400,000 Gallons of Radioactive Water Leaked from a Nuclear Plant in Minnesota -...
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400,000 Gallons of Radioactive Water Leaked from a Nuclear Plant in Minnesota
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400,000 Gallons of Radioactive Water Leaked from a Nuclear Plant in Minnesota (apnews.com) 70
Posted by EditorDavid
on Saturday March 18, 2023 @05:34PM from the tritium-tritium-again dept."Minnesota regulators said Thursday they're monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant," reports the Associated Press, "and the company said there's no danger to the public."
"Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment," the Minneapolis-based utility said in a statement. While Xcel reported the leak of water containing tritium to state and federal authorities in late November, the spill had not been made public before Thursday.
State officials said they waited to get more information before going public with it.... "Now that we have all the information about where the leak occurred, how much was released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location, we are sharing this information," said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Michael Rafferty, adding the water remains contained on Xcel's property and poses no immediate public health risk.
The company said it notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on Nov. 22, the day after it confirmed the leak, which came from a pipe between two buildings. Since then, it has been pumping groundwater, storing and processing the contaminated water, which contains tritium levels below federal thresholds. "Ongoing monitoring from over two dozen on-site monitoring wells confirms that the leaked water is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water," the Xcel Energy statement said.
When asked why Xcel Energy didn't notify the public earlier, the company said: "We understand the importance of quickly informing the communities we serve if a situation poses an immediate threat to health and safety. In this case, there was no such threat."
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Tritium costs $30,000/gram. I bet it's pretty though!
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You can't separate the tritium from the water in any practical way. That's why this water with tritium is there in the first place: you can filter out almost every other substance in one way or another, but getting all the tritium out is very hard.
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Ontario Power Generation (then known as Ontario Hydro) commissioned a Tritium Removal Facility (TRF) at its Darlington nuclear station (near Toronto, Ontario) in 1990. This facility chemically extracts tritium from the moderator water of all of Ontario Power Generation's CANDU reactors
https://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_... [nuclearfaq.ca]
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You can't chemically extract it - it has to be a physical process (and the web page you linked actually describes a physical process despite what it says) because tritium is an isotope of hydrogen and reacts the same way as hydrogen, the only difference is the mass of the nucleus. That's why it is so hard to extract: isotope separation is not at all easy because you can't use a chemical process, which is a very good thing because if it were simple to do it would be very easy to make nuclear weapons.
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Pretty sure vapour phase catalytic extraction is a chemical process. I'll give you the distillation though.
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Chemically, tritium is identical to deuterium or protium. As is deuterium.
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OK, sure. Fortunately people smarter than you continue to work on these things.
https://ec.europa.eu/research-... [europa.eu]
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Smarter than me certainly, when it comes to this stuff. To my layman mind, since the isotopes are of different masses, why would electrolysis to separate out the various hydrogen isotopes from the water, and then a centrifuge to collect the tritium on the outer layer not work to grab all the tritium and then re-burn the remaining hydrogen with the oxygen to get clean water back not work? Purely for my edification.
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If you come up with an easy solution, the folks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS) would love to talk to you. They've been searching for a solution for over 10 years. Experts have concluded that there is no tritium separation technology that is immediately applicable to treated water with low concentrations and large volumes.
https://www.meti.go.jp/english... [meti.go.jp]
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That's mostly true, but not entirely. Tritium and protium undergo the same reactions but at different rates. This is especially true for catalyzed reactions that depend on the shape of the water molecule. The tritium-oxygen bond in THO is several picometers longer than H2O bonds and the bond angle is a few degrees smaller.
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This. I think the technical term is the different isotopes have different bond disassociation enthalpies.
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I feel like there's an obligatory Star Trek reference missing from all this radioactive element technobabble.
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With a single news story, this threatens to send US nuclear electricity generation - the only real alternative to fossil fuels that will actually deliver all day every day - back into NIMBY land where only fairytales and gumdrops are explored as "serious" sources of energy.
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Quick, we need another news story claiming that a wind farm is polluting the groundwater.
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You really have less than zero idea about the topic of energy production, transmission, density or the broader issues we face as a species... but that's some world class "adding nothing to the conversation" so here's your sign
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Seems like a touchy subject there.
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Energy density is bad, as it provides opportunities for taxation and bureaucracy. Solar and wind are terrible for energy industry profits, but good for energy consumers. Once they're overbuilt, networked over large areas and backed up with a moderate amount of storage, they deliver very cheap electricity, reliably.
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Don't forget all the cancer.
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Nothing changed. People with a low IQ were afraid already and will continue to be afraid now. People who put the tiniest bit of thought into what is going on will realise that we just spilled radioactive contaminated water and it turned out to be a nothingburger.
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It is a nothingburger in the sense that the amount of radiation is negligible and no one will be harmed.
It is not a nothingburger in the sense that fewer voters will believe nukes are built and run by people who know what they're doing and can be trusted.
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Got a citation for that?
A 2022 Gallup poll [gallup.com] found that 39% of Democrats versus 60% of Republicans and 53% of independents favor nuclear energy.
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Here's a cite:
https://democrats.org/where-we... [democrats.org]It's a long document so I suggest searching for "nuclear" to find the relevant points.
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Yeah it's the story and not the event that's the problem.
Pro tip: This isn't an appropriate article to throw the term "nimby" around. The reason you lot call people Nimbys is because "profit-driven shortcuts to safety" isn't an argument you've found a solution to.
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A NIMBY is someone who supports X but wants it done somewhere else.
Low-income housing is a NIMBY issue. Most people want more low-income housing to be built, but don't want it in their neighborhood.
Anti-nukes are not NIMBYs. They oppose nuclear power in principle, not just in their neighborhood.
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I don't think your like-minded buddies subscribe to your pu
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My apologies, I bumped the submit button before I was done writing.
I don't think your like-minded buddies subscribe the philosophy you have stated. I have no doubt there are obnoxious extremists who want absolutely no use of nuclear period. But if they're bad, then so is unconditional evangelism of nuclear technology. Complaining that the problem here is the story and not the incident itself, even if it did have a no-harm-done resolution, is a step in the wrong direction. Accountability and transparency
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There's a very, very easy solution to that problem. Ban profits on electricity. Require that all power companies, from generation to consumer-side distribution be nonprofit corporations and cap the salaries for their C-suites. No profits = no motivation to take shortcuts to turn a higher profit.
Of course, that's the one solution that pretty much every political party will disagree with....
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We've seen nuclear power plants built in less than a decade quite often. The mean time to build is under 8 years. Look at the UAE for a recent example on building in under 8 years and under $12 billion per reactor. The plant wasn't less than $12 billion but each reactor came under that price. Perhaps I recall incorrectly, I'm sure someone will chime in to correct me. It has four reactors that total to something like five gigawatts, or at least that's the plan once the last reactor comes on line.
We don'
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The UAE reactors were built by KEPCO, the Korean energy chaebol. They do not have a stellar record in terms of following the rules regarding building nuclear reactors. The financial corruption that taints a lot of Korean business practices is also a worry.
Saying that the KP1400 reactor design the UAE went for was one they had recent experience in building in Korea, the parts chain for large components was well-established and the engineering teams up to speed. The four reactors were all the same, something that also helps get the later ones completed in a shorter timescale.
Chinese 1GW new-build PWRs go from first concrete pours to grid connection in about six or seven years, depending on a few factors. Again there is serial production of a few standard designs, large components are not one-offs requiring the making of tooling from scratch, specialist construction teams are experienced in their roles rather than first-timers learning on the job etc.
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To play devil's advocate, there are some disadvantages to such consistency. If all the power plants are designed identically and they screw something up in the design, they'll all be designed wrong, and if one fails catastrophically for some reason....
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If someone would build it and fund it then we would have a nuclear power industry. All the industry has done is prove it is a con game by digging a big hole ten charging rate payer millions. How many other things would you pay for and then just go âoh wellâ(TM) when not delivered.
The three mile island thing was kind of scary because it was next door to Hershey Pennsylvania where all the cheap kids chocolate is made. I donâ(TM)t know if this is significant. It is going to contaminate the wat
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You’re right. Let’s cover it up instead.
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Have both been able to provide base load power for some time. The only thing holding us back is clawing away enough money from the 1% to actually do it. But that's a problem for nuclear too.
Nuclear power plants can be safe but not in the country like America. We love privatizing things and we love cutting corners for short-term profits. And we love our lobbyists and we love our bombastic and loud and incompetent politicians instead of our quiet and boring administrators.
If you want nuclear power in -
Yep. That's the entire point. This is a real nothing burger. Tritium cannot harm a human being. This story is meant to instill fear of nuclear energy.
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We need numbers, âoeradioactiveâ is meaningless in this context.
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Exactly. The fine article says 400,000 gallons were lost, and 25% of it was recovered. Also this recovery effort continues, but without some numbers on that there's no telling what that means either. Those numbers put an upper limit on how much radiation leaked but that's not very helpful. With numbers like that the radiation leak is somewhere between zero and a very large number.
Tritium is a naturally occurring isotope, and has a half-life of about 12 years. While not great it does mean that this will
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This water contains levels of tritium below Federal limits, so there's no actual risk?
I read an interesting anecdote about the Three Mile Island power plant the other day, which also had a large amount of slightly tritiated water but below any regulatory limits (the Fukushima plant also has a lot of that). The nuclear-phobes denied them permission to dispose of it in the river by the plant, so they came up with an ingenious solution: they cut the top off the tank and let it evaporate. They added some heaters to speed the process up, and it was gone in a couple of years. No permission required for that, as the water was not a regulated waste product (or a regulated non-waste product).
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They only admit to having a problem and there being danger when the smoking ruin is hard to hide. That does not mean there actually was danger in this case, but my trust-level in what this utterly corrupt industry claims is zero.
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My trust level in getting the energy we need from wind, water, sun, and biomass, is zero. So, where does that leave us?
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It probably leaves us with a future where wasting electricity to cool/heat rooms you're not even occupying becomes a luxury only for the rich. Cheap, abundant energy has traditionally come with externalized costs, whether it's the carbon footprint from burning fossil fuels, or the potential for disaster and waste disposal problems of nuclear.
Yeah, it does suck that previous generations got a nice free lunch by kicking the can down the road, but they stuck us with the tab.
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They reported it voluntarily, because the leak was far below even the reporting standards. Nobody made a big deal about it because there simply isn't a reason to. It's also one of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet, and the culture in the US in particular is extremely proactive. There is a very real understanding in that industry that even when there isn't any risk just the perception that there could be can do irreparable damage. To call it "corrupt" displays an almost laughable level of
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I'm honestly shocked that it wasn't Chinese infiltrators trying to destroy the USA's fine, fine infrastructure.
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Every human body is radioactive. Orange juice is radioactive. Sidewalk concrete is even more radioactive. And the scale is logarithmic.
The “radioactive water” stored on the site of a nuclear plant could be deadly, or it could be several times more radioactive than orange juice, in which case you could drink it for your entire lifetime and be perfectly fine, despite the government labeling it as “radioactive”.
The details really, REALLY matter.
I know that it’s a bad-
The “radioactive water” stored on the site of a nuclear plant could be deadly, or it could be several times more radioactive than orange juice, in which case you could drink it for your entire lifetime and be perfectly fine, despite the government labeling it as “radioactive”.
The details really, REALLY matter.
Assuming that when they say "below federal thresholds", they mean below federal drinking water thresholds, that means they expect people to get no more than 4 mrem per year, or 11 microrem per day, or 110 banana-equivalent doses per day.
If so, then this is basically an eye roll. The only real concern from such a small leak would be that it might be a harbinger of future leaks, and that loss of coolant would be a very bad thing. When it comes to the things one can worry about when it comes to nuclear reactors, leaking such a small amount of tritium-infused water probably ranks just above worrying about workers having to use an offsite restroom because of a toilet malfunction, and just below a door being hard to open because of the building settling....:-D
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I really like the unit of “banana-equivalent”. Thanks. I got a good laugh.
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Tritium isn't really indicative of leaks, it seeps through everything. It's even present "naturally" through cosmic ray bombardment of water.
As you point out this is probably less radioactive than a banana.
I would love to lobby for the NRC to apply their rules to all goods and commerce. Only then would people understand the lunacy of the NRC when it takes two hours of scanning to enter the grocery store and complete the paperwork for removing a banana from a storage cask to a lead lined basket.
Recently read
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Tritium is a beta-emitter, with a half-life of ~12 years.
That is radioactive enough that in a concentrated form it glows visibly, but you can safely handle it with your bare hands -the radiation will not penetrate skin. I have seen watches with tritium paint on the face/dials so that they glow in the dark.
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Queue the nuclear power geeks and shills to chant "but modern designs are wonderfully safe!".
I wonder if they were offered two homes, everything equal, but one was $20,000 cheaper and down the road from a nuclear power plant which house they would choose.
I don't know if it is accurate, but I have seen a lot of headlines how wind and photovoltaic solar are coming close to being able to replace goal.
Given that, who would want poisons with a half life of 10,000 years?
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I'd buy that cheaper house downwind from a nuclear power plant. That's an easy choice to make since I already live downwind from a nuclear power plant, there was no discount for this though.
Wind and solar PV are not going to be replacing coal anywhere any time soon. Not unless this area has gobs of hydroelectric power available for cheap and fast acting backup power for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Such places tend to be disinterested in wind and solar because they already have p
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You've pointed out one of the best PR points for the nuclear industry. Anyone working at a nuclear plant is very well compensated, right down to the janitors. Most are very highly educated. Virtually all of them choose to live within the evacuation zone of the nuclear facilities they work at. They raise their kids there and they have assets heavily exposed in the event of an issue. Its such a well known phenomena that anti nuclear organizations like Greenpeace have accused the nuclear industry of "brainwas
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For everyone dismissing this as just fearmongering or shrugging their shoulders, what this does say is the plant fucked up and had an uncontrolled leak, which leads to concerns like 'how did it happen', 'what else could happen', and 'is this plant being well and safely managed'. So yeah, it is a big deal.
"... released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location." If you lived nearby you might not be so nonchalant about it
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Exactly this. It might have been tritium, which the proponents are kind of acting like it was a health tonic.
But if a plant could release almost half a million gallons of this perfectly safe material, they could possibly leak something a bit more dangerous.
You and I will probably get modded to oblivion for pointing out such a truth.
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and they had to clean up all that toxic sunlight to avoid it seeping into the water table? LOL.
But "all power generation strategies have their pros and cons", amirite?-
Remember when the earth rotated and we stopped getting electricity from the nuclear power plant?
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Maybe some day, if we pray hard enough, someone will invent batteries. But I guess we shouldn't rely on sci-fi pipe dreams like that.
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No, I don't remember that, but I found an article on it.
https://www.latimes.com/busine... [latimes.com]-
LA Times has been a Murdochian parody of a news source since the late '90s. Solar panels are a "problem for landfills" like hospitals are a "problem for cemeteries."
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Well.. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/0... [nytimes.com]
and
https://dtsc.ca.gov/solar-pane... [ca.gov]
and while solar is pretty clean, its not clearly better than nuclear
https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Nothing wrong with solar, I think it has a major place in energy production, but I think Nuclear has a place as well I-
Those sources don't really say anything other than that solar has a cost at all. But solar is overwhelmingly better than nuclear on every single level, and so is any other renewable energy source (with solar the best by far). The laws of thermodynamics are not a matter of policy opinion or news editorials, and nuclear fission power is non-renewable and inherently dangerous.
* It's more expensive to find, mine, and refine the materials for nuclear reactors than photovoltaics.
* More expensive to protec
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Tritium's half-life is 12.33 years. If the leak is dilute enough to be within federal limits today, then a century from now (8 half-lives) it will be a factor of 256 weaker.
I've done zero independent research into the hydrology of this site. Often, groundwater moves slowly. It's at least plausible to me that the combination of dilution and time could make this event free of any serious health consequences. However, if a leak like this was unintended then perhaps there are not enough safeguards in place. Were we just lucky that a more persistent or toxic substance wasn't involved this time?
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Excuse me while I do not panic over the word RADIOACTIVE. From the Wikipedia Site " Beta particles from tritium can penetrate only about 6.0 millimetres (0.24 in) of air, and they are incapable of passing through the dead outermost layer of human skin".
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