But Holtec is well within its legal rights and permits to discharge waste at the same rate as it did when operating, and it does not need federal, state or local approval to dump the contaminated water. This practice is standard for nuclear plants.
Being "well within their legal rights" does not make it right or moral or good or healthy.
"Environmental groups and residents are also concerned this could harm their community, as the Hudson River is already a federally designated toxic Superfund site. "
“It may only cause a low risk to the environment as far as we know, but there are other options here, and why not try to minimize the harm?”
So they are just adding insult to injury to the Hudson River. (I grew up on the Hudson River so I know its history.) The point is that Holtec does not want to pay for the storage for 24 years and want to externalize their costs onto the local people and environment.
So it ends up being a little tritium here, a little BPA there, and a little PFAS over there, and then no linked to cancer can be drawn to a single thing but still people die and no one is responsible because they are all responsible.
There are always other options. If the current state of releasing the water endangers no one because the radioactivity it low it's a total waste of resources to do anything else.
TLDR; Water is slightly more radioactive than natural, every nuclear plant does this, its normal behavior, and safe since its such a low amount of radioactivity.
Well, we don’t know because the article doesn’t make an attempt to quantify the level of radioactivity. So we are left with our imagination.
We have really good analytics. That water, based on the description of the article can be anywhere between “would be legal as tap water” to “kills anything on contact”.
For the public, radioactivity is a boolean. Something is either not radioactive, or it's radioactive and will melt your face and/or turn you into a cronenberg.
In practice, almost everything is radioactive to some degree. This is always handy to show people who don't get this: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
> The fact that coal power plants are radioactive has been established not only on the basis of scientific data, but also because some companies have specialised in salvaging uranium from the smoke the plants give off in order to resell it to the nuclear power industry
It seems like we have a really hard time focusing on the best option. We are accepting far worse outcomes at the moment while we indulge the scare of nuclear power.
Radiation, PCBs, PFAS, Mercury, BPA, PAHs, Dioxin, Pesticides...all tiny does on their own, harmless.
Wonder what happens when all those separate tiny doses are combined? I mean the Hudson is already a Superfund site so what harm can 1 million gallon of slightly radioactive water do?
"But there is no definitive epidemiological study to assess the true risk of tritium, and animal studies are also lacking."
"Some evidence suggests the kind of radiation emitted by tritium—a so-called beta particle—is actually more effective at causing cancer than the high-energy radiation such as gamma rays, even though skin can block a beta particle. "
If you read the article you will see that they only want Holtec to use a less harmful solution, storing the waste for 24 years.
It is a truth that they are dumping 1 million gallons of radioactive waste in the Hudson. If you are OK with that maybe you should tell them to dump it in your local river.
This article doesn't even try to quantify the radioactivity of the water, it's completely, utterly, meaningless outrage bait, sprinkled with technically-true cancer risks for high concentrations and the storage high level dry cask waste in the site as enhancements of the scandalisation rather than as comparatives.
If the water was just tap water, technically it's still slightly tritiated (tritiated water is made naturally and rains out of that atmosphere in minute amounts). And technically it could also be so radioactive that the Hudson ecosystem ends instantly. I'll bet that it's many, many of orders of magnitude closer to the former then the latter.
Possibly Holtec is proposing a technically-legal ecological and health war crime. But you can't tell from this article.
"The NRC allows a licensee to release an amount of tritium that could result in a radiation dose to a member of the public of up to 100 millirem (one millisievert) per year — in planned air and water effluents (Title 10, Code of Fedl. Regs., Part20.1301). The NRC translates one million picocuries of tritium per liter as the equivalent of 50 millirem/year (10 CFR Part 20, Introductory Notes to Appendix B, Table 2, Column 2). Please note: Table 2 lists concentrations in “microcuries per millileter.” For example, 1E-3 µCi/ml equals one million picocuries per liter."
That's roughly two mammograms per year. Not inconsequential, but not earthshattering either. You're probably absorbing more than that from the Potassium in your body (according to https://xkcd.com/radiation/).
> Possibly Holtec is proposing a technically-legal ecological and health war crime. But you can't tell from this article.
You pretty much can. The release of the water would be no different from the plants operating practice throughout the last 59 years, as per the article.
Past standards aren't necessarily an indication though, based on what else was allowed to go on.
I do agree that as described, the best option seems to be putting it in the river. And the best way to trade off time for lower concentrations of tritium is to limit the release rate. For example, if one is willing to wait 24 years to reduce the concentration by 75%, one can trickle the water out into the Hudson over that time and reduce the concentration much more.
The whole article feels like typical journalism where they hide the numbers and go back and forth on binary options. When here especially, the numbers are most of what matters.
edit: Pages 30 and 13 of the engineering report linked elsewhere in this thread says that the routine operating release was less than 1% of what is allowed by federal law, IIUC.
Edit: I have no context as to know if the proposal is good or bad, environmentally or morally, but the slideshow is for public consumption so it's pretty readable (not that it'll give you that context).
I also don't know. I asked some people in field (awaiting responses). I see this quote on page 17 of the meeting notes:
"The
dose estimate assumes a uniform radioactive
contamination concentration in these waters
equal to 4.44E-2 uCi/ml"
I'm curious what "assumes" means, has someone measured the tritium levels, or is it actually a blind assumption.
Edit: Thanks for posting some content with details, the original article seems biased, but I am curious about the topic from better sources. Also I'm on a phone and having a difficult time typing properly today.
> ‘best option,’ per Indian Point nuclear plant owner
Lies. Cheapest option. This is precisely why nuclear power is dead: operators don't want to foot the cost. They just want the profits of operating without any of the responsibilities of building plants nor dealing with waste. And for good reason: these two major costs make nuclear energy somewhere between unprofitable and economically unviable.
Fix this, pro nukes, you can have all the nuclear energy you want. Make it profitable or please stop.
There are no zero impact options here. The report is a bit hyperbolic on the other options (storing it for 787 years would be a 1/2^64 reduction which seems unnecessarily long), but overall eminently reasonable.
I agree with where you're coming from - companies creating environmental disasters/harm, walking away with profits, while leaving everyone else to suffer their externalities. But this does not appear to be that.
29 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 69.1 ms ] thread"Environmental groups and residents are also concerned this could harm their community, as the Hudson River is already a federally designated toxic Superfund site. "
“It may only cause a low risk to the environment as far as we know, but there are other options here, and why not try to minimize the harm?”
So they are just adding insult to injury to the Hudson River. (I grew up on the Hudson River so I know its history.) The point is that Holtec does not want to pay for the storage for 24 years and want to externalize their costs onto the local people and environment.
So it ends up being a little tritium here, a little BPA there, and a little PFAS over there, and then no linked to cancer can be drawn to a single thing but still people die and no one is responsible because they are all responsible.
We have really good analytics. That water, based on the description of the article can be anywhere between “would be legal as tap water” to “kills anything on contact”.
In practice, almost everything is radioactive to some degree. This is always handy to show people who don't get this: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
> The fact that coal power plants are radioactive has been established not only on the basis of scientific data, but also because some companies have specialised in salvaging uranium from the smoke the plants give off in order to resell it to the nuclear power industry
It seems like we have a really hard time focusing on the best option. We are accepting far worse outcomes at the moment while we indulge the scare of nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Wonder what happens when all those separate tiny doses are combined? I mean the Hudson is already a Superfund site so what harm can 1 million gallon of slightly radioactive water do?
Adding from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-radioactive-hy...
"But there is no definitive epidemiological study to assess the true risk of tritium, and animal studies are also lacking."
"Some evidence suggests the kind of radiation emitted by tritium—a so-called beta particle—is actually more effective at causing cancer than the high-energy radiation such as gamma rays, even though skin can block a beta particle. "
We already release radioactive waste from coal based power plants (plus all the other bi-products from the ashes).
If you read the article you will see that they only want Holtec to use a less harmful solution, storing the waste for 24 years.
It is a truth that they are dumping 1 million gallons of radioactive waste in the Hudson. If you are OK with that maybe you should tell them to dump it in your local river.
It is OK with me.
I already have a local powerplant, local cars, and local industry exhausting it into the air a breath.
If I could switch, I happily would accept this type of release into the water over the release into the air.
> ..., storing the waste for 24 years.
Should we as power plants to store the exhaust air for 24 years?
Yes.
> If I could switch, I happily would accept this type of release into the water over the release into the air.
Read the article. The solution is to store it on site with the plutonium. Holtec just does not want to pay for it.
If the water was just tap water, technically it's still slightly tritiated (tritiated water is made naturally and rains out of that atmosphere in minute amounts). And technically it could also be so radioactive that the Hudson ecosystem ends instantly. I'll bet that it's many, many of orders of magnitude closer to the former then the latter.
Possibly Holtec is proposing a technically-legal ecological and health war crime. But you can't tell from this article.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2116/ML21168A062.html
The limit given for tritium in liquid effluent is 0.00001 microcuries per milliliter.
That doesn't mean anything more to me than just stating that it has to be inline with the limits they used during operation.
They also dilute the effluent as they release it, so the water anything would be exposed to would be well below that.
"The NRC allows a licensee to release an amount of tritium that could result in a radiation dose to a member of the public of up to 100 millirem (one millisievert) per year — in planned air and water effluents (Title 10, Code of Fedl. Regs., Part20.1301). The NRC translates one million picocuries of tritium per liter as the equivalent of 50 millirem/year (10 CFR Part 20, Introductory Notes to Appendix B, Table 2, Column 2). Please note: Table 2 lists concentrations in “microcuries per millileter.” For example, 1E-3 µCi/ml equals one million picocuries per liter."
That's roughly two mammograms per year. Not inconsequential, but not earthshattering either. You're probably absorbing more than that from the Potassium in your body (according to https://xkcd.com/radiation/).
You pretty much can. The release of the water would be no different from the plants operating practice throughout the last 59 years, as per the article.
That indicates that this is pretty benign.
I do agree that as described, the best option seems to be putting it in the river. And the best way to trade off time for lower concentrations of tritium is to limit the release rate. For example, if one is willing to wait 24 years to reduce the concentration by 75%, one can trickle the water out into the Hudson over that time and reduce the concentration much more.
The whole article feels like typical journalism where they hide the numbers and go back and forth on binary options. When here especially, the numbers are most of what matters.
edit: Pages 30 and 13 of the engineering report linked elsewhere in this thread says that the routine operating release was less than 1% of what is allowed by federal law, IIUC.
When did we become so desensitized to such newspeak?
Full details of the meeting (including video and transcript): https://dps.ny.gov/event/indian-point-decommissioning-oversi...
Edit: I have no context as to know if the proposal is good or bad, environmentally or morally, but the slideshow is for public consumption so it's pretty readable (not that it'll give you that context).
"The dose estimate assumes a uniform radioactive contamination concentration in these waters equal to 4.44E-2 uCi/ml"
I'm curious what "assumes" means, has someone measured the tritium levels, or is it actually a blind assumption.
Edit: Thanks for posting some content with details, the original article seems biased, but I am curious about the topic from better sources. Also I'm on a phone and having a difficult time typing properly today.
If the radioactivity is low enough and the emission is diluted enough I don't see it as an issue.
We are all subject to a certain level of radioactivity every day. It is natural.
Lies. Cheapest option. This is precisely why nuclear power is dead: operators don't want to foot the cost. They just want the profits of operating without any of the responsibilities of building plants nor dealing with waste. And for good reason: these two major costs make nuclear energy somewhere between unprofitable and economically unviable.
Fix this, pro nukes, you can have all the nuclear energy you want. Make it profitable or please stop.
There are no zero impact options here. The report is a bit hyperbolic on the other options (storing it for 787 years would be a 1/2^64 reduction which seems unnecessarily long), but overall eminently reasonable.
I agree with where you're coming from - companies creating environmental disasters/harm, walking away with profits, while leaving everyone else to suffer their externalities. But this does not appear to be that.