's been a magnet for "unforeseen complications". You've got a core being bombarded with a high neutron flux that weakens its structure, you have daughter products leeching out, you have products being bred from the neutron flux, etc. So your core and primary coolant loop is basically doing its best to damage itself. This then combines with the fact that a leak in the core or primary coolant loop is a Bad Thing(TM). Then you have the fact that you need (in order to be economical) to maintain a very high capacity factor (unlike, say, NG). This means you need to rush maintenance through. Then you have the fact that decommissioning cost estimates keep rising as we keep finding new expenses. The same thing happens with spent fuel. And bugs... in a conventional power plant, if something significant goes wrong, your plant shuts down and you have to fix it. The public never even hears about it In a nuclear power plant, if something significant goes wrong, your plant shuts down, you have to do a much bigger fix, you get a ton of bad press, you have to do an expensive cleanup operation, and if it's really bad, people get sick and/or die.
It's just a really tough situation to deal with. And even the most modern designs, like the CANDUs, keep having their own share of problems. It's the risk that's driving investment away, that's causing Moody's to downgrade nuclear power investments. Not so much direct, immediate health risks -- economic risk and liability risks. And don't underestimate the economic risks; even in the construction phase, nuclear power plant cost overruns have proven to be far too common.