Karma at Monticello
In February, the Gordian Knot News published a piece on tritium, the most innocuous radioactive isotope known to man. Tritium had made the news because the Japanese had collected so much slightly tritated water at Fukushima that they had filled up every corner of the massive Fukushima Daichi site with tritated water tanks. With nowhere else to go, they had finally decide to start releasing the six grams of tritium into the Pacific.
The piece went into to some detail about how insane the Japanese handling of the Fukushima tritium was. The tritated water could have been released as soon as it had been cleaned of other isotopes with zero impact on people or the environment. All the Japanese had done at great expense was inflate a non-problem into a global controversy.
Retribution for this supercilious lecture was swift and sure. Only a week or two later it was revealed that the Monticello plant on the Mississippi was leaking tritated water. But there is more than karma here. There is a backstory.
All nuclear reactors produce tritated water. The 670 MW Monticello reactor produces about 7 micrograms of liquid Hydrogen-3 annually. Per license, the plant is allowed to release that tritium at a concentration of up to 37,000 Bq/L into the river, although, under normal PWR practice, the effluent concentration is less than 1600 Bq/L. This is legal drinking water on most of the planet.
However, under local pressure, the plant ``voluntarily'' went to a closed cycle system in which the H-3 continually built up. In November, 2022, that system leaked. At the time, the tritium concentration in the system was reported to be 74,000 to 185,000 Bq/L. Still innocuous. An attempt to patch the leak was unsuccessful, and the plant decided to shut down prematurely amid all sorts of unfavorable publicity. The volume of the leak was estimated at 1.5 million liters. The leak contained at most 0.8 milligrams of tritium, which is about one-third the tritium in a self-illuminating exit sign.
In an attempt to appease totally irrational fears, Monticello turned a regular, harmless release into a media circus and an expensive shutdown. Tritium derangement knows no national boundaries.
The US nuclear industry keeps reinforcing public perception of radiation hazards.
Nothing screams "this stuff is dangerous" louder than shutting down a plant capable of making about half a million dollars per day worth of clean electricity in order to conduct an emergency repair of a pipe leaking tritiated water into the ground under the plant.
Based on closely following Vermont Yankee in its final days, I predict that activists will continually remind the public that Monticello is a leaky facility and that the plant owners covered up the leaks. These claims will happen despite the fact they reported the leak to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within one day of discovery. The NRC promptly published the report on a publicly available daily digest of reported incidents. It won't matter when the plant owners took action to repair the leak.
Thank you Jack for finding the facts on this release, facts which I didn't have when I wrote a rebuttal to an article from CBS, copied to the FaceBook forum Renewables vs Nuclear Debate.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2081763568746983/posts/3439635739626419?comment_id=3440321002891226
I have linked to your article above in a second comment on that same FaceBook post.
Someone please help me. I need to spend my limited time not as an advocate, but as an editor at Citizendium ensuring we have the best encyclopedia coverage of nuclear power, far better than Wikipedia.