Tainted Water From Nuke Plant Now Reaches Major NJ Underground Aquifer
People keep lecturing me about how safe nuclear power really is, but I'm not quite convinced yet:
LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Radioactive water that leaked from the nation's oldest nuclear power plant has now reached a major underground aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey, the state's environmental chief said Friday.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has ordered the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station to halt the spread of contaminated water underground, even as it said there was no imminent threat to drinking water supplies.
The department launched a new investigation Friday into the April 2009 spill and said the actions of plant owner Exelon Corp. have not been sufficient to contain water contaminated with tritium.
Tritium is found naturally in tiny amounts and is a product of nuclear fission. It has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.
"There is a problem here," said environmental Commissioner Bob Martin. "I am worried about the continuing spread of the tritium into the groundwater and its gradual moving toward wells in the area. This is not something that can wait. That would be unacceptable."
The tritium leaked from underground pipes at the plant on April 9, 2009, and has been slowly spreading underground at 1 to 3 feet a day. At the current rate, it would be 14 or 15 years before the tainted water reaches the nearest private or commercial drinking water wells about two miles away.
But the mere fact that the radioactive water — at concentrations 50 times higher than those allowed by law — has reached southern New Jersey's main source of drinking water calls for urgent action, Martin said.
He ordered the Chicago-based company to install new monitoring wells to better measure the extent of the contamination, and to come up with a plan to keep it from ever reaching a well.
The contamination is not a new issue, plant spokesman David Benson said, questioning the need for Martin's order.
"We have monitoring wells on site, and the tritium concentration is down steadily, sometimes by as much as 90 percent," he said. "We are drilling more wells, and we will work closely with the state. We have been all along."
Should the plant fail to stem the spread of the contaminated water, the state will do it and bill the company for three times the cost as a penalty, the environmental department said.
Well, sure there's Three Mile Island.
And Chernobyl.
And waste that no one has figured out how to safely dipose.
Yes, they're totally safe. Until the moment when they're not. And then it's too late.
"Should the plant fail to stem the spread of the contaminated water, the state will do it and bill the company for three times the cost as a penalty, the environmental department said."
And then the company raises the rates and the working poor get screwed again.
If the company fails to stop the pollution then seize the damn plant from them. And throw them in jail. For fucks sack that's a penalty that might make an impact on the greedy fucks.
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Nuclear is safe...
Coal is clean...
Gulf oil is Eco-friendly...
.
Starve the WAR Beast...
... Save the World.
about the benefits of oil rigs serving as artificial reefs. While they do offer those benefits, I hardly consider those to outweigh the devastation caused by this spill.
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
I want to see the barnacles pop when the oil fire immolates them.
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Bottled H2O industry just scored a big win...
Message in a Bottle:
Despite the Hype, Bottled Water is Neither CLEANER nor GREENER Than Tap Water
by Brian Clark Howard
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?1125
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Starve the WAR Beast...
... Save the World.
One - this is the oldest nuclear plant in the country. Yes, it probably should have been shut down at least a decade ago. If not, at least massive upgrades. That wasn't popular or profitable in the US. There are much better, safer designs now. This isn't one of them. It is an aging dinosaur.
Two - can you say crappy regulators? If you don't regulate nuclear tightly, then no, with a profit motive, it won't stay safe. It must be regulated much tighter than say, oil platforms in the ocean.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32760401/ns/us_ne...
I'm not afraid of nuclear. But Oyster Creek was long due for a shutdown. And if we don't stop with the lax regulation we're going to have more Three Mile Islands and more Deepwater Horizons. No arguments to that either.
Regulation is the key, not fear mongering over nuclear power.
Of course ideologues on the right will say it was excessive regulation that caused this..
unanswered questions about plant safety, operation, and waste disposal are not fear mongering. There are serious issues that have NEVER been addressed. And the regulators are usually hamstrung by lobbyist-written rules.
I'm not going to Jersey for a glass of water anytime soon, but the half-life of Tritium is 12.3 years.
Alantic city has one of the best water supplies in the country let a lone the world. Oddly enough Jersey actually has good water.
Ya, and the stuff moves around all that time. The only hope is that it just settles out under things, into cracks, and deep under the ground whence it came.
I'd suggest that these new, really, really safe nuclear power plants they propose to build this time.. be constructed outside of populated areas entirely.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
First the Massey coal mine disaster, then the BP oil spill, and now radioactive waste water leaking into an aquifer...all within the space of a few weeks. What next? A natural gas explosion? A blackout like the one in 2003?
Never trust anyone who insists that patriotism requires you to blindfold yourself with the flag.
It's just Dog's way of telling us that we should really be using renewables on His/Her planet.
...I'd be lying.
Never trust anyone who insists that patriotism requires you to blindfold yourself with the flag.
Personally I am very supportive of building more thorium reactors.
I think they should shut the blasted thing down! If it's releasing radioactives into the water supply then yes, they should shut it down and send the execs to jail! Why not?
radioactive water — at concentrations 50 times higher than those allowed by law — has reached southern New Jersey's main source of drinking water
What are they saying here? That 50 times that allowed by law is in the water now, but it's still safe at that level?
Or it will take 15 years to reach people at that level?
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
... before the seepage from the plant seeps far enough to get into water anyone drinks.
It is like saying someone spilled into a very large above ground lake that has very, very slow currents. The spill is in the lake. But in the north end. People only drink from the south end. Currents won't spread the taint to the south end of the lake where people might drink it for 15 years.
Now put the lake underground. Viola.
Just talk to the Navajos who are still living amongst the uranium tailings from the previous mining on their reservation. And now corporations want to start the mining again since the price for uranium has skyrocketed. The Navajos are fighting it.
Do a search on uranium mining and Navajos. There's a wealth of information. The trouble starts long before a nuclear plant is even designed or built.
Not just uranium. Natives were the first group that could be taken advantage of. Now it's ranchers in Wyoming with hydro-fracture techniques for gas/oil.
It is a good point. Mining, in general, needs much better laws and regulations.
There have been a whole lot of problems, including a tritium leak (extra rotten given most people in the area have wells and aren't on municipal water, so can't easily monitor it) at Vermont Yankee.
VY started operation in 1972 and is a scary old thing.
Taint so...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
"This is not something that can wait. That would be unacceptable" said environmental Commissioner Bob Martin.
Uh, what are you going to do about it now? You can't pump out an entire aquifer and filter it. There's nothing you can add that would neutralize it. Seems like the unacceptable already happened and, as usual, the only thing the government is willing to do is watch as the taxpayers take it up the @ss.
The thing to do would have been to never build the plants in the first place. The technology does not exist to build pipes that don't leak. It's a given that sooner or later they will leak. The easy way out was to build nuke plants instead of demanding that research be done on solar until it became cost effective.
There is nothing you can do to stop it. Good luck with that.
The vast majority of the new nuclear power plants, either under construction or in the planning stages, are in China.
As of 2008, China had 11 operational nuke plants. That year, the Chinese government announced its intention to have 100 more plants in operation or under construction by 2020.
China is a one-party state, rife with corruption at all levels. Pollution standards, extremely lax to begin with, are routinely ignored. Worker safety standards are a joke. Labor laws as practiced in the West is in the dark ages.
Many manufacturing companies are owned directly by the Red Army and thus avoid legal or regulatory oversight.
Many imported toys, pharmaceuticals and food products from China have been found to be contaminated or toxic in recent years.
There is no political opposition in China. Regulation of industry is haphazard, to say the least. Whistle-blowing is illegal and alien to Confucian culture.
Can China be trusted to build 100+ nuclear plants with the highest standards of safety and reliability?
Can China be trusted to operate these plants accountably and openly?
Can the world trust China to safely store the thousands of tons of highly toxic waste its nuclear industry will produce every year?
The good news is your water is already hot. Both sides.
A nuclear plant has an incident that, on the general scale of things, is fairly minor as industial accidents go. And that condemns the entire industry, it's a technology that should never be used, yadda yadda same old hysteria.
Groundwater is contaminated by a good majority of the people in the United States every single day due to leaking sewage lines or failures at sewage treatment plants. It's contaminated by the cars and buses you drive that have a leak which gets washed into the ditch, and the storage tanks with fuel at your local gas station which might have leaks.
It's contaminated by the chemical factories that make the materials used in soalr cells and wind turbines, it's contaminated by the accumulation of sediments behind hydroelectric dams.
But those are porblems people simply decide to deal with without the hysteria because the Evil Atomic Fairies aren't involved.
Fascinating, that.
issue is the question of what to do with the nuclear waste. I offer this suggestion to every proponent of nuclear power: If you think the waste is an equitable tradeoff for electricity, then agree to store it on your property. In exchange, you and your family will be exempt from every form of taxation in perpetuity.
Technologies improve with time, and it probably isn't that surprising that the oldest operating plant has leaky pipes. That plant needs to clean up its act or risk decommission. However, it still looks like nuclear power is the way for the future. The alternatives to fossil fuels we keep promoting (solar and wind) are just too inherently inefficient to solve global energy problems.
I recommend you google the term Integral Fast Reactor and read up on it. It's the 4th generation of nuclear power, with the added benefit of using nuclear waste as fuel. Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of waste of out there that isn't going anywhere. With IFRs in place, there is no need for waste disposal sites such as Yucca Mountain. These new plants are designed in such a way that disasters like Chernobyl are impossible because they will shut down in the event of a runaway reaction.
Also, let's remember that nobody died in Three Mile Island. Yet we're still willing to put with about 10,000 deaths from coal pollution. The only reason why we haven't adopted nuclear power so readily is because of its image problem. We should have outgrown that long ago.
the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the nuclear industry's liability as a result of a nuclear incident, the industry could not survive. It makes the government (the taxpayer) the policy holder. No private insurance company will assume that risk. So the industry is a "welfare queen" that does not play by the rules of the so-called "free market".
It's really not a question of "is it safe?" It's more of a question of "what needs to be done to make it safe?" That answer is mostly strong regulators that actually know what the hell they're doing and can't be bought off (if you have many per site, it would make it harder). FORCE anyone that wants to build one to follow the absolute strictest guidelines. Besides, this is a really easy argument to win against the anti=regulation crowd:
"Libertarian" Conservative: The government getting involved will just make it a mess. The private sector will keep it safe because consumers will demand it.
Regulation supporter: You mean just like they didn't create bad finance market items to defraud people out of money before collapsing the economy and taxpayers bailed them out? You know, all that stuff that happened AFTER the regulators were reigned in? Or how about how the oil companies have been fully prepared to deal with spills and leaks when regulators weren't forcing them to comply... and then the taxpayers are having to foot the bill now in order to clean up the mess created by them NOT BEING READY? Just like that?
Let's see one of the anti-regulation idiots stumble over their words as they try to explain how "that's not true."
Um hum. Strong words. Positive words. Any geologists out there to speak up on how to divert or contain an underground seepage over cubic square miles?
'...no immiment threat to drinking water supplies.'
never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
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