Aletho News

NRC confirms 2005 tritium leak at Vermont Yankee

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Monday that a whistleblower told the truth last week when he told a member of the Vermont Legislative Oversight Panel there was an earlier radioactive leak of tritium at the Vermont Yankee plant in the same area that is the focus of the current leak.

The confirmation by Donald Jackson, branch chief of reactor projects for NRC’s Region One, again raised the question of why Entergy Nuclear executives repeatedly told Vermont regulators last year there were no underground pipes at the Vernon reactor carrying radionuclides. Jackson said the leak was in 2005, not two years ago, as the whistleblower had originally told Arnie Gundersen, a member of the oversight panel and a consultant to the Vermont Legislature.

Entergy Nuclear spokesman Larry Smith said late Monday he could not discuss the 2005 tritium leak, saying he was still waiting for a letter from Entergy attorneys before talking about the issue.

Entergy Nuclear is excavating the area near the advanced off-gas building, in particular an underground pipe tunnel connected to the building, which is the same area the whistleblower pointed to. The whistleblower said the area in question was in a “high-radiation” area and involved a “radioactive steam leak” which drained into a drain pit.

Jackson said that the exact location of the current leak is still not known, although the advanced off-gas pipe tunnel is of strong interest, so it was impossible to say the two tritium leaks came from the same spot.

Jackson said that the NRC makes no distinction between “underground” and “buried” pipes, something that Entergy has made several times in the past couple of weeks. In Entergy’s words, buried pipes are in direct contact with dirt, while underground pipes are in tunnels or vaults, carrying pipes.

Jackson said the 2005 leak was under investigation, but he said it was a steam leak and the steam contained tritium and potentially other radionuclides.

He said Entergy did list the problem in the advanced off-gas pipe tunnel or vault as one of several corrective actions in 2005.

According to the whistleblower, whom Gundersen said seemed credible and well-informed about the inner workings at Vermont Yankee, the company used a temporary plug to fix the leak, rather than shut down the plant and make a permanent fix.

The whistleblower even went so far as to list the type of material, Furmanite, that Entergy used to temporarily plug the leak.

The whistleblower said that a tent and HEPA filter was set up to catch any radioactive gas during the 2005 case, and that workers used protective clothing.

Gundersen on Monday refused to say whether he had heard again from the whistleblower. Gundersen had turned the information from the whistleblower over to the Department of Public Service and the Vermont Attorney General’s office last week, both of which are investigating the case.

Jackson’s disclosure confirming the whistleblower came during a conference call with reporters, giving an update on the current leak. Neil Sheehan, NRC spokesman, said that Entergy would be issuing a press release about the 2005 leak later in the day.

Entergy Nuclear only started monitoring for tritium leaks in 2007, after an industry-wide suggestion from the NRC. Entergy drilled three monitoring wells on the banks of the Connecticut River, with one revealing elevated levels of tritium in November, which was reconfirmed in January.

Entergy revealed the current tritium leak on Jan. 7, and has been working since then to find the source of the leak.

Entergy, in its daily update about the search for the leak, said it was taking one of its own drinking water wells, which is near the leak’s plume, out of service as a precautionary measure.

That well, the construction office building well, is one of several wells that provide drinking water to the company, and is more than 350 feet deep in bedrock, the company said. The contaminated monitoring wells are relatively shallow, about 35 feet.

Sheehan said that the NRC was able to talk about the whistleblower allegations in 2005 because the whistleblower did not file a report with the NRC. Usually, the NRC won’t discuss whistleblower issues.

Jackson said that it was unknown whether the 2005 tritium leak, which was found in the underground pipe tunnel, had “transmitted” to the ground.

He said that there is a possibility that the tritium-laden steam did escape to the outside environment. “We’re still determining that,” he said. Jackson said the 2005 leak was inside a part of the reactor complex, and should have been maintained in the concrete pipe vault.

Most of the conference call with the reporters dealt with the NRC emphasizing that the current tritium leak currently posed no health risk to Vermonters, since it had not reached any private wells and that while it was reaching the Connecticut River, it was in very low levels, between 200 to 600 picocuries per liter.

While the plant is licensed to release some amounts of radioactivity into the environment, according to Steven Garry, a senior health physicist, they are well within NRC limits.

Garry said that there had been “essentially zero dose” to the general public from the current tritium leak, and he said that any tritiated water that did reach the Connecticut River would be diluted substantially to eliminate any health threat.

Tritium, which is a form of radioactive hydrogen, can cause cancer, but only when ingested in large, concentrated doses. One well at Vermont Yankee has tested for 2.6 million picocuries per liter, although that concentration has dropped to 1.8 million picocuries. Other wells show various other levels of tritium, with the next highest close to 1 million, according to the Vermont Department of Health.

susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com

© 2010 Rutland Herald – Source

February 23, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment

A book review

By Dr. Rosalie Bertell | Global Research | February 12, 2010

This new publication of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (Volume 1181), by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko, and Alexey Nesterenko, is the elucidation many of us have been waiting for since the 1986 disaster at the failed nuclear reactor in Ukraine.  Until now we have read about the published reports of limited spotty investigations by western scientists who undertook projects in the affected territories. Even the prestigious IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR reports have been based on about 300 such western research papers, leaving out the findings of some 30,000 scientific papers prepared by scientists working and living in the stricken territories and suffering the everyday problems of residual contamination with nuclear debris and a contaminated food supply.

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is wrtitten by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenk and Alexey Nesterenko.  The senior author, Alexey Yablokov was head of the Russian Academy of Science under Gobachev – since then he receives no support.  Vassily Nesterenko, head of the Ukrainian Nuclear establishment at the time of the accident, flew over the burning reactor and took the only measurements.  In August 2009, he died as a result of radiation damage, but earlier, with help from Andrei Sakarov, was able to establish BELRAD to help children of the area.

The three scientists who assembled the information in the book from more than 5000 published articles and research findings, mostly available only within the former Soviet Union or Eastern block countries and not accessible in the West, are prestigious scientists who present objective facts clearly nuanced with little or no polemics. They were not encumbered by a desire to promote or excessively blame a failed technology.

The book was expertly translated into readable English by Janette Sherman, Medical Toxicologist and Adjunct Professor in the Environmental Institute at Western Michigan University.

Professor Dr. of Biology, Dimitro Grodzinsky, Chair of the Department of Biology of the Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, and member of the National Commission wrote the Forward to the book. His statement relative to Western reporting of the accident is illuminating:

“For a long time I have thought that the time has come to put an end to the opposition between technocracy advocates and those who support objective scientific efforts to estimate the negative risks for people exposed to the Chernobyl fallout. The basis for believing that these risks are not minor is very convincing.”

The government of the former Soviet Union previously classified many documents now accessible to the authors. For example, we now know that the number of people hospitalized for acute radiation sickness was more than a hundred times larger than the number recently quoted by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR.  Unmentioned by the technocrats were the problems of “hot particles” of burning uranium that caused nasopharyngeal problems, and the radioactive fallout that resulted in general deterioration of the health of children, wide spread blood and lymph system diseases, reproductive loss, premature and small infant births, chromosomal mutations, congenital and developmental abnormalities, multiple endocrine diseases, mental disorders and cancer.

The authors systematically explain the secrecy conditions imposed by the government, the failure of technocrats to collect data on the number and distribution of all of the radionuclides of major concern, and the restrictions placed on physicians against calling any medical findings radiation related unless the patient had been a certified “acute radiation sickness” patient during the disaster, thus assuring that only 1% of injuries would be so reported.

This book is a “must read” for all of those bureaucrats currently promoting nuclear power as the only “solution” for climate change. Those who seek information on the disaster only from the official documentation provided by the IAEA, WHO and UNSCEAR need to broaden their reading to include the reality check from those scientists who have access to local findings and are simply telling the truth, with no hidden propaganda agenda.

I was impressed by the simple message of the cover of this volume, which shows a number of felled logs with clearly distinguishable colors of wood: before and after Chernobyl. The reader will find that the environment, living plants and animals all suffered ill effects from this experience, as did the human population. It should be a sobering read for all those who have believed the fiction that “low doses of radiation are harmless”, or that a severe nuclear accident is easily contained within the human environment.

Below is the New York Academy of Sciences site for the book. Unfortunately, its selling price is now about $150, which may limit its distribution.

http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1

Source

February 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment

Vermont’s Radioactive Nightmare

By Harvey Wasserman | February 11, 2010

Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America’s 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.

The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.

In 2007 one of Yankee’s 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont’s pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event “a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated.”

Yankee is owned by Entergy, a Mississippi-based consortium that also owns New York’s Indian Point reactor, which suffered an internal gusher of radioactive water in May, 2009. Another leak has just been found at Oconee in South Carolina. Illinois’ Braidwood leaked so many millions of gallons of tritium-laced water that its owner, Exelon, was forced to buy a new municipal water system for a nearby town.

Entergy says none of Yankee’s tritium has been found in local drinking water or in the Connecticut River, which supplies the plant’s cooling water. Vernon sits near Vermont’s southeast border with Massachusetts, across the river from New Hampshire. “The existence of tritium in such low levels does not present a risk to public health or safety whatsoever,” says the company’s Robert Williams.

But VY is just the latest of more than two dozen U.S. nuclear plants—many built in the 1960s and ’70s—to be found with leaking tritium.

Last year at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek, tritium was reported leaking a second time shortly after Exelon got it a 20-year license extension. Entergy’s Pilgrim reactor, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, has recently leaked tritium into the ground.

The NRC’s Neil Sheehan has confirmed leaks involving 27 of 104 licensed US reactors, and says that probably doesn’t account for all of them. At Yankee, Oyster Creek and elsewhere, rotting pipes are the likeliest culprit, but no one is 100% certain.

The epidemic has escalated public dismay. Vermont state Representative Tony Klein, chair of House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, says that “when you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that’s ludicrous.”

For decades the Encylopedia Britannica, National Academy of Sciences and other primary scientific bodies have confirmed that no dose of radiation, no matter how small, can ever be deemed perfectly safe. “There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” says Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Thus far the NRC has granted a series of license renewals to aging reactors. But by virtue of a long-standing agreement with Entergy, the Vermont Legislature can deny Yankee’s request for a 20-year extension. In the 1990s local groups like the Citizen’s Awareness Network (http://www.vtcitizen.org/) helped force down the Yankee Rowe plant on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts, about 25 miles southwest of Vernon. The root cause was concern over embrittlement of the elderly reactor’s core, a key to the future of all other aging nukes.

In Vermont, angry debate has also arisen over Entergy’s dwindling decommissioning fund, which has been slashed by a declining stock market. Entergy has proposed spinning off plant ownership to a shell corporation whose assets may be even more dubious. But area residents also fear Entergy may be pushing Yankee operations in an attempt to find the source of its leaks.

With VY operating under duress, Katz and others report an increasing wave of concern among local citizens starting to think seriously about how they might evacuate if Entergy keeps pushing. “This plant appears to be leaking from its reactor piping, but they don’t really know where,” she says. “They don’t want to shut down because they’re afraid they’ll never get back up. Entergy is choosing to protect its bottom line rather than the health and safety of our community.”

Indeed, a desperate national industry now pushing for massive federal subsidies to build new reactors may not survive a flood of elderly clunkers being forced to close by the weight of their own contamination. “This is an industry trying to build a new fleet of Titanics while the old ones are sinking,” says Katz.

Amidst the gusher of tritium leaks, Governor Douglas wants to postpone the legislature’s vote on VY’s license extension. But his term expires in November, and all five Democratic gubernatorial candidates are pledged to a Yankee shutdown.

What happens next will be defined by fierce grassroots activism crashing into a flood of corporate money in support of a rickety old reactor being operated with increasing recklessness.

The highly hyped “reactor renaissance”—and much more—may hang in the balance. Stay tuned.

Source

February 11, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment