BRACEVILLE, Ill. – Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.
Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP’s yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard — sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.
At three sites — two in Illinois and one in Minnesota — leaks have contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes, the records show, but not at levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding picturesque Barnegat Bay off the Atlantic Ocean.
Previously, the AP reported that regulators and industry have weakened safety standards for decades to keep the nation’s commercial nuclear reactors operating within the rules. While NRC officials and plant operators argue that safety margins can be eased without peril, critics say these accommodations are inching the reactors closer to an accident.
Nuclear generated power is perfectly safe….unless, of course, something goes wrong. And the government’s lame response will be to raise acceptable limits.
Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. And it looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try and make up for switching off nuclear. They call themselves green, but to me this is utter madness.
James Lovelock
We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price. Hydro, biomass, solar, etc, have all got great promise, but they’re not available tomorrow, or even in 10 years.
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-interview-gaia-theory?intcmp=122
Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away. The next two-to-one gain you get is that methane has only got half its energy in the carbon, the other half is in the hydrogen, so there’s a four-to-one gain in CO2 output from the same amount of electricity by burning methane. Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane.
I think the most outrageous example of climate scientists getting it wrong and not admitting it was the 2007 IPPC report. They happily accepted the Nobel prize, but their sea-level rise estimates … were 100% wrong. They didn’t really answer this other than say it’s a very complicated business and we’ve only just started. The IPCC is too politicised and too internalised. Whenever the UN puts its finger in it seems to become a mess.
Gasfrac Energy: The Prize Of Waterless Fracturing
A new method of fracturing eliminates the need for water.
Obama speaks of how together we built the Hoover Dam and unlocked the mysteries of the atom. But today Obama and his minions are shutting down nuclear power and have already closed 200 dams.
Those fucking beavers were flooding neighborhoods!
NewformatSux trying to usurp my own hoggish role says:
6/16/2012 at 8:30 am
We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. /// Since when? The NEED to get off carbon became crystal clear in the 1970′s with the first Arab Oil embargo. The NEED to go GREEN was SCREAMING at us. We still haven’t done much but dole out fraudulent demonstration projects allowing the super rich to pocket more corporate welfare.
The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. /// Yep, change in modalties is always like that. Like switching from hog fat to whale oil. Lots of market disruption.
I personally can’t stand windmills at any price. /// You are personally an ass of no consequence.
Hydro, biomass, solar, etc, have all got great promise, but they’re not available tomorrow, or even in 10 years. /// Great Promise or we rushed into them? Demonstrating an attention span of 4 seconds? Your personal best?
Haw, haw. Yes–define “the future” as anything more than 4 seconds but less than “even 10 years” away and you got the reason why America has lost its lead in innovation.
Right THERE! – - – Just look. NFS==you actually normally don’t such this much. What are you doing?==Putting in extra effort?
Good thing progress comes from the efforts of only the very few, derided by the many notwithstanding.
Mind the gap.
The promise of biomass is to convert food for humans and livestock and the raw material of humus to fuel, plastics, and structural materials.
The very nasty secret of alternative energy is you need to keep enough power plants on hand to carry the total load when they can’t. Cycling the plants up and down causes a lot of pollution and a lot of wear and tear on the equipment. If you are willing to run on newer nuclear and not play around you can get around some of this but everybody’s freaking over nuclear. Trying to go green is one of the main reasons Spain is now a pauper nation. They are no longer subsidizing alternative energy but the damage is done.
The US has more than enough coal to met its energy needs for about three hundred years including coal liquefaction for vehicles. That’s with out even taking natural gas, etc. into consideration. The greens don’t want to hear it. They want to make Al Gore richer so he can buy a few more sea side mansions and a few more personal jets.
The warming trend we had seems to have been largely a return to more normal conditions from the cooling of the little ice age. We can’t grow wheat in Greenland yet so we haven’t made it all the way back to the highs of the medieval warm phase.
The last time I checked the sun appears to have four poles and is showing every evidence of doing what it did at the beginning of the little ice age. The numbers suggest a 30 year cooling trend is starting. It might turn out to be worse than that. What your weather is depends on what the jet stream is doing at your location.
Everybody wants clean and sustainable energy and they want it now and they want it to be inexpensive.
Nice dream.
I want a home that is powered by hydrogen fuel cells and a vehicle that is powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
All I need is plentiful and cheap hydrogen and fuel cells that are manufactured cheaply without harming the environment.
I don’t know why this can’t be done immediately.
The killer is a cheap environmentally friendly source of hydrogen and a safe way to transport and store it without it leaking away.
Methane hydrate
Importance of methane hydrate
It has been suggested that there may be deposits all over the world, which will have twice as much energy than we ever had with oil, gas and coal together. So this could be the alternative we are looking for, until there is a solution for no longer using fossil fuels (which are already running out) and nuclear energy.
Danger of methane hydrate
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane hydrate deposits has been hypothesized as a cause of past and possible future climate changes.
There’s no shortage of energy of course. The problem is :
- is located near where it’s going to be used?
- can it be safely portable (like a car tank)?
- does it have a high enough energy density for practical use? (ie gasoline has a high energy density)
…and other things like costs to produce. Note the American sheeple unknowingly subsidize the cost of oil via military presence in the middle east, homeland security and medical since polluting the air is free,…).
The key to energy independence is :
- conservation
- make everything electric (except trucking, air and shipping)
- Advances in battery technology (the Chinese get this but the Republipukes …not so much)
- alternative and renewable energy sources
I want plentiful and inexpensive batteries that are manufactured without harming the environment and do not contain rare earth metals or constituents.
I will need these batteries immediately to store the energy that I collect from solar panels that are plentiful and inexpensive and manufactured without harming the environment and do not contain rare earth metals or constituents.
I will need a method of transferring the energy that does not involve the mining and production of copper wire.
Thank you.
Great! I guess we’ll wait for China to invent those awesome batteries as they seem to know where the future lies.
Good news! The copper based infrastructure for moving electric energy is already in place!
Transfer of energy: Hydraulic/pneumatic. Done cleverly, you can make surprising use of natural gas as a pneumatic energy transfer by pressurising the lines higher than normal, and using the depressuring process to generate electrical energy at hubs. Same with water. You have to distribute these things anyway, so why not?
My personal belief however is something I heard chrysler had looked into, but requires more to do so and this is complex cells. Typical electrolytic fuel/regular cells that can recharged OR refilled.
I think it’ll be an electrolytic solution personally, with some kind of cell cleaning method. To refuel, you connect a three hose connector. One removes the discharge and the second and third refills the fuel.
PRO
- refuelling is simple
- fuel is ideally non-toxic, liquid at STP.
- Potentially safer than gasoline/diesel.
- ideally consumes less energy to create and transport than hydrogen. Or much else.
- can be recharged on site in simple process from mains energy at stations.
- could even potentially be recharged in vehichle by regenerative braking, though complex and heavy.
CON
- Very Low energy density.
- Discharge management.
I can see this being a hurdle, but compared to hydrogen, much more palatable.
Also, compared to regular batteries, much more recyclable and it’s the ability to refuel, rather than recharge, that makes it usable in the real world.
Does anyone know if anything came of it?
Hey orchi==how firmly/concretely do you recognize that if coal/oil/gas/methane were available FREE ON TAP we would still RIGHT NOW have to be deciding how to curtail our use of it? Or–perhaps confusingly more complex say: how to use it but sequester the carbon released by burning it?
co2/methane levels in the air not only heat the air/water/earth but are also toxic in and of themselves. As an average: greater co2 levels increase plant growth but reduce plant yields.
blah, blah, blah. point being we aren’t considering curtailing our use of it even as the cost is bankrupting us. God is laughing his tits off that we finally found out about fracking. No smarter than yeast are we in a wine bottle filled with all the sugar we can burn.
Talk to your magical God and ask him to fix the problem.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will consider alternatives that do not involve magic.
The only option is to stop putting accountants in charge, with their optimistic risk assessments*, and put mining engineers in charge and burying the reactors, and their waste right from the get-go.
A single point of entry to a mine shaft means that Al Queda has no chance of blowing it up from the exterior and there’s no possibility of air borne contamination like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
*) Optimistic Risk Assessment. Nothing will go wrong. That just tempting Murphy.
Build a super nuclear reactor on the moon and beam the energy to earth.
If it blows up or melts down, no harm is done to the earth.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Praxis
An artificial satellite would be better.
=)
For some odd reason people freak out when we send reactors into space. We’ve done it and never had an issue and the way the ones we send are made even the fragments aren’t dangerous unless you get hit by one or hang around same for a prolonged time frame but it still causes a great many people demonstrate and throw rocks, etc.
As someone who works in a university lab that handles tritium and a few other radioactive labels, just because it’s radioactive doesn’t make it crazy dangerous.
Tritium poses little external risk because it is such low energy. It can’t penetrate the skin or even a piece of paper. Ingestion is not something I would suggest as there is potential for long-term incorporation but it also has a fairly short half-life of 12 years meaning things may be decaying fast enough to be at a steady state, given the average age of US reactors.
Heck, the university I work at has a legally permitted “sewer disposal limit” and is allowed to discharge so many mCi of tritium down the sink and into the local sewage treatment pipeline.
No, no, no. Didn’t you read Bobbo’s post? Nuclear reactors are unsafe at any speed. No amount of tritium is safe. You sir, are a criminal.
Be careful, there are many people with severe facts allergy in this blog.
NFS – I support the post of A University Researcher totally. When I say “Nuke Reactors are unsafe at any speed” I am referring to the LONG LIVED nuke waste they create. Not low level. Not short lived.
It Nuke generation plants could BLOW UP and take out 25 radial miles I would say: do the math, make the actuarial studies, cost it out and GO FOR IT. But no one does actuarial studies of the cost/damage of contamination with a half life of 100,000 years.
Its like we make public policy by ignoring the relevant facts.
Know what I mean?
Nothing new here.
France is known for periodically discharging radioactive steam into the environment, and I suspect something similar is going on in the US.
Italy stocks it’s spent nuclear fuel into **regular** warehouses that have developed cracks in the walls due to lack of maintenance and birds fly right inside to nest.
Just get a Geiger counter and go for a Sunday drive to your nearest nuclear plant, then post your findings here.
This is a good time to thank President Obama for the low oil prices!
I just hear crickets.
http://politicususa.com/obama-gas-prices-fall.html
What did he do to make them fall? If he did something close to what he did to attack unemployment by allowing free pass to 800,000 illegals then everything’s peachy
After having a tsunami and earthquake take out a plant, Japan is bringing two nuclear power plants back online.
Tritium is used in making Hydrogen bombs. So the questions are, is this reactor Tritium being made by accident or on purpose? And is current reactor design, because of the useful byproducts they make? Whereas a much safer design, would not crank out the bomb making goodies, another industry requires. I’ve heard of a reactor design that uses Helium, instead of water, so dangerously explosive hydrogen does not result. I’ve also heard of Thorium based reactors, instead of uranium. Which may even be more energetic, but doesn’t create the weapons grade Plutonium that we-know-who, needs.
http://tinyurl.com/3y3ypqr
If all of this is true, we’re losing a golden opportunity to start over and build new reactors right, as the aging ones are (or should be) deactivated. But I suspect the uranium mining industry, as will as the nuclear weapon making industry, will have a say in what replaces the old reactors. Once again politics, rather than science, rules the day. The US sets off two A-bombs to scare the Japanese, and impress the Russians. And we’re plagued ever since by specter of dirty nuclear power.
OK I know this is just nit-picking, but the title should read “…nuclear reactors leaking radioactive contamination.” If all there was to worry about was radioactivity, then you could just stay away from the sites since it drops off fairly rapidly. Contamination can spread (e.g. Tritium as H2O) much farther.
Nuclear power was never a good idea.
Well, expect for billionaires.