nuclear-news

Nuclear contamination from Tritium – dangerous and super-costly to fix

the Environmental Protection Agency’s tritium standards are far too liberal…..the real focus should be on tritium and the nuclear industry’s continued release of the isotope into the environment,

Expert: No level of tritium safe Times Argus By DANIEL BARLOW Vermont Press Bureau : January 27, 2010 MONTPELIER – The federal government may have set a safe drinking water standard for tritium, but no amount of that radioactive isotope, which is now leaking from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, is safe, according to a national expert.

Paul Gunter, a nuclear reactor oversight specialist with the Beyond Nuclear organization, told a crowd at Montpelier’s Unitarian Church Tuesday night that the Environmental Protection Agency’s tritium standards are far too liberal.

The EPA sets a tritium drinking water standard of 20,000 picocuries per liter, but he said this dangerous byproduct of nuclear power can lead to cancer, developmental disabilities, mutations and death.
“There is no safe dose,” said Gunter, who spoke at the church at the request of the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance, a local anti-nuclear group. “The more you take in, the more risk you have.”

Vermont Yankee, located along the edge of the Connecticut River in Vernon, is at the center of a political uproar over recent revelations that it is leaking tritium into the groundwater and that officials may have misled state regulators about the existence of underground pipes, suspected of being the source of this on-going leak.

The turmoil comes at a time when Entergy, the owner of the plant, had hoped to win the Legislature’s backings for an additional 20 years of operation. The plant’s license to operate expires in early 2012………..
Focus right now may be on these buried pipes containing radioactive water, which Entergy once said did not exist, but the real focus should be on tritium and the nuclear industry’s continued release of the isotope into the environment, Gunter said………………..
Discovery of tritium at nuclear power plants can also greatly increase the cost of decommissioning, the process of shutting down and cleaning up a nuclear site, according to Kevin Kamps, another official with the Washington, D.C.-based Beyond Nuclear group.

Kamps, who will testify before lawmakers at the Statehouse this morning, said 20 more years of Vermont Yankee would likely result in more tritium leaks and a larger decommissioning bill. Entergy’s decommissioning fund, which it has not contributed to since buying the plant in 2002, is hundreds of millions of dollars short of the estimated clean-up costs.

He said the cost to shut down and clean up the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant site soared from $481 million to $870 million after officials realized that they also had tritium contamination.

Expert: No level of tritium safe: Times Argus Online

January 27, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, radiation, radioactive