Testing:“Everything associated with an actual disaster”

The headline Monday read: NRC Report Vt. Yankee hasn’t done all promised.
However the article reads as if Entergy had done nothing at all. According to the NRC, Entergy had promised after the tritium leak a year ago to do more studies on radioactive tritium and groundwater contamination.

Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that Entergy Nuclear had promised to do more studies on the issue of the tritium and other radioactive contamination and groundwater protection, but hadn’t carried out all those promises.

“No significant findings were identified,” Sheehan said Friday. According to the[NRC] report, Entergy “has yet to complete its longterm groundwater monitoring program.”

While noting that Vermont Yankee failed to complete its longterm groundwater monitoring program as they had promised ,the NRC obligingly employs a little of its faith based regulatory rhetoric, Sheehan said the NRC believed that Entergy

“effectively evaluated the contaminated groundwater with respect to off-site effluent release limits, and the resulting radiological impact to public health and safety; and complied with all applicable regulatory requirements and standards pertaining to radiological effluent monitoring, dose assessment and radiological evaluation.” Emphasis added

Well as long as the NRC believes they have effectively evaluated the contaminated groundwater, no doubt it will be too busy this week to work on past promises as today they start a simulated radiation leak exercise.
A control room simulator will “create blueprints for everything associated with an actual disaster” Once the plume is originated by the computers, plant employees will use wind patterns to track which way it would travel and state hazardous material technicians will be sent out to various sites to collect simulated measurements.

William Irwin, chief of Radiological Health for the Vermont Department of Health, said.

"We’re going to hold companies and people more accountable as a state. Vermonters should be proud of the systems in place."

Hey, who owns this nuclear dump?

It may come to pass that Vermont Yankee’s nuclear waste will ultimately end up on the Texas-New Mexico border in a privately owned 1,338 acre waste site.
Vermont’s partner in Texas is Waste Control Specialists, a nuclear waste disposal site owned by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons. A Texas news magazine calls
Simmons the “King of Superfund Sites,” and notes an example of his genius:

[Simmons] has figured out a way to clean up a radioactive mess one of his companies made in Ohio by—according to some experts—creating another radioactive mess in West Texas. The best part: he’s gotten the folks in West Texas to support the plan and the federal government to pay for it.

Harold Simmons “King of the Superfund” may also benefit from two of Vermont Gov. Douglas’ appointed officials that voted against what some see as the state’s interest. In NovemberVermont state nuclear engineer Uldis Vanags and Steven Wark director of consumer affairs and public information for the Vermont Department of Public Service as members of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission voted preliminary approval to allow the Texas nuclear waste site to accept waste from other states.

Vtdigger.com reports that:

In audio testimony, Vanags and Wark voted against amendments to the proposed rules that would have given Compact members first dibs to the landfill and also that would have delayed action and allowed the Texas and Vermont legislatures an opportunity to weigh in on the matter

This will end Vermont’s exclusive deal with Simmons’ Waste Control Specialties and expand its potential profit base. Wark and Vanags rationale was that this would lower costs for Vermont. Governor elect Peter Shumlin immediately raised concerns that opening up the site might limit space and thus the access needed for VY’s waste. “It’s a race for space,” Shumlin told The New York Times. “When push comes to shove, the first waste that arrives is the waste that gets in.” The waste compact will meet on January 4 to make the decision on how much low level waste can be processed.

Earlier legislative changes in Texas and national reclassification of nuclear waste types made Simmons’ private nuclear waste site possible. In a 2006 interview he explained

“It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we’ve got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license [to handle radioactive waste], and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”

Among Harold Simmons’ many civic minded philanthropies he also donates heavily to conservative republican causes. He is one of Texas governor Rick Perry’s biggest contributors, partly funded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry and anti-Obama ads.

TRIHT'-ee-um

These two things I know are true; water flows down hill and Friday afternoon is when the health department and Vermont Yankee release troublesome news. This past Friday afternoon, reports from the Vt. Health Dept. leached slowly into the weekend news flow that two monitoring wells(one near a former drinking water well )showed elevated levels of radioactive tritium.

A Vermont Yankee spokesman saw this as good news because he claimed it showed the tritiated water was moving away from the area of the water well and toward the Connecticut River.

The state Health Department, reporting the test results late Friday afternoon, was less positive, calling them “of particular concern” because it meant tritium was again found in the area of a former drinking well. The detection of tritium in that well in October raised concerns because it was deeper than previous findings, suggesting that the radioactive isotope could be headed into aquifers that reach the public water supply.

In mid-November Vermont Yankee shut down it’s voluntary contaminated water extraction effort after shipping out, by truck to Tennessee 300,000 gallons of water for disposal processing. Monitoring will continue and an NRC report on the ground water extraction is due out sometime in January. The NRC held a non-public exit meeting[?] in November no findings where released

The NRC’s Sheehan said, however, that there were higher concentrations closer to the Connecticut River as the plume has moved, which was expected.

Check for more updates any Friday afternoon.

A wee bit of the old glow in the dark?

Vermont Public Radio reported this week Entergy's Vermont Yankee has another leak. A high pressure emergency coolant system is leaking small puffs of steam, mild levels of radioactive steam. If it’s not exactly the same as many other times it’s at least a very familiar chain of events.

"We're talking about relatively mild levels of radioactivity coming out of here. This is a system connected to the reactor obviously but any radioactive liquid flowing out of here would be at low levels."

There was a notable delay in reporting the news to the public as often is the case. Remember as Vermont PSD Commissioner David O’Brien said recently

“How many days until the election?”

The leak (called minor by the NRC) was discovered almost a month ago, September 24th and reported to the NRC.

"Our maintenance department put a maintenance patch on this drain line to make temporary repairs and we have permanent repairs that will be made sometime in the future. But the high pressure injection coolant system is operable.

We have no issues whatsoever with the operation of the system and we're considering this routine maintenance

that our maintenance department would perform at a nuclear plant on a day to day basis."

Tuesday VPR reported poll results showing that statewide 44 percent of those surveyed said they want the plant to close, 39 percent supported re-licensing and 17 percent undecided with an error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.