Report Blames NRC For VT Yankee Leak 136
mdsolar writes "A new report from a nuclear watchdog group finds that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 'is ignoring its oversight and enforcement responsibilities at the nation's increasingly leaky, uninspected and unmaintained nuclear power plants.' Because of this lack of oversight, 'at least 102 reactor units are now documented to have had recurring radioactive leaks into groundwater from 1963 through February 2009.' So, the leak at Vermont Yankee that Slashdot has been following is not just a fluke, but is systemic."
So says a site... (Score:5, Informative)
"Working for a world free of nuclear power..." right in their masthead.
Re:So says a site... (Score:5, Informative)
mdsolar is a well-known troll. Basically about 90% of all the submissions from this tool is basically FUD against nuclear power.
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RTFA before blaming it on troll behaviour. How can you argue with a statement from the U.S. Regulatory Commission?
"Numerous incidents of unplanned releases of radioactivity have been reported to the NRC within the past few months."
"These incidents of leaks, overflows and spills have resulted in contamination of areas outside of plant buildings. "
Re:So says a site... (Score:4, Informative)
For one thing, the story here is billed as kind of a 'breaking news' 'new findings' kind of thing.
But the summary makes it clear it's a rehash, a dredging up of every bad thing the anti-nuke site it is hosted on could dig up, going back to 1963.
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it's a rehash, a dredging up of every bad thing the anti-nuke site it is hosted on could dig up, going back to 1963.
Might be so, but what about the numerous leaks documented in the report? [beyondnuclear.org]. What are the facts of the matter?
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Numerous incidents of unplanned releases of radioactivity
as opposed to, say, planned releases of radioactivity?
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Ignorance is thinking that just because you think something is rude or insensitive, it must be ignorant.
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Lenny: But that's where they leaked out of, Mr Burns.
Mr Burns: Put them back before someone trys to hock them on eBay. They aren't iPhone prototypes, you know!
Mr Smithers: I'm on it, Mr Burns.
My attemp to actually read the article (Score:5, Insightful)
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Try the executive summary (Score:2)
1. Regulatory oversight, authority and enforcement must be strengthened;
2. Buried pipes must be promptly replaced so that systems carrying radioactive effluent can be inspected, monitored, maintained and contained in the event of a leak;
3. The nuclear ind
NRC tritium propaganda (Score:2)
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Probably also working for a world free of nuclear families.
Coal (Score:5, Interesting)
So far nobody has died because of the nuclear industry's negligence. What we need is a probe of our coal industry, and expansion of the comparably clean nuclear engery, with research into minimizing and recycling nuclear waste for fuel.
Re:Coal (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing about this whining about nuclear plants is that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste [scientificamerican.com].
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That's really interesting, I had no idea of that.
But after reading that article, the title seems misleading. What was studied was contamination of the soil around the power plants.
That is not the same as comparing radiation levels of fly ash and nuclear waste.
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Yeah, they did have a correction at the bottom of page 2. It's still important to note though:
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
Divide by zero error (Score:3, Insightful)
You've been conned by a divide by zero error.
Re:Divide by zero error (Score:5, Funny)
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LOL++ I would flush my mod points on you both if I had them today.
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You guys need to RFA. We're talking about tritium which is a necessary by-product of most US plants and is not adequately contained. Nothing at all to do with dry cask storage or high-level nuclear waste.
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It's like saying there's more cyanide in ocean water than in a glass of cyanide, because there's more cyanide collectively in the ocean as a whole.
Huh?
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
That sounds nothing like your analogy at all.
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I saw that and found it meaningless, and certainly no "clarification" for the purposes of this thread; I would hope that shielded nuclear waste would release less radiation into the environment than unshielded coal ash. The point remains that while coal plants may produce more radiation per unit of energy created than nuclear plants, "ounce f
Nuke gets criticised - misdirect to coal (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole misdirection to coal thing is a trick and a waste of time anyway. We don't want dangerous power plants of any kind when we can have well regulated ones.
Nuclear has to keep it's promises and argue on it's own merits. This sort
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Most definitely experimental - good thing though (Score:2)
That is one reason why nuclear advocates will never ever give you any sort of result for a single operating plant and instead give you a rubbery figure for the benefits of nuclear power in general. The figures are never going to look so good for periods when tests are being performed on the plants early in their lifetimes so it's not really a fair tes
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"Don't let him drag you down with the bullshit - people have been raving about nuclear material coming out of the stacks for 40 years but nobody has been able to find anything yet despite it only being a matter of setting up an absorbion spectrometer to look at the flue gas."
????
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html [usgs.gov]
A team at my university did the same measurements with the same results. As you've said, it's a rather simple matter of taking and analyzing samples.
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Unlike me, they actually saw some heavy elements, but in their summary they wrote the following:
That's a pretty good answer to all of the stupid bullshit about coal ash being more radioactive than nuclear waste.
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Not really since people living downwind of coal fired power plants receive more radiation than people living downwind of nuclear powered plants.
Any yes I am leaving out those that lived near Chernobyl. That plant was a disaster from stop to bottom. It is a design that would never have been built in the West and never run the way that it was in the USSR.
Bring up Chernobyl went talking about western nuclear power plants is as out of place and clueless as bring up the Titanic as a reason to not take a Caribb
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Well considering we are talking about *groundwater* contamination with radioactive isotopes "downwind" is not really relevant.
Well PBMR have similar conta
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"Well PBMR have similar containment structures proposed "
Chernobyl had No containment building at all. Russia used to say that their reactors where so safe that there was no need of containment buildings. Truth was that was cheaper.
Pebble bed reactors are very different from Chernobyl. Pebble bed reactors are thermally stable.
Also the there are no PBMRs yet in service. So why bring them up at all since it is a clear red herring.
Also the AP-1000 is totally different design from Chernobyl as well in every way
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You may not be aware but PBMR reactors are proposed to be built without a concrete containment building for exactly that reason. Concrete and steel are the largest input cost to building reactors.
PBMR have radically different failure mods
Re:Coal (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a very low moment for Scientific American.
In case people haven't noticed coal kills real people in real ways already without this imaginary bullshit. This stuff really comes from a failed 1970s PR effort that went along the lines of "coal pollutes, why can't we do the same?" and should have died off before most readers here were even born.
I was looking at which elements were in fly ash with backscatter in an electron microscope in the 1990s for a while and never saw enough of anything heavy that made it out of the noise - and now we get this bullshit about it all being radioactive. Think about it - if there's all this stuff why hasn't anyone been able to detect it coming out of the stack sine the 1970s, after all the spectrometer you'd need to find it was invented over a century ago?
There's an easy answer - you've been conned by slick PR.
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John McPhee's book, Rising From The Plains [amazon.com], documents his time spent with John Love in Montana. Love was one of the pre-eminent geologists of the 20th century and the primary author of two state geologic maps of Montana. During the Uranium Boom of the 50's, Love was offered a job paying a million dollars/year because he was so good at finding uranium. He repeatedly found deposits where other geologists had said there wouldn't be any.
During their travels around Montana, Love described how uranium easily diss
Re:Coal (Score:4, Interesting)
Then some time over the last 40 years somebody should have been able to find some of it going up the stack. No luck so far despite a lot of monitoring.
I mostly mentioned my experience because usually some idiot insists that 100% of all ash is nuclear waste, and at least this dispels the extreme view. When I was looking at the ash I'd never even heard of this bullshit because it emerged and was buried as a laughing stock in the 1970s (apparently) and then was regurgitated again around 2000 or so.
It's irrelevant anyway. Get enough of it in your lungs and it will kill you without any of this pretend nuclear waste bullshit.
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Naturally regulation is essential. But the point is that at current levels of regulation, nuclear is much safer than coal.
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Yes, I already mentioned that they made a correction on page 2 about their original claim.
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I agree that the article is misleading, but I disagree that waste dumps for coal fly ash [wikipedia.org] are safer than nuclear waste dumps.
Fission products? (Score:2)
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I think you mean the American nuclear industry. Otherwise, there might be a few residents of Chernobyl who would like to have a word with you.
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Or the French, German, Japanese, UK, Canadian nuclear industries (among many more that could be listed). But because there happened to be one accident at a single nuclear power plant that clearly means all nuclear plants are unsafe!
Fluffy bunny view of nuclear power is wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuclear works - but there's no point of all this bullshit pretending it's clean, a solved problem and we don't have to be careful about safety when it's a dangerous, dirty process just like a lot of other things we use. The fluffy, clean, runs off magic beans without farting bullshit is counterproductive and has certainly held up research into waste management and better reactor designs in the USA. It's about 20 years
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And there are several magnitudes more of dead coal miners and people with lung cancer from coal ash-related pollution.
So nuclear power IS a clean and solved problem. At least compared to fossil-based fuels.
The fact that coal is worse is irrelevant (Score:2)
Yes, coal is much dirtier than nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power is inevitably going to have to be part of our power generation portfolio for the foreseeable future (probably a fairly significant part). But you can't wave away the real issues involving nuclear power by saying "but but but... coal is worse!" Nuclear energy is safe when we make it safe - by putting a lot of time, expense, and effort into safety systems and processes. If/when we let safety systems degrade, we neglect to train in safety procedu
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"Nuclear energy is safe when we make it safe - by putting a lot of time, expense, and effort into safety systems and processes. If/when we let safety systems degrade, we neglect to train in safety procedures, and we fail to conduct proper oversight of nuclear plant operations... then it won't be clean and safe anymore."
So? So far the track record for nuclear power plants is pretty good. Cynically speaking, one Chernobyl every 80 years is _still_ better than fossil fuel.
Re:Coal (Score:5, Informative)
The Soviet military invaded the plant for a "scientific test" and held the technicians at gunpoint while they bypassed every security feature that site had.
Umm, bullshit. The test was scheduled by the plant crew. It was originally supposed to be held during the day when more experienced operators were on duty but was moved to the night shift because the USSR's persistent electrical shortages would not allow the idling of a reactor during peak demand. The Soviet military had nothing to do with it until the disaster happened nor was anybody held at gunpoint and forced to conduct the test.
On a side note, I've often wondered why the thought of having the more experienced operators come in and work the night shift didn't cross anyone's mind. I guess communism doesn't encourage standing out from the pack and suggesting such "novel" ideas....
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Mr. Hightower? [illinoistimes.com] Is that you?
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Chernobyl killed 31, with another 4,000 cancer deaths expected. Maybe you meant the American nuclear industry?
The jist of the issue is true, however: the NRC has turned into a rubber-stamp machine, in favor of the industry. That's probably the only way that many of the aging power plants will get recertified (remember, few reactors have been built in the last 20 years.)
Some plants have serious issues, for example the fire safety problem a
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Wow, even the official report into Chernobyl had 56 people die, in actuality many more did.
What about a probe of the Nuclear Industry, I'm sure it's got many more dirty little secrets hidden. We could uncover theirs as well.
Compared to what? Coal? Because that's the only
Figures (Score:4, Insightful)
Numberous aviation accidents between the years 1905 and 2009 may indicate the FAA is not doing it's job, either.
Re:Figures (Score:4, Insightful)
And since this submission is from mdsolar, I think we must take issue with the number of people who have died as a result of exposure to the sun between the years 1905 and 2009.
Or the number of people dying while digging coal and oil out of the ground.
Re:Figures (Score:5, Insightful)
More people died this month alone from coal power than have died from all the commercial nuclear power accidents in the US.
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As well as oil power. [washingtonpost.com]
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Yea, I read about that. And this one, I lived in Anacortes last summer, the refineries at night remind me of Blade Runner
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36146392/ns/us_news-life/ [msn.com]
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They track airplane/novociane accidents?
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Nice Try (Score:2, Informative)
Nice try mdsolar. Maybe the mods are too stupid to realize you submit every story with a noted bias against nuclear plants but I'm not. All the other stories about the leak are submitted by this guy.
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What's funny is that he's submitted like 10 or 11 stories in just the last 3 months on this plant.
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Ignorance is bliss.
Let us now stereotype (Score:2)
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I can't see the nuclear reactors from where I live, but you'd think that the 30 or 50 of them would lead to numerous transformed monstrous animals, but all we've got are jackalopes. They do make a nice sandwich spread, but so far no buildings have been destroyed with laser beams coming out their eyes.
Impressive! (Score:2)
at least 102 reactor units
You guys have that many? Good on ya!
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101,119 Megawatts from 104 reactors, 1 building and 30 planned or proposed.
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The U.S. has more watts of nuclear than any other country.
We also have more watts in general, so the above sort of gets lost in comparisons.
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But the big problem is that we have more 'wuts' in general. And they just get lost.
A better source... (Score:2, Informative)
The NRC’s regulations focus on systems necessary to safely operate the plant or safely shut it down in case of an emergency. These safety systems’ buried piping is subject to inspection and testing requirements laid out in agency regulations and
Tritium exposure is relatively benign (Score:4, Informative)
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And the level of contamination in the surrounding soil and water is far less than what you get around even the cleanest of coal plants.
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Tritium in coal? (Score:2)
PDFs missing (Score:1)
There are two links in the original article that supposedly point to PDFs of the list of events. Both links are returning Page Not Found.
Okay, but what does it mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this... for instance:
at least 102 reactor units are now documented to have had recurring radioactive leaks into groundwater from 1963 through February 2009.
(which is a broken link from the linked article/page)
So the NRC is a 50 year epic fail? That leaks are increasing? Increasing... post-Regan/post-90's/post-40-year-old-reactors? No implied pattern? Caused by what... maintenance failures? Expected wear? Unexpected wear? Lack of oversight?
Sorry, I just tend to take a somewhat guarded view to statements that amount to, "It's all f*cked up!" and not much more.
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It's mdsolar, he sells solar panels online and regularly posts these anti-nuclear FUD tinged posts.
You do the math.
Better Subject Line Needed (Score:4, Funny)
This is not Chernobyl (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to notice that there is a lot of FUD and misinformation out there (not just from mdsolar and Beyond Nuclear) regarding nuclear power. This is helped in part because of ignorance by the general public. It's important to understand that there is a wide range of radioactive sources. Most of them are naturally occurring, or occur is such small amounts that they present no health hazard.
Radiation exposure is usually measured in Rem (or mRem). Let's take a look at some common activities [nyc.gov] and see how they compare.
One chest X ray (8 mRem)
One mammogram (70 mRem)
One X ray of the abdomen (300 mRem)
One renal nuclear medicine procedure (310 mRem)
One CT head scan (3000 mRem)
CAT scan of whole body (5000 mRem)
As you can see, there is a wide variance of radiation sources. Most people in the US receive approximately 300 mRem / year from natural background radiation sources (primarily from radon and sun exposure.) So, how much radiation exposure do you need to cause bodily damage [epa.gov]?
There is no agreed-upon level which is considered "safe", however there is relatively clear agreement on thresholds where radiation has noticeable effects on the human body. (NOTE: These are listed in Rem, not mRem)
Changes in blood chemistry (5-10 Rem)
Nausea (50 Rem)
Fatigue (55 Rem)
Vomiting (70 Rem)
Hair loss (75 Rem)
Diarrhea (90 Rem)
Hemorrhage (100 Rem)
Possible death (400 Rem)
Death within 1-2 weeks (1000 Rem)
Damage to central nervous system (2000 Rem)
Death within days (2000 Rem)
But what about cancer? The risk for cancer can be increased by radiation exposure, which resulted in increased mutation rates of cell growth. The EPA [epa.gov] estimates that in a group of 10,000 people 2,000 of them will die from cancer. If each person received 1 Rem (not mRem) of non-natural ionizing radiation exposure accumulated over their lifetime, 2,006 people would die from cancer.
So, now that we have an idea of just how bad different levels of radiation exposure are, what about these tritium leaks that have got certain people so upset? The highest reading that these monitoring wells have read was 2.45 microcuries / liter. This translates into roughly 425 mRem / year (assuming it was not diluted). 425 mRem is substantially higher than the current NRC limits, but still much too low to present a health hazard.
When people hear words like "nuclear reactor piping leak" they naturally assume that high-level radioactive particulates are getting out to the environment. The fact is that the incident at Vermont Yankee represents a very small health hazard to the public.
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Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This
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Indeed, thanks for pointing that out. The sentence should have read;
This characteristic makes the radiation readily absorbed by surrounding cells.
Tritium leaks (Score:2)
On top of all this, most plants are not designed to contain tritium, and those that can contain it must somehow transfer it to another containment vessel.
No! No! NO! (Score:3, Funny)
Irrational fear and misinformation (Score:3, Interesting)
Canadian nuclear plants emit 40 times more tritium every day when functioning normally than the Vermont Yankee leak emitted in a year:
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-much-tritium-leaked-from-vermont.html [blogspot.com]
A 1 GW(e) natural gas turbine will emit about 9 curies/year,* which is 20 times the rate of radiation from the VT Yankee leak at its highest.
Oh, and natural gas "fracking" produces toxic and radioactive wastewater. This article from last summer discusses EPA tests that found nasties from the fracturing fluid in domestic well water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemicals-found-in-drinking-water-from-natural-gas-drilling [scientificamerican.com]
New York State is doing fracking in something called Marcellus shale. This article from last fall says that surface wastewater from these sites was found to contain Ra-226 in concentrations "thousands of times" the limit for drinking water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=marcellus-shale-natural-gas-drilling-radioactive-wastewater [scientificamerican.com]
This page
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/oilandgas.html [epa.gov]
says, "more than 18 billion barrels of waste fluids from oil and gas production are generated annually in the United States".
-Carl
* Radioactivity of fossil gas. This abstract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/3/259.abstract [oxfordjournals.org]
gives 200 Bq/m^3. It doesn't say where they measured, but given context of the paper I'll assume it was at the consumer end of the line, at STP. I don't know if gas used at electrical plants is any fresher, but I'll assume it's no more stale. Pure methane has an energy content of 55.5 kJ/g and a density of 667 g/m^3, or about 5 Wh(e)/L from a 50%-efficient combined-cycle plant. So about 40Bq/Wh, or 1 nanoCurie per Wh, or 9 Curies/GW-yr.
The real issue (Score:2)
Thoughts on responsibility (Score:2)
And this is why we actually need effective government.
There is something seriously wrong when a report can be written with a straight face that blames somebody other than the perpetrators for the problems they cause.
"You didn't make me stop" isn't a valid excuse for dumping waste, nor for ignoring existing LAWS.
Corporations need to grow up and have some personal responsibility, in a similar manner that Libertarians and Free Market Captialists, Randians, et at have been beating everyone over the head with pe
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I couldn't tell the difference between that and Budweiser.
Frosty piss tastes better.
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They're dams, not damns, and bypass structures to allow fish to pass dams have been around since the 17th century. They're called fish ladders, and there are dozens of them in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. There's one under construction in Montana right now.
As for large scale solar and wind installations, they're connected to the grid the exact same way a nuclear power plant is: a high voltage transmission line or two. It's not like the nuclear power plant is going to be built
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It will be built in a remote location, the same as any other power plant.
CWLP [google.com] (coal and natural gas) is within the city limits (look to the right, you can see the smokestacks).
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Zooming out some on that image, It looks like it is on the edge of the city. This would make sense to keep transmission lines to a minimum while still being away from most of the city. I see this one every morning, though in this image it doesn't look like it is running:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Shores_Generating_Station [wikipedia.org]
Hell of a ugly plume to see in the winter.
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Doh, my comment about the image was refering to a maps.google.com url that I removed:
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=9891548025180463408&q=herbert+a.+wagner+generating+station&hl=en&cd=1&cad=src:pplink&ei=JPbRS4WsEZD8zASv_cDJBA [google.com]
and its sister plant I linked to above
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=7577988005272051506&q=herbert+a.+wagner+generating+station&hl=en&cd=1&cad=src:pplink&ei=uPbRS53uO5u0zASylqSIBQ [google.com]
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Unlike other "news" sources, Slashdot allows voices that contradict the usual preferences to show up as stories. Other organizations *cough*Fox*cough* are managed much more tightly, so none of their coverage ever contradicts the party line without substantially negative connotations to go along with it. Slashdot is as much or more discussion-driven as it is headline-driven, and I'm convinced the editors have a habit of letting through inflammatory articles on purpose, in order to drive up comment particip
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Slashdot like government regulation, so long as the regulation agrees with their prejudices. Just like everyone else does.