I’ve mentioned recently the tritium leaks that have been detected at aging US nuclear plants (see Tidbits, More on nuclear leaks, and Tritium for everyone!), and now the news is getting worse in one location…
Tritium hot zone expands.: Rutland Herald Online:
The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be “a very large area” at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.
Because the area is so big, according to William Irwin, radiological health chief, there are many potential sources of radioactive water at this particularly high concentration of tritium.
“This is a very large area that encompasses many potential sources of water at this concentration of tritium, including the condensate storage tank and the systems and components of the advanced off-gas system,” Irwin said late Monday afternoon.
He said the area of contamination was roughly from the reactor building to the Connecticut River.
Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear said Monday the new well with the highest level of contamination saw its concentration drop a little on Sunday to 2.38 million picocuries per liter, but went higher on Monday, to 2.52 million picocuries per liter of water. The federal standard for drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter.
…
The first indication of the contamination showed up in November in one of three 2007 monitoring wells and the levels quickly rose starting in January. New wells, closer to the reactor and turbine buildings, show contamination in extremely high levels.
“We have to uncover pipes and see what’s leaking. And get a better image of flow times and flow directions,” he said. Water flows west to east on the site, toward the Connecticut River. Some of the monitoring wells are 15 to 20 feet from the river, while others are 100 feet or 200 feet away from the river.
Irwin said the Health Department is starting to test wells at private residences along Gov. Hunt Road, where Vermont Yankee is sited.
He said all of the private wells the state is testing are within a quarter of a mile of the plant and the point of the highest level of contamination.
Irwin said the state was looking to add five or six private residences to the state’s weekly testing program, but he said the state had to get landowners’ permissions. He said the department wanted to publish those test results, with the names of the individual homes kept confidential.
He said the Department of Health is testing private wells at Vernon Elementary School, which he estimated was just under a quarter of a mile of the contamination. The state is also testing water at two area farms – the Miller farm, which he said was about a quarter of a mile north of the plant, and the Blodgett farm, which, he said, was a mile from the plant “as the crow flies.”
In addition, the Vernon Green nursing home and residential center is also being tested, he said. He estimated Vernon Green was about a half-mile south of the plant.
There are no municipal water systems in Vernon, he said, and every business and home is dependent on its own well.
Irwin said the Vernon health officer had done some initial private well testing when the tritium contamination problem first was made public.
Irwin said all deep wells are testing free of tritium.
This situation neatly explains why a lot of people “don’t like” nuclear power: We have to do everything exactly right, or we could have a huge problem. Other ways of generating electricity can certainly have design and construction flaws, but for coal or natural gas or wind or solar such an error typically means you get less electricity than planned or even a complete shutdown of the facility and no electricity for a while. When we have leaks of radioactive material into ground water 126 times higher than legal limits for drinking water, that’s a whole other story.
Yeah, no one ever got killed by a natural gas explosion.
Tell me, how many people in the last year have been killed by drinking water with excess tritium?
Compared with… how many people have died in the past year from solar panel accidents? from windmills?
In the U.S. I’ll guess those numbers are 0, 11, and 2.
All far overshadowed by the number of people killed by methane explosions, or the 10′s of thousands of people who die in part due to coal particulates.
Try to keep things in perspective.
Tritium Leaks Trouble Nominees for Panel – NYTimes.com
Ah, yes–the body count argument. By all means let us not pay any attention to risk and the potential for immense problems. Surely there’s no such thing as cancer clusters near nuclear power plants, after all.
From one of the articles found with the above Googling (Let’s take cancer clusters seriously this time):
@Lou,
I was wondering – what do you think of space-based solar power?
The upfront costs are big, but on the positive side it is 1) much more efficient than ground-based solar PV’s, 2) it is a reliable source of base load power, 3) not directly polluting and out of sight, and 4) it’s cool.
SO: SBSP is certainly intriguing, but my gut instinct is that it’s yet another “beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact”. Said ugly fact being, as you pointed out, those horrendously high up-front costs.
The lure of SBSP is obvious–nearly uninterrupted, zero marginal GHG emissions electricity–but the costs are not just highly likely immense, but just as bad, very hard to determine beforehand. In one recent book on SBSP (Energy Crisis by Ralph Nansen; see page 172) says it would take a year’s worth of space launches at 2-3 flights per day, each carrying 100 tons (quite a bit more than the current US Space Shuttle), to build a single 5GW SBSP satellite. That’s a hell of a lot of heavy lifting out of the gravity well at considerable expense in dollars as well as embedded energy and emissions. But the expected payback would also be large.
Extrapolate those numbers to replace just half of the current US coal- and NG-fired electricity generation (let alone that of China, India, et al.), and you quickly conclude that a broad roll out of SBSP is an even bigger challenge than it seemed.