[Cody Dawg]

This is from the Los Angeles Times today: They have a radioactive water leak, they don't know where it is, how to stop it, or what to do, so right now they are simply discharging it into the ocean. By the way? The feds are in charge of the problem - and apparently do not care.

Radioactive, cancer-causing tritium has leaked into the groundwater beneath the San Onofre nuclear power plant, prompting the closure of one drinking-water well in southern Orange County, authorities said.

Officials have not found evidence that the leak from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, California's largest, has contaminated the drinking water supply.

Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that can cause not only cancer but also miscarriages and birth defects, is increasingly stoking fears in communities near nuclear plants across the country.

As a precaution, San Clemente officials shut down and are testing a city well near the contaminated area.

"We owe it to our residents and business folks to properly test the water," said Dave Lund, San Clemente's public works director.

San Onofre has extracted more than 10,000 gallons of the contaminated groundwater and piped it into the Pacific about 8,600 feet offshore, where it is instantly diluted in seawater, Golden said.

Since groundwater will continue to seep into the contaminated area, plant officials will continue removing contaminated water and discharging it into the ocean until they can remove all traces of the contamination.

Lucio Tiberio, a San Diego resident who had just finished surfing at nearby Trestles, was more concerned about the tritium's effect on the ocean.

"There's pollution everywhere, but this is scary because there's no way you can see it," he said.

The regional water board regulates all discharges from the plant but has no jurisdiction over nuclear waste, which is handled by the federal government.

Robertus, the board's chief, said he was unhappy to learn of San Onofre's disposal methods for the contaminated water.

"My hands are tied; we don't regulate radioactive waste," he said. "I'm not particularly pleased with hearing … that they're dumping nuclear radioactive waste" into the ocean.

NRC spokesman Bricks said the ocean dumping meets his agency's standards.

But Daniel Hirsch, director of the nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap in Los Angeles and former director of the Adlai Stevenson program on nuclear policy at UC Santa Cruz, said it was foolhardy to make the ocean the dumping ground.

"It's extremely hard to clean up water that's contaminated with tritium," he said. "There's this incredible illusion that you can dump radioactive waste in the ocean and it won't come back to you in the fish you eat. That's troubling. Dilution is irrelevant."

Link

I'm glad I don't live there is all I can say.

And who is charge of that FUBAR problem anyway? They/he/she should be fired. Oh, wait - you can't fire the federal government.

[analogika]

Hey, nuclear power's safe.

Stop worrying.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by analogika

Hey, nuclear power's safe.

Stop worrying.

I guess you missed the recent incident in Sweden.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/inte...430458,00.html

[OreoCookie]

I guess you've missed the sarcasm tags, tetenal

[ghporter]

1) tritium can help cause cancer, but it doesn't do it just by being there-it takes a lot of exposure over an extended period of time
Score -1 for the reporter in the quoted story

2) the best way to deal with a relatively benign radioactive hazard is to dilute it-and isn't the Pacific kinda big? Makes sense to me to disperse a tiny amount of a short-half life isotope into the hugest body of water on the planet. That manages to dilute the hazard to something close to, if not equal to, the background radiation level.

3) ground water that's contaminated by tritium is not "radioactive waste" the way spent fuel rods, radio-infected tools and other materials are. These issues are simply leaks of water that's slightly more radioactive than normal-and it's NORMAL for ground water to be slightly radioactive, particularly in parts of California-they used to mine uranium there, you know.

4) This is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to say about the issue. In short, it's a very minor safety threat that can be dealt with quite easily by doing (whodathunkit!) just what the LA Times is reporting is being done.

An excerpt:

As an example, assume that a residential drinking water well sample contains tritium at the level of 1,600 picocuries per liter (a comparable tritium level was identified in a drinking water well near the Braidwood Station nuclear facility). The radiation dose from drinking water at this level for a full year is characterized as follows (using EPA assumptions):

*

at least ten thousand times lower than the dose from a medical procedure involving a full-body computed tomography (CT) scan (e.g., 3,000 to 10,000 mrem from a CT scan vs. 0.3 mrem from tritiated drinking water)
*

one thousand times lower than the dose from natural background radiation (e.g., 300 mrem from natural background radiation vs. 0.3 mrem from tritiated water)
*

one hundred times lower than the dose from either dental x-rays or natural radioactivity (potassium) in your body (e.g., 30 mrem from potassium vs. 0.3 mrem from tritiated water)
*

ten times lower than a round-trip cross-country airplane flight (e.g., 3 mrem from New York to Los Angeles and back vs. 0.3 mrem from tritiated water)

Wow. How dangerous. I think I'll worry about it. Later.

Seriously, I'm disappointed with the LA Times. This sort of reactionary, inflamatory reporting is beneath them.

[Big Mac]

You don't know much about the Times, do you?

[ghporter]

Maybe I was remembering their "golden days" when they had journalists and stuff... Getting old is hell-especially when other people and institutions get much older much faster!

[Buckaroo]

I use to live in San Clemente. It is a wonderful city to live in. I lived up on the hill, Calle Del Cerro.

It's only a couple miles from the nuke plant, but I'd love to retire there. It's getting too expensive to live there anymore.