Entergy Admits 2005 Tritium Leak 385
mdsolar writes "The leaking Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was hit last week by a whistleblower allegation that a previous tritium leak had occurred. Now the parent company, Entergy, has admitted the occurrence of at least one prior leak to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is particularly significant for three reasons: because the leak occurred in pipes that company officials later testified under oath did not exist, because the Vermont Senate will likely soon vote to deny Entergy a needed approval to extend the power plant's license for another 20 years, and because President Obama just put taxpayers on the hook for new nuclear power plants in Georgia."
Troll summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to be all "So what?" but so what? One plant leaks an unspecified amount of a weak beta emitter...It tested at the leak at a whopping 2 million picocuries, which is a bullshit measurement that's clearly chosen because it's more shocking than 2 microcuries. 2 microcuries is about what you'd get for a basic thyroid test at the docs office. Trituim doesn't stay resident in the body, it's half life is 12 years long, and it's a beta emitter: if you drink it you'll get a few rads, but you can take a shower in it without any problem.
The whole thing is clearly being pushed as an example of the horrible dangers of the super scary nuclear power industry, but what I see is the dangers that are inherent in running antiquated plants for years beyond their design life because a bunch of poorly informed hysterics have blocked all attempts to modernize them for the last 40 years.
And what the hell is the point in talking about the plants in Georgia? That's a different type of plant, being built by a different company! Georgia has the largest coal fired power plant in the us: where's that outrage? Where is the outrage over the radiation it emits?
Re:Troll summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the point is the fact that they lied about the leak in the first place. Sure, this time it might be something like tritium, but whose to say at some later date it's not something worse? Why should anyone believe anything they say about the safety of their plant(s) if they're willing to lie under oath about something this minor?
Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WHAT! (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference being that the Tritium in luminous devices is contained and no one has lied under oath about it. I am a big supporter of nuclear power for environmental and economic reasons and I believe these guys ought to be nailed to the cross over this. Nuclear power is one of the few technologies that are capable of displacing fossil fuels to any extent and the last thing we need is some corporation cutting corners and getting away with it. The public's confidence in nuclear power needs to be strengthened by making damn sure these corporations are doing what they are supposed to do in order to keep these plants safe.
Re:Troll summary. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the plant management is now known to be lying about safety and operations goings on at the plant. Further, their grasp of what the hell is going on seems to be shaky where it is not actively dishonest.
This particular tritium leak(or, for that matter, was the last one, the one that officially never happened) is not particularly dangerous. There are a number of conditions that could be, though, and this story suggests that A)There is no reason to believe that plant management would act competently to avert them. B)There is no reason to believe that plant management would be honest about admitting to them if they were to occur. and C) It does not appear that the NRC is up to the task of forcing plant management to undertake A and B.
New Plants have nothing to do with old... (Score:5, Insightful)
But all of the above is already covered under existing law and policy, and has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with a DIFFERENT COMPANY building a NEW PLANT in a DIFFERENT STATE. It would be like arresting every person in the country who owns a Silver or Gray car because a Silver/Gray car was involved in a hit and run Rhode Island.
Nuclear companies cannot be trusted (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like pretty much every other company on Earth their primary interest is money. All other concerns are secondary including the safety of the public. It's not the technology that is dangerous, it's the terrible people operating it. I believe nuclear energy can be safe in theory but in practice it's the people who inject the danger to the process. This little omission is just one of thousands, if not tens of thousands of cover-ups by the nuclear industry who are their own worst enemy when it comes to the public embracing nuclear power.
I trust nuclear power. I do not trust the people responsible for providing it, or the people responsible for overseeing them. They are all blinded by money.
Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ridiculous that the summary implies that, in the context of this leak, Obama setting aside funds for building new power plants is a negative thing.
If anything, the fact that America's only nuclear power comes from relatively ancient, decaying reactors of obsolete design should be motivation for building new nuclear power plants. This might be the best tangible thing Obama has proposed to date and informed citizens should be applauding it.
Re:New Plants have nothing to do with old... (Score:5, Insightful)
A better car analogy: "I don't trust any hybrid because of that damn Prius braking problem. And the fact that Toyota denied there was any Prius braking problem for so long."
But let the anti-nuke whackjobs be the anti-nuke whackjobs. It keeps them out of more annoying fringe circles.
Re:WHAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
seconded.
nail em to the wall.
This is a trivial leak but a serious matter.
Re:WHAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Tritium is pretty safe outside your body. Not so safe inside it.
Re:WHAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
dear market place fundamentalists and libertarians (Score:2, Insightful)
the market does not take care of itself
repeat: the market does NOT take care of itself
with things like energy utilities, you do NOT privatize. you heavily involve the government and you heavily regulate
no, it is not red tape that interferes with the normal functioning of the marketplace, it is the only way things fucking work right
for examples like this, for the example of the economic meltdown in 2008, for the example of healthcare, and for examples like enron
no, it does make you a fucking communist to admit that the market does not solve ALL problems. it simply makes you wise and intelligent for simply recognizing that THE. MARKET. DOES. NOT. SOLVE. ALL. PROBLEMS. full stop
for most sectors of society, indeed, a market free of most regulations IS the ideal. but even then, in something like food, for example, you still want the government running around, and you still want to spend tax money on all those pesky government employees and their horrid, horrid bureaucracy, to fucking make sure you're not eating melamine or toxic e coli. yes, you want to pay fuckign taxes for that, asshole
if you had no inspectors, the manufacturers would likely suffer business wise. true. BUT THEY WOULD ALSO KILL PEOPLE. get it? in other words, some failures that market players can suffer are so severe, a simple market correction is not the only way they should be punished. furthermore, some "failures", such as leaking tritium, or overindulging on bad mortgage loans, are so horribly disruptive as to kill people or destroy an entire economy
then you need government bailouts. after which some of you assholes will still blame the government for that, as fucking blind as you are, when it was YOUR FUCKING THINKING THAT LED TO THE DISMANTLING OF THE GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS THAT CREATED THE MELTDOWN
please adjust your idiotic simplistic worship of market forces: they are not the fucking answer to everything. really. welcome to reality assholes
Re:Troll summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to be all "So what?" but so what?
Someone lies under oath abouty the operation of a nuclear power plant and you say "so what?" Are you on crack, or are you on this company's board of directors?
The whole thing is clearly being pushed as an example of the horrible dangers of the super scary nuclear power industry
No, it's an indictment of dishonest corporations in any industry. I'm starting to suspect that all big corporations are run by sociopathic thieves. I don't want any power plant, nuke, coal, or gas, run by sociopaths. And I'm damned glad there's an NRC, OSHA, and EPA, because these bastards don't give a damn about anything but their money.
I'd like to see someone go to prison over this, preferably someone with a seven figure salary. It's the only way this shit will stop. The next time it may be a serious leak of some truly nasty shit, what makes you think they'll react any differently?
Slow Down (Score:2, Insightful)
And this is the argument against nuclear (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, it can be done safely. But, when you've got Corporate American running things with CEOs who'd sell their own mothers to bury one quarter of lackluster PR, you get these kinds of results. Toyota tried to bury a potentially life threatening flaw in order to postpone a little bad press resulting in a major scandal years later. This is the fundamental flaw in Free Market thinking. Companies aren't going to do the Right Thing because profitability dictates it. They'll lie about it then leave the train wreck for next guy.
If Toyota is willing to lie about a little brake problem that's probably killed people, you trust a company not to lie or cut corners when it comes to expensive waste disposal?
Re:WHAT! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a big supporter of nuclear power for environmental and economic reasons and I believe these guys ought to be nailed to the cross over this.
Having worked in the nuclear industry, I understand there's a lot of unreasonable fear about radiation and radioactivity. I also understand that 2.5 million picocuries per liter sounds like a huge amount, but it's closer to a drop of tritium in a swimming pool. That's a very low level of contamination.
Even at that, lying under oath and otherwise being dishonest is not okay. Patient education and being truthful will win over time. Yes, you'll have to sometimes make expensive repairs, which you'll then pass on in the form of rate hikes. That's life in the nuclear business.
I'll help pound the nails.
Re:Yes but (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is they lied under oath. And once people are lying about the state of things you don't know what else they are or will lie about. These might not matter, but they might very well lie about the next leak when it is a serious problem. As with many issues, the initial incident isn't nearly as much of a problem as the coverup.
How do you know they lied? How can you be sure it wasn't an honest error by a company official who simply didn't understand the technical details of the reactor's plumbing? I don't know about you but, in my experience, these types of corporate misstatements and goof-ups are pretty common in any industry, nuclear or otherwise. I'm not convinced that isn't the case here. TFA doesn't provide enough evidence one way or the other on this point. It certainly doesn't substantiate a deliberate coverup. There's just no hard evidence of that.
The recent revelation of a tritium leak at Vermont Yankee in 2005 seems, at least to me, to indicate that someone at Entergy is trying to be up-front and honest with the public and the NRC. I applaud that. Good for them. God knows, after Three-Mile Island in 1979, I can't imagine anyone in the US nuclear industry wanting to admit to any accident, benign or otherwise.
As others have already pointed out, a tritium leak isn't particularly dangerous. I don't feel compelled to get my own knickers in a knot over the problem. But I do think it's telling how quickly a minor leak at a nuclear facility spirals into, "They're lying -- it's a coverup!" This type of knee-jerk anti-nuclear reaction is exactly why the US hasn't built a new reactor in over a quarter of a century. It's also why I'm dubious about new nuclear projects today. Until US citizens show a willingness to get facts in their hands and abandon the "if it's nuclear it must be bad' mentality we are never going to have the kind of debate we deserve to have over the pros and cons of nuclear energy.
Re:WHAT! (Score:4, Insightful)
The only part of this article worth mentioning was the lying under oath. The tritium leak was harmless to anyone not 3 feet away when it happened. As for the American taxpayers being 'on the hook' for new power plants that will only happen if the plants somehow default on their loans, something no nuclear power plant has done in American history and given the subsidies already given to nuclear power it is highly unlikely that any new (and therefore more easily maintained and more efficient) reactor would do so.
The summary reads like a troll to me, but YMMV.
Re:Troll summary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, so the leak is trivial. So why not fess up about it? Do you think we can expect them to be more forthcoming if there really is a non-trivial problem?
When my daughter lies about something trivial, it doesn't make me think, "If there really was something going on, she'd tell me the truth..."
Re:WHAT! (Score:4, Insightful)
The quantity of Uranium that is in higher grade ores is limited although the quantity of Uranium at lower concentrations is enormous. Fossil fuels are much more likely to run out long before Uranium does.
Re:WHAT! (Score:5, Insightful)
> What happens when the uranium runs out?
You mean Uranium 235? There is still Uranium 238, which is very common. Then there Thorium, which is available just about everywhere. Chances are that we melt the earth before running out of Thorium, but if you still need more energy, there is always fusion.
The sources are not the problem, the sinks are. What do you do with radioactive waste? And how do you tell the public that everything is safe when the nuclear industry is lying like Dick Cheney? Those are the real questions.
Re:Loan Guarantee (Score:3, Insightful)
Oooooo, scary tritium. Looks like hydrogen but has two scaaaary extra neutrons.
When you get done tilting at this windmill, I think you need to go take on carbon-14. It also has two extra neutrons. Scaaaaaary.
Newsflash bub, it's in your water already. It's in ALL water. It's in the air. And it was there before we started using nuclear power, and it'll be there after we're gone.
Fearmongering to try and sell your fricking solar panels is pathetic.
Re:It's been, what, 30 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
NIMBY and Greenpeace. Coal is responsile for the deaths of over 40,000 people a year in the United States due to various pollution caused by Coal plants. I wonder why people are screaming so loud to stop nuclear plants when Coal is by far the greater danger to life and the environment.
Show me a single anti-nuclear environmentalist of note who's not equally also anti-coal. This false dichotomy you people paint gets old fast. Almost all anti-nuclear environments are pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-wave, and pro-geothermal. Many are pro-tidal. A good number are pro-natural gas (esp. for peaking). Some are pro-hydro. Almost none are pro-coal. I doubt you could find a single one of note.
Again, red tape.
Again, for good reason. And see my post higher up comparing the radiation exposure from a single nuclear accident with that from all of the coal emissions in US history, as well as the part above about your false dichotomy. Anti-nuclear environmentalists want both coal *and* nuclear shut down. And your blaming them for the lack of new nuclear plants in the past two decades makes them out to be way more powerful than they actually are. There's been no *market demand* for building them.
The relative impotence of the environmental movement over the past several decades is reflected in their stunning lack of success at blocking coal plants, mountaintop removal, and valley filling despite high profile campaigns to do so during this time.
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. They didn't lie at all about the leak.
What they are accused of lying about is "they were not aware of any underground or buried pipes that carried radioactive materials.".
Now, given that juxtaposition (underground or buried pipes), and that the pipes in question were in a pipe tunnel (you know, the sort of place that people where walk along beside the pipes, looking at them, as opposed to underground or buried pipes like the water pipes into my house), it's just possible that the questioner meant one thing, and the answerer heard another.
Note also that the answerer was not an Entergy executive necessarily - TFA merely describes them as "Entergy representatives"
Re:And this is the argument against nuclear (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, we've entered a period where our society has disregarded ethics in favor of profit. Of course, profit is almost always the primary motivator in the free-market, but profit needs to be accompanied by ethics or I'd wager the system will ultimately fail. This kind of stuff is often the result of those lack of moral ethics.
For all of you dirty business men/women out there who think you make a quick buck at the expense of public health, safety, product quality etc.. ALWAYS remember this: Where ever morality is found to be absent from capitalism, legislation will be substituted in its place. I, for one, don't personally like 'morality' being legislated.
If you're really a free-market person, then surely you can appreciate doing the *right* thing -- because if you don't -- government intervention in the market becomes YOUR fault.
Re:Troll summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
If the EPA allows Monsanto to dirty up the air like they did before the Clean Air Act I have a vote. Without the EPA Monsanto will do as they wish.
I say Monsanto because I grew up in Cahokia, a mile south of Sauget, where there was and still is a Monsanto plant. This was before the EPA existed, and you literally could not drive past the plant with your windows down, even in 100 degree heat (there was no AC in cars back then) as you literally could not breathe -- the air burned your lungs.
Today you seldom smell anything driving past. The EPA works -- as long as you don't vote an Executive into the White House who thinks government is always the problem and never the solution.
Had OSHA existed in 1959 my grandfather wouldn't have gone four stories down an elevator shaft because Purina was too murderously cheap to put doors on the elevator.
Personal experience tells me that those agencies are in fact effective. Rush "Oxycontin" Limbaugh tells you they're not. I'll believe my own experience before I believe some drug-addled right wing hack.