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Leaks Imperil Nuclear Industry; Vermont Yankee Among Troubled
VERNON, Vt. - The nuclear industry, once an environmental pariah, is recasting itself as green as it attempts to extend the life of many power plants and build new ones. But a leak of radioactive water at Vermont Yankee, along with similar incidents at more than 20 other US nuclear plants in recent years, has kindled doubts about the reliability, durability, and maintenance of the nation's aging nuclear installations.
A portion of a cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee reactor collapsed Wednesday, August 22, 2007. A broken 52” pipe was photographed spewing water into the ground, in the latest embarrassment for Yankee owner Entergy Corporation, the nation’s second-largest nuclear utility. Vermont health officials say the leak, while deeply worrisome, is not a threat to drinking water supplies or the Connecticut River, which flows beside the 38-year-old plant, nor is it endangering public health. But the controversy is threatening to derail the nuclear plant's bid, now at a critical juncture, for state approvals to extend its operating life by 20 years when its license expires in two years. Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors, Vermont Yankee's owners, and state officials are tracing the source of the radioactivity and searching for other leaks in the labyrinth of below-surface pipes on the plants' property about 10 miles from the Massachusetts border.
The timing couldn't be worse for the nuclear industry, coming as it attempts a broad rebirth as a green energy source in the battle against global warming; the reactors do not emit greenhouse gases that cause the atmosphere to warm.
Memories of the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are receding and many in the public are taking a second look at nuclear. President Obama last week endorsed a new generation of nuclear power in his State of the Union address, and for the first time in decades, more than 20 new plants have been proposed.
But the leaks have the potential to slow, if not stop, the bandwagon. Crucial voices are calling for caution. "I am appalled by the safety procedures not only at Vermont Yankee, but at other nuclear facilities across the country who have failed to inspect thousands of miles of buried pipes at their facilities,'' US Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said last week. Earlier this month, Markey asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate the integrity, safety, inspections, and maintenance of buried pipes at nuclear plants.
Critics say the problems with buried pipes are evidence the plants are too old and poorly maintained to continue to safely operate as many - including plants in Seabrook, N.H., and Plymouth - seek extensions of their original 40-year operating licenses. Nuclear advocates, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, say that while the leaks of a radioactive form of water containing tritium are serious, those that have contaminated groundwater have not exceeded regulatory limits or harmed the structural integrity, operation, or safety of the plants.
"No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on the health and safety of the public,'' said Tom Kauffman, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a prominent industry group. In 2006, the industry took it upon itself to search more aggressively for problems with buried piping and tritium leaks.
"These are the most highly regulated, highly monitored industrialized [power plants] in the nation,'' Kauffman said. He said the nation's 104 nuclear plants are some of the greenest sources of energy in the country. "It is very important to keep these plants working.''
Indeed, Vermont Yankee provides roughly one-third of the Green Mountain State's electricity and, to the delight of many business owners and residents, it is inexpensive. That low cost - and the 650 jobs the plant provides - has won it longstanding political support in the state. Still, antinuclear sentiment, always an undercurrent in this liberal state because of the dangers of radioactive releases and waste, accelerated after the plant received NRC permission to increase its power output by 20 percent in 2006.
The next year, a cooling tower partially collapsed, and in 2008, another tower sprung a leak. The plant's safety was not compromised, but the events stoked public concerns about the adequacy of plant maintenance. More than 200 people, evoking the 1970s grass-roots efforts against the construction of nuclear plants in New England, took part in some portions of a 127-mile march from Brattleboro to the state capital, Montpelier, earlier this month.
Then earlier this month, Vermont Yankee's owner, Louisiana-based Entergy Corp., told state and federal regulators it had discovered elevated levels of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, in a 30-foot-deep monitoring well on the property as part of the voluntary industry effort to look for leaks. Two weeks later, Entergy said it found much higher levels of tritium - along with Cobalt-60, another radioactive isotope - in a 40-foot-long trench that houses pipes. It is unclear whether the two areas of contamination are related.
Tritium, while found in nature in small amounts, is produced as a byproduct in nuclear power plants. The US Environmental Protection Agency says tritiated water increases the risk of cancer if someone drinks it, but the radiation is low-level and leaves the body quickly. The agency has set a drinking water standard for tritium of 20,000 picocuries - a measure of radioactivity - per liter.
The test well, which is not used for drinking water, has registered increasingly higher levels of tritium in recent weeks - topping out at 29,000 picocuries per liter. The trench had levels in the millions of picocuries per liter. Vermont Yankee is drilling seven more wells to see how widespread the problem is.
"Obviously we are taking this very seriously,'' said plant spokesman Rob Williams, as he guided a reporter through a maze of security fencing to view one of the monitoring wells near the Connecticut River. He stressed that the company was doing everything it could to figure out the extent of the problem and its source. The plant told regulators about the elevated levels as soon as they were found, even though they were below levels required to be reported, he said.
Across the country, tritium leaks have not prevented re-licensing of the nation's nuclear plants by the NRC, which has extended the operating life of 59 reactors and is considering or expected to consider 37 other applications in the next seven years.
In December, the agency issued a report noting that an evaluation of buried piping showed that corrosion, where leaks can spring from, tends to occur in small areas where anti-corrosion coating is damaged. The agency concluded that its oversight of the issue is adequate, but spokesman Neil Sheehan said in an e-mail that the NRC is "a learning agency'' and would continue to review any new information and change policies as needed to ensure safety.
The leaks at Vermont Yankee have caused a credibility problem for the plant's owner. State officials have charged that Entergy officials misled them on a number of occasions by denying the plant had buried piping that could carry radioactive material. Last week, Governor Jim Douglas, a longtime supporter of the plant, asked legislators to delay a vote needed for the plant's re-licensing. He also called for a state board to stop considering Entergy's request to spin off Vermont Yankee into a subsidiary with its other nuclear plants, a move that the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, a consumer and environmental non-profit, says could limit the parent company's financial liability when the plant shuts down.
"What has happened at Vermont Yankee is a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated,'' Douglas said in a statement last week. Until questions are answered, he said, "decisions about the long-term future of the plant should not be made.''
Entergy, in a statement, said that it was disappointed by Douglas's decision but is conducting an investigation "to get to the bottom of how and why the company provided conflicting information to state officials.''
The Brattleboro-based New England Coalition, longtime critics of nuclear energy, said the buried-pipe problem at Vermont Yankee underscores a far larger one for the nation - its nuclear plants are old.
"It is the canary in the coal mine,'' said coalition codirector Clay Turnbull.
35 Comments so far
Show AllObviously, using inaccessible buried pipes to carry tritiated water or other poisonous materials that can contaminate groundwater was a terrible idea. But, this or that engineering flaw doesn't invalidate nuclear power generation.
Dam failures - which, unlike nuclear electric generation have actually killed a lot of people do not lead to calls to abolish dams or hydropower.
"Dam failures which, unlike nuclear electric generation have actually killed a lot of people" amazing... sure is easy to make believe when you ignore all history and facts. Nobody died around Chernobyl, nobody died around Three Mile Island due to radiation leaks, child leukemia rates are not higher near nuclear plants... damns create/leave toxic chemicals that will be toxic for a time period longer than mankind has lived in buildings... what does pjd stand for Permanently Just Dumb? I hope not...
Do you have documentation about the *numbers* (not percentages) of people dying from the TMI incident? I can't find a science-based source that gives credible numbers.
Everything I find gives handwaved numbers, or unmotivated percentages that are meaningless without reference numbers (as should be obvious: if the normal rate is 2 people, and after some event 3 people died, we have a nominal 50% increase...but a meaningless one because the granularity is too large)
The article "Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island (Nuclear) Disaster" (posted on CD on April 3, 2009) gives some indication of what really went on at TMI ... and of why bad news that conflicts with the official story tends not to get the imprimatur of science.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/03-9
I don't know what to say. I read through your cite, and checked the references pointed to by it. The claims in the article aren't supported by the references they give. They're just more handwaving.
As far as your statement goes that "bad news that confliicts with the official story tends not to get the imprimatur of science", I can't dispute it. Bureaucrats automatically cover up, there's no question about that.
But looking at negative results doesn't reveal whether there was a coverup. A competent coverup of bad results and a natural lack of bad results look the same at the end.
In the case of 9/11 and the WTC towers, we have some rock-solid information --raw data-- that can't be suppressed or handwaved away (though Goddess knows they try!). With TMI, we don't. We only have interpretations. I'm just not paranoid enough to automatically discount a statement that says the data is, *at worst*, equivocal.
Cancers currently cause about 1/4 of all deaths in the US.
Do you imagine that a low percentage of people downwind of TMI would have died of cancer even had the plant not existed?
The normal rate, then, would be about 2 people for every 8, though there might be some changes around TMI before the incident because of more or less chemicals in the environment -- or because of the higher background radiation even before the incident.
Sorry for the confusion, B. My use of the numbers 2 and 3 were merely illustrative of the granularity problem. When the population is tiny, practically any change looks enormous.
Saying 25% of deaths are caused by cancer doesn't tell us much, any more than saying 100% are caused by heart failure. What we need to know, as you imply, is what the local run rate was longitudinally for each population cohort x effective cause of death, and what changes in those run rates are correlated with the construction and operation of TMI, and with the failure.
The dams are not inherently toxic, do not have to contain the water for 25,000 years, do not require uranium mining, do not create waste problems in the same sense or to the same degree.
There are lots of ways the analogy does not work.
And while a single engineering flaw certainly need not invalidate an entire technology, a technology may be inherently too risky for corporate management.
The nuclear industry has a long history of governmental secrecy, corporate opacity, regulatory conflict of interest and howlingly absurd individual error.
Can you even imagine engineers plugging a coolant pipe with a basketball? It beggars belief, but the record claims it happened.
I have to wonder too that anyone would design a system to run water over metal pipes and create it in such a way that people cannot get in and repair it. But apparently someone with a lot more engineering savvy in some ways that I will ever have decided that was a wonderful idea.
Those people will likely be just as crazy somewhere else, but they should not be given uranium to play with.
Nuclear power has killed people - at TMI and Chernobyl as well as in the various industrial accidents that occur more or less as in other industries.
Actually, there's quite a growing consensus that Dams are problematic, not just from a safety standpoint, and growing pressure to remove them. It's nearly impossible to get a permit for a big Hydro dam, the environmental and cultural preservation groups have been very effective on this.
Dam failures don't ordinarily render the downstream areas useless for the next 1000 years. Entergy appears to be planning to dump the plant on a subsidiary, and run away from any liability. The fact remains: mining, processing, transporting, and disposing of uranium is far more dangerous than the nuclear industry would like us to believe. France is also having problems with their nukes; dumping waste off the coast of Somalia isn't exactly helping anyone. Nuclear energy offered great promise; they just never figured out how do make it safe.
Leaks do not imperil the nuclear industry, but rather expose it for what it is: unreliably managed by profiteers and extremely dangerous to our health and survival and that of our descendants, who will have to be keepers of nuclear waste dumping grounds for thousands upon thousands of years (a lovely legacy!).
All nuclear power plants are eventually owned by Monty Burns, who will in turn appoint Homer Simpson as safety officer. This is no metaphor, this is the way the system works.
However safe it starts off, which everyone has his own opinion about and you can argue all you like, that is the way it will always devolve.
And then there's the problem of what to do with the nuclear waste. Oh yeah, forgot, that's someone else's problem.
No danger hu! Good, I was worried there for a minute. Just think you'll be able to walk around in the dark using the green glow from your glass of water as a flashlight. What a bunch of Maroons! Anything for a profit!
We sure need a bunch more of these dangerous, dirty, mal-tech, monetary and political power concentrating water boilers....
And America continues to resist real conservation.
I ask: When will Michelle put up a clothesline?
Maintanence of a facility costs money. In order to enhance profits in a "For Profit" system the Corporations will always be tempted to cut corners.
This is one reason Hospitals in the US, as example , have higher rates of infections due to hospital visits then in other countries.
You make more PROFIT if you cut corners.
Cutting corners so as to increase profits can lead to a law suit. Thus the cry for "Tort Reform" and the Governments passing of legislation to limit the liability of Nuclear Plants.
Now one of the problems with Nuclear power is that cutting corners when it comes to safety issues can have catastrophic consequences. This unlike generating electricity from other means.
So it becomes a question of how far and how intrusive is the Government willing to be when it comes to ensuring the safety of these plants (Given the nature of a for profit industry to cut corners) in an atmosphere of "The Government and regulations are always bad?"
Do people really think the Nuclear industry can "self regulate" ?
This is SOP for the corporate Medusa. Inadequate regulation lets them play a shell game with profits and accountability:
"Entergy's request to spin off Vermont Yankee into a subsidiary with its other nuclear plants..."
The new entity lets them pass along the costs of their business after they have taken the profits. The Supreme Court endorses this and makes the same offer to all personhoods. If you get arrested for robbing a bank, just change your name and tell the court your previous personhood did it.
"The agency has set a drinking water standard for tritium of 20,000 picocuries - a measure of radioactivity - per liter."
Natural levels of tritium are 10-30 picocuries per liter. The European Union drinking water standard is about 1/7 what the EPA allows. It readily replaces hydrogen and since we're comprised of mostly water it will readily replace hydrogen in our bodies if ingested. Even with a relatively short half-life of 12 years I don't see how the amounts of this stuff will decline with aging reactors and businesses willingness to cut costs any way possible.
Here's an article about the pollution occurring around the Chesapeake Bay.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16866
"No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on the health and safety of the public,'' said Tom Kauffman, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a prominent industry group.
I'm very skeptical. It's also very possible that people have developed cancer due to exposure to tritium. Plus it would be one of the more difficult isotopes to prove a connection to a cancer.
Since the general population has had an almost geometric rise in autoimmune problems, like allergies and cancer, and since both chemicals and radiation negatively impact immune systems, Kauffman simply cannot possibly know what he claims to know and could not regardless of the data.
He just represents a company that thinks the odds are fair that it can get away without being sued, or sued too badly.
Part of the calculations probably falls the way it does because the more dangerous work in most plants is subcontracted.
Nucular power mongers are not just styoopid; they're NUKING FUTS!
It's always amazed me that I never hear the "leak" problem discussed as a reason to avoid nuclear. There are far more leaks than explosions and people can probably understand/relate to them better.
I have found it difficult to get people to relate to leaks, perhaps because the information is less dramatic, at least outwardly.
But the entire lot of light water reactors leak and will leak worse. They pump water through metal pipes. The pipes rust and cannot be repaired. The have tried a lot of water treatments and they have catalogued a couple dozen kinds of rust, but basic story remains the same.
The pipes rust. People cannot enter key areas to repair. What goes in comes out.
The only reason Green Mountain nuclear energy is inexpensive is that the taxpayers are bearing all the risk. The risk is absurd.
Tritium! What about all the rest of the waste that is invisible to the senses until you die from it? Tritium's half life is only a little more than 12 years. And there's not a container made that will keep it or the other radioisotopes isolated from the environment.
All those assurances derived from wells, etc. are just more Homeland Security hype. Nobody is secure.
Plutonium-239 in spent fuel will remain hazardous to humans and other living beings for _hundreds of thousands of years_. All you creationists take heed.
Other radioisotopes remain hazardous for millions of years. Way longer than the human race will last, especially if we come into contact with nuclear-power-plant-produced "green" waste!
These wastes must be shielded for centuries and isolated from the living environment for millennia. No human power can assure that for Yucca Mountain or anywhere else.
Whose in charge of shielding and isolation? Police? Governments? The Roman empire didn't last long enough to do the job. The United States certainly won't. We're already on our way out after only 232 years.
Some elements, such as Iodine-131, have a short half-life (around 8 days) and thus they will cease to be a problem much more quickly than other, longer-lived, decay products but their activity is much greater initially. Those are the only ones the government will tell you about. And the NRC even lied about those in the "plume" from 3-mile Island.
Mr. Obama was only 18 years old during the Three Mile Island accident and probably has no idea of the lethal effects of the malfunction because his advisors want to bail out the energy industry and therefore lie about it or repeat lies that they have been told about it.
Nuclear power is not green! Carbon dioxide is not the world's most deadly problem. Clam shellers and Stone crabbers unite and teach the world what it needs to know about nukes.
Jeevee
"If you get arrested for robbing a bank, just change your name and tell the court your previous personhood did it." Good for the writer of this! He/she has an excellent sense of humor and has made a superb analogy.
"those that have contaminated groundwater have not exceeded regulatory limits"
"Two weeks later, Entergy said it found much higher levels of tritium - along with Cobalt-60"
"the radiation is low-level and leaves the body quickly."
"The agency concluded that its oversight of the issue is adequate"
Just nuts. They are playing with your life.
Yeah. One of the cute games is that emissions do not generally get measured when the plants are shut down.
And if you were going in to clean internal parts, wouldn't you be glad the blew some of that stuff outside of the plant before you entered?
Nice picture.
On Google I looked for the image of the Vermont Yankee leak with the greatest number of pixels. I saved the image on my computer. Next, I'm setting a document's margins to 0.5", inserting the picture nearly full page sized, writing a note with the picture, printing it out in color, and sending it to my senators.
Paul, please send your nice picture to President Obama too. In his State of the Union Address he said we need more nuclear power plants. He also mentioned 'clean coal'. He really needs help with the facts.
In the address he also asked if any of us had a good idea on how we could have universal health care without raising our national debt for us to please contact him. I have contacted him to tell him about Single Payer, Medicare for all. I guess he doesn't know about it because Nancy Pelosi took it off the table. When you contact him could you please mention this too? I see that two doctors went to the hotel where our Presdident was speaking to a Republican group. The doctors wanted to tell the President about Single Payer Medicare for all. They were arrested and taken away in hand cuffs.
If global warming becomes as bad as some scenarios suggest, and we haven't done much to replace fossil fuels, we may find these old nukes maintained, uprated and re-licensed over and over, even over 100 years. In a power rationed world, it might be a good thing to live near a nuke.
You don't want to be downwind or downstream. They all leak, though not all equally.
Since the inner parts cannot be effectively repaired, they will leak more as time goes on.
Besides, there are other, cheaper, cleaner ways to produce electricity. Wind and solar have absorbed an increasing market share since the 80's, and all without the heavy governmental subsidies that nukes receive.
There are reasons these guys are bucking for government funds instead of trying to lure private investors.
Nuclear power as we now know it is insane. I just spent more than an hour documenting this at this site but then evidently pressed a key that lost it.
Nuclear "power" is innately Entropic and a threat to DNA and RNA. As many at this site have observed, it cannot be controlled, mostly due to human error.
There is at least a century of evidence of the threat of the isolation of radiation. It cannot be isolated.
We are far better off with the isolation of light. At least by lasers we now have CDs and DVDs, etc.
We needs [sic] to get rid of the military. Conversion to wind and solar and related.
This is not an exercise in a Humanities Class. This is an exercise in Reality.
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“No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on the health and safety of the public,’’
TOTAL BULLSH!T!!!
Ask Gail Merrill.
Indian Point Nuclear plant leaks tritium laced water into the reservoir that serves Westchester County and used to also supply the Bronx. When the Bronx switched to getting it's water from a reservoir in the Poconos(!), incidence of breast cancer diverged, with the Bronx's stats improving dramaticly and Westchester's staying the same. Somehow a very poor Burrough of the City suddenly had much better health than one of the richest counties in the country. Coincidence?
Try to tell that to Gail. When she was diagnosed with BC and so were several of her friends and neighbors, she started doing the research and found the Bronx divergence, traced that back to the water and then traced the water problem back to the plant.
But there's another problem for Nukes and that is that at current consumption rates, we will use up ALL of the available Uranium on the planet in forty years. And most of the Uranium deposits are in places we don't get along with so well, like Iran and Russia. If we are so dumb as to build more of these monsters, we'll simply deplete quicker.
Mairead, TMI and 9/11 are being suppressed. The corporate MSM decides what 90% of the public gets to know. And they don't care about the other 10%. Doctors and nurses were arrested in Senate hearing rooms trying to ask about Single Payer and 90% of the public doesn't know about that.
How many people have seen the movie Silkwood or even realize it is based on a true story? And the JFK assassination? Coverups do work. And the worst of it is, people don't even want to hear the truth. The Corpocracy has convinced them they are powerless. Certainly it's told them they have to work harder for less and they are obeying. If it told them they had to crawl around on their hands and knees, they would be doing that.
It isn't just the power plants and dams rotting away. Airplanes, bridges, water systems, you name it. How long would our homes last if we never replaced the roof? Or our cars if we never changed the oil? This corpocracy is completely irresponsible about maintenance. And safety. We have a record rivaling the third world for hospital induced deaths. But that's Republicans for you. Profits come first. Much as I loathe Democrats, it's even worse when Republicans get to be committee chairs. But the majority of the public is completely ignorant of all this, although it's amazing about how well-informed they are about celebrities.
Thanks Pitchfork, for the great laugh. "That was a different personhood". Priceless! I'm still smiling...
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Radioactive water leaking into the ground next to the Connecticut River isn't dangerous? Okay. I propose a law stipulating that any industry or government official who advocates building more nuclear plants and claims existing ones are safe purchase property adjacent to said plants, build a house, dig a well, and raise their children there.
Great suggestion, BenFromEugene.
However, not quite sufficient.
There are thousands of radioactive sites in the U.S. that are not power plants but are ancillary to it. For example, the Fernald plant NW of Cincinnati that processed uranium. It had a huge checkered logo at its entrance that made people think it was a Purina pet food factory. It became a Superfund site taxpayers paid hundreds of millions to "clean up" (meaning move the radioactive contamination somewhere else, say a Navaho Reservation...). Most of the neighbors to that sie are downwind. Has anyone done an epidemiological mortality study? And all that "work" disappearing the radiation (and the evidence) added to the GDP.
Also, uranium fuel rods are/were milled off-site, often by small private contractors. Unknown to me in my youth, I lived down the street from one of them. Years later local activists finally got a cleanup: the ground all around it was heavily contaminated by milling residues. Cancers and deaths from cancers of neighbors were high. My father died from cancer, my mother survived breast cancer, my younger sister died of lung cancer, my best friend's mother up the street, lung cancer.
Hi, I'm from the gubment and I'm here to help you...
These contaminated sites are one big reason for our blossoming health care costs. And, note, cancers aren't the only problem; all kinds of endocrine issues as well, and skin issues. To say nothing of the contamination of the gene pool. And each contaminated site will be to a great degree unique in the health implications of its existence.
Finally, it is now generally understood that in major ways, the body burden of radiation is cumulative. We are in the proverbial slowly heating pot. Once we lose consciousness they can turn up the heat and render us at will. We won't know it happened. Quite humane if you think about it. It's so good to know we're in good hands with All State all the time.
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