Much higher tritium levels found at nuclear plant:
A radioactive substance recently found in groundwater monitoring wells at a Vermont nuclear plant has turned up again at levels more than nine times those previously reported and more than 37 times higher than a federal safe drinking water limit, officials said Thursday.
Officials at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, state Health Department and federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission said a newly dug monitoring well at the Vernon reactor turned up a reading of nearly 775,000 picocuries per liter. It was by far the highest reading reported yet for tritium, which has been linked to cancer when ingested in large amounts.
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.
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News of the new reading came nearly a month after the Jan. 7 announcement that tritium had been discovered in a monitoring well at the Vernon reactor. No source has yet been found.
Plant spokesman Robert Williams said in an e-mail Thursday that the new reading is “good news” because it could indicate plant technicians searching for the leak are zeroing in on a source.
“The good news is that one newly installed well, located just to the east of the plant’s condensate water storage tank and some underground piping, appears to be closer to the source because its concentration is 774,825 picocuries per liter,” Williams wrote in the e-mail.
Wow, that “good news” has to set some sort of record for spin.
Just wondering–what would it take in the way of a radiation leak or other “incident” for the owner of a nuclear plant to say, “We have a really big problem”? Would it take a near-meltdown of a core, ala Three Mile Island? A catastrophe like Chernobyl? And when do we conclude that after doing this commercial nuclear power plant stuff for a smidge over 52 years that we really don’t have the hang of it yet?
Related:
as a generally pro-nuke sort, all I can say is they sure missed the proper spin:
“After 52 years of in-the-field R&D, we’ve finally figured out how to produce commercially-viable supplies of tritium – by randomly irradiating ground water. We can now start building fusion power plants…” ;)