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?"
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?
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not A Major Concern (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.
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:Wow... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 other people's lives and then paying yourself a big bonus.
Re:I won't lie- This concerns me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Now everyone go to your corners and rant. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 considers caution a silly thing to spend any time on?
Like others, I've had to accept that nuclear power is one of the best energy sources, but this is fucking pathetic. Come on, Diane, even people who are pro-nuclear are put off by your bullshit. Close up your shop, get out of town, and let us bring in some people who will do it right. Your attitude makes it clear that this leak is the least of your problems.
Re:I'm not shocked they didn't know (Score:3, Interesting)
Accelerometers? Stepper motors and/or rotary encoders are your friend.
Re:actually, the levels only doubled (Score:3, Interesting)
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 then have to evaluate themselves how unsafe it has to be to drink for it to be unsafe or damaging to the environment*.
People are more inclined to rely on a piece of trustworthy information that has to be brought into relevance by their own inexpert/vague estimation than they are to rely on a piece of untrustworthy information regardless of how relevant. Sometimes there's a thin blurry line between ignorance and a healthy dose of scepticism.
* I use the term "environment" quite loosely, some people may be thinking of the cute bunny-rabbits while others may be thinking about crop yield. The distinction isn't really relevant to the point.
Re:Now everyone go to your corners and rant. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's 0.775 microcuries per liter (Score:2, Interesting)
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, 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.
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....
];)
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.