LAT: Radioactive Leak Reaches Nuclear Plant's Groundwater

[DeepModem Mom]

Radioactive Leak Reaches Nuclear Plant's Groundwater
At San Onofre, the cancer-causing tritium isn't known to infect drinking water, but experts are checking.
By Seema Mehta and Dave McKibben, Times Staff Writer
August 18, 2006

Radioactive, cancer-causing tritium has leaked into the groundwater beneath the San Onofre nuclear power plant, prompting the closure of one drinking-water well in southern Orange County, CA, authorities said.

Officials have not found evidence that the leak from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, California's largest, has contaminated the drinking water supply.

As a precaution, San Clemente officials shut down and are testing a city well near the contaminated area.

"We owe it to our residents and business folks to properly test the water," said Dave Lund, San Clemente's public works director.

In recent years, tritium leaks have been found at more than a dozen nuclear plants across the nation, prompting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to form a task force this year to study the cause of the contamination. The findings are scheduled to be released this month....

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-radioactive18aug18,0,3580491.story?coll=la-home-local

[Buzz Clik]

1. This is troubling and should be corrected. However, ...

compared the the monumental disaster at Hanford, this leak is trivial.

[Tellurian]

2. They claim they have dumped ONLY 10,000 gal. into the Pacific

You and I both know the gallonage is at least 1,000,000 of radioactive waste water that is being dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Then read this and see how trivial this news is, when by proxy, it could affect millions of people.

"It's extremely hard to clean up water that's contaminated with tritium," he said. "There's this incredible illusion that you can dump radioactive waste in the ocean and it won't come back to you in the fish you eat. That's troubling. Dilution is irrelevant."

[Tellurian]

6. Where's ARNOLD? n/t

[leesa]

3. Comforting. "The leak probably occurred somewhere between 1968

and 2004" In other words they haven't a clue of the extent. Leaks at a dozen other plants over years. Such a safe form of energy! Close to an earthquake fault line to boot. I live about 20 miles from here.

I took care of a very young engineer who used to inspect nuclear facilities (he inspected at this facility too). He aquired a unique form of leukemia. In the end he died actually coughing up his lungs which had disintegrated. I had never seen anything like it before, or since. Don't know if it was directly related to his work, but it was odd.

[damntexdem]

4. They must be glowing with pride ...

and well diggers won't need lights to dig at night.

[donkeyotay]

5. If only we weren't preoccupied with perpetual war

we might be able to take care of a few of these little details. We might even be able to remember that the world is also beautiful, still.

[Ghost Dog]

8. Very well said, thankyou.

k&r.

[w4rma]

7. Maybe this is why Orange County is so heavily Republican.

It really is the stuff in their drinking water that made them crazy. :freak:

[shanti]

20. SOUTH orange county

get it right ;)

[NNadir]

9. Oh. Oh. Everybody in Southern California will die.

Unlike most articles of this type, the article actually gives the concentration of tritium in the water: The highest concentration is 330,000 picocuries per liter, or 3.3 ten millionths of a curie (or 3.3^-7 curies), since "pico" means times 10^-12.

Oh my God! Deadly! Everyone on Earth is going to die! It's the end of the world!

A curie, is a (gasp) scientific unit that is equal to 3.7 X 10¹⁰ Bequerels, a Bequerel being a single nuclear decay.

Thus the water directly under the reactor contains tritium that involves 22,000 Bequerel, or decays per second.

Now for some comparisons: If you are a human being, you contain potassium, and element that naturally contains the radioactive isotope K-40, as a result of the supernova that formed the earth. (This same supernova is responsible for all of our uranium, thorium, and many other radioactive isotopes that naturally occur on earth.)

If you weigh about 70 kg (154 lbs), you contain about 140 grams of potassium. Of this 0.0164 grams is radioactive potassium-40, K-40. It is easily shown that the activity from your body from potassium alone is about 4200 Bequerel.

This means if you crawled under the reactor, and insisted on drinking one liter of the water directly under the reactor, you would increase your radioactivity by a factor of 5. Many people of course, as part of medical treatments increase their radioactivity deliberately by a much greater factor.

But the fact is that you cannot crawl under the reactor to drink the water. As the water moves from under the reactor, it is necessarily diluted by mixture with rain, etc. It is very unlikely that the tritium is even detectable 3 miles away, although, of course, air pollution is detectable everywhere in Southern California. (The air is actually visible most days in most places there.)

But you want fossil fuel plants. You will put billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the air, metric tons quantities of heavy metals, acidify the oceans, fill your lungs with soot, engage in wars, kill, because you don't like the fact that there is a patch of water that is slightly more radioactive than you are.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[jpak]

12. Another apology and nonsense.

I work with tritium all the time and your analysis is just plain wrong.

And how many nuclear proponents would want their children to drink this water?????

(clue: none)

[jpak]

18. If some working at a lab ingested 0.3 µCi of tritium

There would be hell to pay from the NRC (and your urine would be hotter than a pistol).

It would not be viewed as a trivial incident and your license to use radioisotopes would probably be revoke.

Those are not trivial concentrations of tritium.

Nice try though.

[Odin2005]

10. This is an absolutely HARMLESS amount of radiation.

I guess the Nucleophobes are afraid of getting an X-ray too.

[mbperrin]

13. No, the estimate is that 400 units creates one new cancer in a million

and so 330,000 units would equal 765 new cancers per million x at least 5 million people in the immediate area = 3825 or so new cases of cancer per year x at least 24 years is oh, around 100,000 cases of cancer. Assuming you accept industry numbers of the actual units. It IS harmless if you're not one of them, right?..........We have the only nuclear reactor we need right where it's at - 93 million miles away - it produces energy for both wind and direct solar energy. So much energy strikes the earth from the sun that we in the US spend BILLIONS a year mitigating its effects with air conditioning, for example, so there's more than enough to go around, if we would only work at it. But a lot is ready to go right now.

[NNadir]

23. Boy this is going to be a classic. I think I'll bookmark it.

Do you have something called a "source" for this claim?

You apparently don't know what the "units" are, do you?

I am of two minds about how to deal with abysmal ignorance - ignore it, or too confront it. Now personally I am aware of complete and total fuels who claim to work with tritium, showing that the stuff can't be very dangerous - otherwise total idiots wouldn't be allowed to handle it.

Let's get a little more specific though. Tell me more about the "400 units."

This statement claiming 3825 new cases of cancers from the "330,000 units" certainly is at a scientific level as to qualify you as a candidate the Kansas Board of Education. Before I come back and demolish this bit of silliness - and I will - just for fun, I'd love to hear your source for this "garbage in, garbage out," calculation.

[NNadir]

24. Well? OK then, let's get right to the core of the distortion.

I have an idea of where this bizarre interpretation came from, but I'm not going dignify that kind of claptrap by reading it. This is why God created the "ignore" button. Suffice it to say that I know from whence it comes and the extremely low scientific level at which it is represented.

Lately I have been ignoring some cases of massive ignorance and misrepresentation, well, because I live in the time of the Bush administration where, as Orwell would have it, "Lies are Truth." There are so many distortions, so many examples of tortured thinking, and so little time. I've got to put limits on the level at which I'm willing to throw up.

Now let's get right to the core of the issue, or under the core of the reactor. Somebody, obviously not too bright, told you that 400 "units" cause cancers and you, credulously, went so far as to attempt a calculation of the "garbage in, garbage out" variety.

First let's refer to the article beginning the post and I will add the relevant bold:

The plant is operated by Southern California Edison and houses two working reactors. A third, 450-megawatt reactor was shut down in 1992 and is being dismantled.

While workers were taking apart the containment dome that housed the inactive reactor, they discovered that groundwater beneath the reactor complex was tainted with tritium...

..."So far, the spills … haven't resulted in people off-site being exposed to excessive amounts of radiation," said David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit advocacy group that focuses on environmental problems...

...Samples of the groundwater beneath San Onofre's decommissioned unit contained 50,000 to 330,000 picocuries per liter, Bricks said.

In drinking water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's safety limit for tritium is 20,000 picocuries per liter, a measurement of radioactivity based on one-trillionth of a unit. The state of California has recommended a "public health goal" of no more than 400 picocuries per liter, a level the agency determined could still cause one cancer case per million people exposed.

San Onofre has extracted more than 10,000 gallons of the contaminated groundwater and piped it into the Pacific about 8,600 feet offshore, where it is instantly diluted in seawater, Golden said

OK, well enough. Directly under the reactor there is a concentration that could cause a 1 in a million chance of cancer.

Now let's look at the California agency standards themselves and not as interpreted by a weak thinking poster on DU. Here is what they say, again the bold is mine:

The calculation of the PHG level applies the risk coefficient for tritium to a lifetime of exposure to 2 L/day of water and incorporates a de minimis excess individual cancer risk level of 10-6 (one in one million) from exposure to tritium to estimate the health-protective value of 400 pCi/L. Lifetime risks of 10-4 and 10-5 would correspond to tritium activity levels of 40,000 pCi/L and 4,000 pCi/L, respectively...

http://www.oehha.ca.gov/water/phg/pdf/PHGtritium030306.pdf#search=%22%22risk%20coefficient%22%20tritium%22


Now we're getting somewhere. Someone has to crawl under the reactor, insert a straw in the groundwater, suck up 2 liters every day for a lifetime in order to face a one in a million risk of contracting a cancer.

However, we have some information, from the article, about how much water there is: 10,000 gallons. OK, we're going to have to deal with the metric system, I know, but not much can be done about that: A gallon is roughly 3.79 liters. Thus ten thousand gallons is about 38,000 liters. At two liters a day, this enough for one person, who has crawled under the reactor for this specific purpose to drink 2 liters a day for 51 years in order to raise his or her risk level by one in a million.

Do you have any idea of the risk that will be involved in driving on Interstate 5 to San Onofre, straw in hand? Comparable? What about the gasoline burned in this 51 years of sucking the water from under reactor? Any risk associated with it? Any comment on the 999,999 chances in a million that even with these elaborate constraints, nothing will happen at all?

Here, by the way is the statement from Argonne National Laboratory about the real risk of tritium:

Where Does It Come From? Tritium is naturally present as a very small percentage of ordinary hydrogen in water, both liquid and vapor. This tritium is produced as a result of the interaction of cosmic radiation with gases in the upper atmosphere, and the natural steady-state global inventory is about 7.3 kilograms (kg). (About five times this amount remains from past atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.) After being produced in the atmosphere, it is readily incorporated into water and falls to earth as rain, thus entering the natural hydrological cycle. Tritium is also produced as a fission product in nuclear weapons tests and in nuclear power reactors, with a yield of about 0.01%. That is, about one atom of tritium is produced per 10,000 fissions. Each year a large commercial nuclear power reactor produces about 20,000 curies (2 grams)of tritium, which is generally incorporated in the nuclear fuel and cladding. Because little tritium is naturally present, it must be produced artificially for use on a practical scale. Tritium can be made in production nuclear reactors, i.e., reactors designed to optimize the generation of tritium and special nuclear materials such as plutonium-239. Tritium is produced by neutron absorption of a lithium-6 atom. The lithium-6 atom, with three protons and three neutrons, and the absorbed neutron combine to form a lithium-7 atom with three protons and four neutrons, which instantaneously splits to form an atom of tritium (one proton and two neutrons) and an atom of helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons). The United States has recovered an estimated 225 kg of tritium, of which 150 kg has decayed into helium-3, leaving a current inventory of approximately 75 kg...

http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/tritium.pdf#search=%22%22cancer%22%20tritium%22

This link also gives the cancer risk for ingestion of tritium (box lower right hand corner) which is 4.4 X 10^-14 per pCi of tritium.

Briefly during the early 1960's, during the period of nuclear testing, the worldwide concentration of tritium in water reached 5000 TU (1 tritium unit = 3.19 pCi/liter.) In spite of the worldwide growth of nuclear power since then, the concentration has decreased and is now about 20 units.

http://www.iaea.org/programmes/ripc/ih/volumes/vol_two/ChT_II_05.pdf#search=%22tritium%20concentration%20atmosphere%20%22

From this it is easy to calculate that, assuming 2L per day and a population around 3 billion in 1963, that about 1500 people world wide died from tritium induced cancers that year. This would be trivial compared to the number of persons killed by air pollution in that year or in coal mines or in wars or car accidents or other carcinogens, but who's counting? Certainly not you.

Following the same calculation for 1995, when the concentration was about 20 tritium units, and a population of 6 billion for the planet, a rough calculation shows about 12 people getting cancer because of tritium worldwide. The 1995 figure, derived from the next link, includes tritium from all sources, medical treatments, tritium watch dials, nuclear reprocessing, weapons manufacture, and, oh yes, the useless and largely meaningless labeling experiments in research of third rate biologists at fourth rate institutions. Thankfully nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere has been banned, but I'm afraid we're going to face the risk of poorly educated biologists for many years to come.

http://www.eawag.ch/research_e/w+t/UI/tritium.html

These figures are very different than your "calculation" for Southern California.

Now, here is the fact that cannot be disproved. If you are anti-nuclear, you are pro-coal. This can be seen by inspection of the energy flow chart:



Anyone who comes to you with some pilot program involving hydrogen for four or five people hooked up to a wind mill has no fucking clue about industrial issues, which in the time of global climate catastrophe, are fucking real. Global climate change is not happening in 50 years. It is not happening in 20 years. It is not happening in 10 years or in 2 years. It is happening now.

If 100,000 people dropped dead from air pollution in Southern California you would not pay attention. How do I know? Because you don't. You misinterpret misinformation in a credulous way and you don't even have a clue about what is being said.


You have not attempted to calculate the number of cancer deaths associated with soot - which is just as well since your calculational skill is so poor - because you wish to pretend that such deaths don't matter.

Right in the State of California they have written on their gas pumps, all of them, "This product contains compounds known by the State of California to cause cancer." Got a calculation for that one? No? It doesn't matter? You don't calculate for anything but nuclear issues and even in that case, can't be troubled to get them right?

If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, make stuff up.

[jpak]

14. The BEIR committee of the National Academy of Sciences sez not

They have concluded time and time again that the dose-response of ionizing radiation is linear and there is no threhold dose below which there are no effects.

There is no "safe dose" and no "ineffective" dose - every exposure carries some risk.

Any non-medical exposure to ionizing radiation is an unnecessary health hazard - period.

To suggest otherwise is wrong.

[Odin2005]

16. We are exposed to small amounts of NATURAL radiation everyday.

So I guess living is an unrcessary health hazard...

[jpak]

17. There is a risk with every unnecessary dose

Just because we are constantly being exposed to natural background radiation doesn't mean we can ignore the unnatural sources.

Some people deny global warming.

Some people deny any risk from low does of ionizing radiation.

I've worked with radioisotopes for nearly 30 years and have served as Radiation Safety Officer at various research institutions and aboard research vessels - and I know better on both accounts.

[hunter]

21. Vigilance focused too tightly is negligence.

In medicine it's called "the zebras vs. horses dilemma" and beginning medical students are told ""When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

If you miss something common because you were focused too tightly on finding something uncommon, that's negligent. When you can reliably catch the 998/1000 problems you can start working on the rarer 2/1000 problems; to do otherwise is to do more harm than good.

The damage done by fossil fuels is the 998/1000 problem. The leak at San Onofre is almost something negligible compared to that. Certainly the owners of this plant have an obligation to make sure it does not leak tritium, but in comparison to the massive ongoing daily environmental damage done by fossil fuel power plants of similar capacity, this is a very small thing.

[jpak]

11. This is a national problem

Nuclear plants in Illinois have dumped mass quantities of tritium into ground water for many years without detection.

I wonder what else we'll find at other nuclear plants...

[hunter]

15. All the airline flight crews I know are hideous glowing mutants.

Especially the old ones. When the hell are they going to BAN AIRPLANES?????

Radiation sucks.

[jpak]

19. The doses they receive are not trivial and there is a legit health concern

http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html

<snip>

Q: Have there been studies of long-term, low-level exposure to radiation during commercial flights and the effects for flight crew?

A: At present, the Airline Pilots Association is conducting dosimetry studies for its membership and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is engaged in a study of reproductive disorders among flight attendants. Several studies have already been published; some show an increase in various malignancies among crew members while others show no increased risk. The following references all present data showing an increase in malignancies among flight crew members with the exception of the second British Airways paper which, as discussed above, reevaluates data published in the earlier reference. These papers can be obtained through your local library.

<snip>

Waters M et al. The NIOSH/FAA working women's health study: Evaluation of the cosmic-radiation exposures of flight attendants. Health Phys. 79(5):553-559; 2000.

<snip>

Only flight crew flying both a large number of hours during pregnancy (for example, 100 hours per month) and strictly the highest dose-rate routes (typically global routes—United States to Buenos Aires or United States to Tokyo, etc.) would exceed the NCRP monthly guideline.

<more>

[hunter]

22. I know.

The next time I go to Europe I'll try to book a ticket on a Swedish submarine.