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New Contamination Found At Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant
Potentially Dangerous Element Found In Soil At Nuclear Plant
VERNON, Vt. - Calls for a shutdown of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant are being repeated after health officials said another chemical was found contaminating the plant's grounds.
Vermont Yankee said there was no public threat from the cesium 137 found in soil samples taken from the plant. But experts said the element is more dangerous than the tritium discovered in a recent leak.
The Vermont Department of Health said the samples had contamination levels 12 times higher than normal. A plant spokesman said it's unclear where it came from, saying that it could have been from a fuel failure eight years ago.
The news comes soon after Vermont Yankee discovered the source of tritium that was detected in monitoring wells.
Experts said cesium 137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, can potentially be dangerous.
"It has what's called a half life of about 30 years, meaning it will decay, it will transform itself into another element, which happens to be barium 137," said Dave McDonald of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. "And that, in turn, gives off gamma radiation, which is not friendly to people."
U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., is calling again for the immediate shutdown of the reactor at Vermont Yankee.
"It's going to be up to the plant to show they are getting it right, and I think they need to shut down until they have found everything that needs to be found," Hodes said.
Vermont Yankee said the contaminated soil will soon be shipped off the site and disposed of in an appropriate area.
A public meeting has been planned to discuss the issues at the plant, but the time and location have not been determined.
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16 Comments so far
Show All"Vermont Yankee said the contaminated soil will soon be shipped off the site and disposed of in an appropriate area."
What, exactly, is an "appropriate area"? We are up to our ears in radioactive mine tailings, processing byproducts, spent fuel, irradiated and contaminated equipment. We have no idea what to do with it, except keep adding to the stew.
One of the problems with these plants and facilities that is rarely mentioned, but constant exposure to hard radiation can cause mutations of a sort in metals and other materials. It can become brittle and fail for instance. Then, we get leaks into the soil and waterways. This is one of the facts that makes nuclear plants shut down after a period of years. Cracked valves can be replaced, but pipes encased in concrete and buried cannot. Hence the discovered leaks, when someone tests the surrounding soil.
However, few, if any, multi-billionaire$ live close to nuclear plants, mines or manufacturers, so it really makes no difference, does it?
Does it??
What, exactly, is an "appropriate area"?
____________________________________
The White House garden?
NIMBY.
>>What, exactly, is an "appropriate area"?
In the past it was Indian Reservations. Today it some poor third world country like Haiti or Somalia.
The approprite place to dispose of it is at the seam where two techtonic plates plates pass over each other. dropit to the sea floor in the right place it gets sucked under into the Mantle of the Earth, where most of the radioactives come from anyway. Harmless to noone. Expect maybe to mole-men
This was studied years ago but noone could figure out how to make a big profit from it so it was abandoned in lieu of Yucca mtn approach where you can charge forever to hold the waste in man made containment.
Vermont Yankee will eventually melt down, and then they'll have to close the plant. Problem solved. Sort of... except for massive radiation releases, but what the heck, a little radiation is probably good for you, or so they told us as school kids back in the 50's when nuclear produced electricity was going to be too cheap to meter.
Really people? Cs137 isn't the best stuff ever, but you can find it in your freakin coca-cola if you look long enough and hard enough. It's called trace. HOWEVER, I agree that it is a concern if they find it near a nuke plant, because that is a likely source of it. That being said, did they say how much they found? Maybe one speck of dust worth? That's not exactly going to hurt anyone.
Even IF VT Yankee melted down tomorrow, it wouldnt effect ANYBODY (except the folks that work there). Have you ever seen the big concrete dome? Yeah, it's made to totally enclose that sort of thing. We probably got more radiation (even in PA) from Chernobyl (no dome, melted down... oh yeah the graphite fire blew the crap into the air...REALLY bad design) than we did from TMI (dome contained almost everything, no graphite fire bc it doesnt USE graphite)
I really wish people would get a clue about radiation and stop living in fear.
"That being said, did they say how much they found? Maybe one speck of dust worth? That's not exactly going to hurt anyone."
From the article: The Vermont Department of Health said the samples had contamination levels 12 times higher than normal. A plant spokesman said it's unclear where it came from, saying that it could have been from a fuel failure eight years ago.
"I really wish people would get a clue about radiation and stop living in fear."
Yeah, I know. A little radiation is probably good for you, right? Problem is, radiation dosage is cumulative.
When (note, not if) a meltdown occurs, unlike the partial meltdown at TMI, the nuclear fuel pools at the bottom of the containment building. It is so hot that it melts through or burns through anything, and then it hits the groundwater, and while not actually a nuclear explosion, it will explosively spatter and splatter radioactive material into the environment. The design of the floor of the reactor building is, looking down at it, usually convex. This shape is supposed to spread the nuclear fuel about so much that fission cannot continue. In theory. If all of the melted fuel were to gather in one location such that it is a contiguous body of molten fuel, although we have always been told a nuclear plant "cannot explode", I do not see how this is true if there is enough fuel in one place to cause a runaway fission reaction, which is exactly what a nuclear bomb is. At TMI there were one or more hydrogen explosions inside the reactor containment. There was much fear that enough hydrogen could accumulate to produce an explosion, a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, not a nuclear explosion, that would breach the containment and spread nuclear fuel into the environment.
"Even IF VT Yankee melted down tomorrow, it wouldnt effect ANYBODY (except the folks that work there)."
When one of these horrific machines finally does melt down its good to know that you will actually go there to record the story... since of course there will be no danger to you outside the plant.
Just because the dome remains (not guaranteed, btw) does not mean the radiation all remains inside.
In fact, rusting and irreparable internals guarantee that it will not be, even without all the massive careless abuses that industry people like to claim will not be repeated again the second that such things become profitable again: dumping waste into the ocean in rustable metal cannisters, storing waste in open-bottom pits, blowing contaminated pressurizer gases out into the atmosphere as a regular prelude to cleaning.
..
I do not wish to confuse the motives of large players in the industry with individual posters, some of whom have comments about nuclear plants that are quite informative despite being in favor of their continuation. However, the rhetorical line that claims ignorance on the part of the population in general and those against nuclear energy in particular is badly misplaced. Major players in the industry goes through considerable trouble to create ignorance. They count on ignorance so heavily as to threaten employees with both legal and illegal consequences for characterizing plants and incidents and YES, accidents in ways the industry finds unfavorable.
They do not share all this information with employees either, BTW.
The odds of the Yankee dome surviving a meltdown intact and without giving up an increased % of its deadly cargo are particularly slim, BTW. The plant has and has had enough problems in comparison to similar plants to make it a particular source of data for researchers preparing lawsuits within the industry.
Wish that we would take the unutterably great environmental crisis SERIOUSLY!!!
Contamination from Chernobyl? Um, you mean the accident in USSR in 1986? How could it have found its way to Vermont? Are you saying it floated there from 24 years ago? Not likely, eh?