Nuclear power plant leaked 1.5M litres of radioactive water in Minnesota
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
> The EPA safe drinking water concentration for tritium is 20,000 picocuries/liter. It is not expected or likely that this concentration would be exceeded as a result of this event.
https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/air/t...
I think radiation just freaks people out in general, so these headlines are super effective at getting engagement.
Instead, the company and government agencies just reiterate that “it’s safe”.
According to that, the concentration of radiation in the water directly under the plant is at least 50x above EPA limits. But that is where virtually no dilution will have occurred. If plant officials and state regulators are to be believed, the other monitoring locations around the site don’t yet show anything to get super worried about.
Edit: Just to note, I live in the general area, but not particularly close to this specific location. Lucky for me I live in the area with water contaminated by 3M PFCs rather than Xcel Energy radiation. /s
Radioactivity level is actually one thing you can easily measure yourself without having to trust the big bad government.
BTW: did you know coal power plants release uranium into the air? Coal is "clean" only in election ads. The real one is too expensive to filter, and burned in such massive volumes that even tiny impurities are significant.
Yes. A small amount, and not in concentrated form the way nuclear output or nuclear power plant waste is...
I also don't have concerns with bananas
So we're back to square one: it's not actually concentrated. The report says "the levels of tritium in the water are below federal thresholds".
These aren't barrels of green goo like in the Simpsons.
In this case, increases of trace contamination have not been found or expected in any drinking water supply from this event.
Dept of Health says [2]:
> Currently, there is no health risk due to this situation. Monitoring wells are being sampled frequently to track the migration of the plume while the plant works to recover the tritiated water. Should the monitoring well results indicate protective action is necessary, it will be taken at that time.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...
[2] https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/air/t...
Don't drink those if you can help it.
And as someone who lives just downstream from this plant and would have been directly impacted from drinking the water: yes, I will continue to be trusting the Minnesota Department of Health over reactionary HN commentary.
Xcel reported it when it happened to the state—which they didn't even have to do given how low-concentration it was[0]—the NRC published that it happened on their website in November so it wasn't a "secret"[1], the levels are being monitored from wells, and the plume didn't travel far enough to affect anyone. Now they're pumping out and filtering the water to remove it.
What are you trying to get at here? What is the outcome you wanted? If this is some sort of anti-nuke power plant take based on an unfortunate but basically non-event then just say so and I'll excuse myself from replying any further.
[0] https://www.startribune.com/xcel-is-cleaning-up-a-radioactiv...
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/...
Consider it gone.
My guess
According to a 1978 paper [1], a 1 GW coal power plant releases something like 50 GBq per year. The Minnesota Department of Health did not release the activity of the water that was leaked from the nuclear plant. However, according to one article, "In water directly below the plant, the picocurie-per-liter count was in the millions." [2]. 1.5 Ml of water at 1 million pCi/l would correspond to 1.5 Ci or 56 GBq of total activity. This is a very conservative estimate, since the water below the plant is probably already significantly diluted by ground water.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
[2] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-xcel-radioactive-minnesota.htm...
I write "vs." because we need to tackle the climate challenge as quickly as possible and have limited resources, therefore the need for optimization is clear: boosting the better approach and neglecting anything else.
No one technology is adequate. Even as we ramp lithium production as fast as we can, we’re facing production shortages for the next few years. More shortages of other stuff will hit each technology as it ramps.
This looks like a “spray and pray” sort of situation to me. We should pick the top 5-10 technologies, and throw enough funding at each to get it to be a 33% solution. In five years, fund the top two or three at 100%, but don’t cut funding for the rest.
(I’m counting geologically fixed atmospheric carbon capture and efficiency measures in that top N computation, fwiw)
Uranium extraction has not negligible effects. Recent case: https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20230124-french-uranium-miner-l...
> Even as we ramp lithium production as fast as we can, we’re facing production shortages
Maybe, however the big picture seems clear: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicl...
> We should pick the top 5-10 technologies
Globally we did so during the last 20 years, as many nations (including the US) tried hard to build and then use nuclear reactors and also renewable sources of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
> "We are well above the 20,000 picocuries per liter EPA standard," Clark said. In water directly below the plant, the picocurie-per-liter count was in the millions.
I'm not sure if the millions of picocuries per liter are measured in the leak site or after it's diluted.
Anyway, I made an approximate calculation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35205070 and with tritium 10 millions of picocuries per liter is 9uSv/L. So if I made no mistake and you drink 1 liter of it, it's like 2 dental x-ray or 1/4 of a flight from NY to LA. https://xkcd.com/radiation/
The amounts of tritium measured in a test well to initiate repair of leaky pipes and cleanup is well below any potential risk.
Every issue was responsibly reported to regulators and acted upon.
The post wasn't implying that nuclear power is absolutely safe. Simply that safety measures in place worked in this case and the incident was handled correctly with respect to response and reporting.
Typically they're just installed according to a site model and assumed to function like that.
Happened to koch along the Mississippi where they assured regulators for a decade that you'd never see their contamination. Eventually someone was sampling along the Mississippi and there it was.
I know some people honestly believe that it's a good option. But for every one of them there are three industry lobbyists and social media bots who are working directly for the industry making drastically short sighted arguments.
Don't tell me it's safe when other options will never ever make whole parts of the world a toxic wasteland for the rest of human history.
While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous, if you're interested in the numbers of it all in context, I highly recommend this page:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The whole wasteland argument falls apart quickly when you take a look at e.g. a worst case scenario like Chernobyl and compare it to the fact that fossil and biofuel cause 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions (according to the WHO) and cause global climate change.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
Again, I chose nuclear specifically to fight climate change, not to make the most money.
Someone's incentive towards some point of view is not evidence either way about an object-level claim. It's only useful for questions like attention allocation, or like how someone could be so wrong after you've established they're probably wrong.
This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself.
And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.
Nuclear has failed to make a dent in emissions for 60 years now. Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? But this question is almost never asked. I honestly believe there is a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Nuclear cannot survive without the threat of fossil fuels, but it cannot or at least has not for decades prevented fossil fuels dominating electricity production worldwide. So it's a guarantee for keeping the status quo. It's time for something else. Not merely another technology, but another way of thinking.
The bet that the previous governments in EU made the last decades was to switch generation to wind and solar when weather condition makes it cheaper than natural gas, and then use natural gas (primarily bought from Russia) for everything else. When green hydrogen become cheaper than natural gas (estimated 2050-2080) we can start replace that natural gas with hydrogen. The big event that changed that was the invasion of Ukraine and the climbing prices of natural gas.
The other way of thinking would be to consider other aspect than price. Those could be geopolitical, global warming, or pollution. I am however doubtful, and the events in EU this winter demonstrated how much citizen demanded government subsidizes and intervention when prices of energy went up. Energy prices are also tied to economic stability and growth, which makes changing the way people think difficult.
The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary.
The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.
Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, it is just the worst scenario that has happened so far. If it hadn't been handled by humans sacrificing their lives to stop the chain of events, it could have been much, much worse. Had the fire continued it could indeed have been a "wasteland" scenario.
The site you recommend makes claims about safety that are logically broken. Things are not safe based on what has happened so far, they are safe or unsafe based on what could happen in the future. Surely you realize this.
The claim this site makes is equivalent to saying that a gun is safe if it hasn't been used yet. I frankly find it to be a very dishonest argument, it seems designed to mislead rather than enlighten.
a) an unstable reactor
b) without a containment structure
c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems
means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see.
Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm.
And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally.
I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.
The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.
Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.
Primary energy. That will shift dramatically as industries get electrified. No point cooling 70% of the produced energy in a nuclear or coal plant anymore.
Similarly, the question of interest is what to build. Fossil, or nuclear plants barely exist on that list globally.
It is simply too expensive. 5x the CO2 emissions get displaced by building renewables compared to nuclear, with a much shorter time to value.
Investing in nuclear today prolongs the climate crisis.
This kind of willfully blind thinking continues our reliance on fossil fuels. There is a need for reliable energy that cannot yet be met by renewable energy. For this specific reason, Russia funded German opposition to nuclear power.
The research finds it easily solvable today, but a holistic approach is necessary.
But that aside, just looking at the sheer magnitude of capacity mentioned in his papers, one can see that it's not even remotely easy or trivial. See eye-watering Table 2 in [2]
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/11/stanford-prof-ordered...
[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USSt...
Do you bet against this?
I'm pro anything low carbon. I love wind and solar and hydro and nuclear. These no-nuclear people are trying to get us to tie a hand behind our backs for no reason in the midst of a climate crisis. Energy generation choices are not a zero sum game.
Lots of antinuclear people mistakenly believe that pro-nuclear people are also anti-wind or anti-solar when in fact we are usually just anti-fossil and biofuel.
So you are telling me that a peaking nuclear plant will solve the last 10% when it comes online at earliest 2040? What problem are we even solving at that time other rather than brute forcing nuclear into the solution?
Then try put that nuclear power plant on a marginal price market. What do you expect to happen?
Simply put, humans failed and caused a catastrophe. If you have c), a) and b) don't matter. And we will always have c).
Humans are currently failing by waging a war around nuclear power plants. How safe those plants are under normal operation doesn't really matter. Humans fail by performing terrorist attacks too. They fail by building nuclear plants that can't handle a tsunami in a tsunami-prone area.
Nuclear power provides centuries of opportunity for humans to fail in ways that have immense damage potential. This is clearly a very real risk, and makes nuclear power unsafe.
One can still argue for nuclear power, but not by saying it's safe. It simply isn't.
That isn't the issue, which is solely economics. Don't waste your time advocating and persuading. Bring the power of your nuclear engineering Ph.D. to bear towards making nuclear power profitable. There is nothing else is stopping nuclear power other than the economics. It's a deal-breaker. But make it profitable, and there is nothing on this Earth that could stop the proliferation of nuclear power plants. They'd literally be everywhere.
"Fossil fuel or nuclear" is obsolete since renewables became pertinent. Moreover our current capacity to deploy useful nuclear reactors isn't convincing.
'Our world in data' retains the Banqiao case. It is somewhat debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422
People don't understand how tightly nuclear is regulated. If we had anywhere near these same regulations in other industries we'd never have a SVB or Lehman failure. We wouldn't have airplanes crash from lack of maintinence. We wouldn't have oil spils from rigs detaching or drilling too agressively.
In what world? Yes, nuclear could cleanly replace existing fossil fuel plants, which is exactly why the fossil fuel industry tries to stop it! In contrast, intermittent solar and wind aren't viable full replacements to fossil fuel electricity, so Exxon-Mobil and co are comfortable investing in it.
That happens for a really good reason, it's cheaper.
It's less durable than a distributed system but distributed systems don't get the benefit of scale. People choose to not have solar panels on their houses and windmills in their back yards because the power from the power company is often cheaper and comes with out initial investment or personal intervention. All thought is taken out of the process and customers like that. Dollars converted to energy with the least amount of intermediary steps is preferred.
In reality grid maintenance and transmission costs are 80 to 90% of your electricity bill. Our existing electricity system is a lot like the old world of mainframe computing, rooftop solar and storage is like the introduction of the PC. We all know how that worked out.
Pretty much everything serious people do online is offloaded to one of these places. You probably don't store your emails or messages on your PC. You store them on the cloud. You also likely don't maintain a movie collection anymore, you use Netflix or Youtube.
Your digital devices are mostly useless without an internet connection and strongly depends on an ecosystem of centralized data services stored and processed in datacenters. An old estimate put the energy consumption of an Iphone as comparable to a fridge once you took the data services into perspective. [1]
Even the actual connectivity infrastructure behind the internet is very centralized. We have a handful of optical fiber cables at the bottom of the seven seas connecting large routing centers that makes the internet tick.
[1] https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-...
Manufacturers used $/compute power as a core metric to guide their thinking around future product development. They were perplexed when people started buying PCs because they were 10x more expensive on a compute power basis, but they eliminated the friction associated with centralized systems (terminals, queues, the need to be connected, etc.). The value of a PC was invisible to them. Centralized generation of electricity has the same problem, the cost of transmission and distribution of electricity is so high that there is an inevitable crossover point where the cost of localized electricity generation and storage will decline below the cost of grid maintenance. At that point we will live in a new world of distributed power generation with deep implications for society. Can't wait.
Most people use their computers as terminals, that need to be connected to large datacenters, through the internet so they can do the things they want, from watching cat videos, to listening to their favorite songs to shopping or writing office documents on online productivity webapps.
Also renewable energy projections don't really support that view at all. Renewable energy costs are plateauing, as with Li-ion batteries (2022 was the first year that the average cost of batteries haven't dropped since the BNEF started their analysis in 2013). And with the need for more energy storage, more transmission capacity, long term storage, flexible demand systems. The grid is going to be more needed than ever.
https://youtu.be/6zgwiQ6BoLA https://youtu.be/udJJ7n_Ryjg
Peace
1- it is not water, it is deuterium (AKA `heavy water`, the hydrogen atom has an extra neutron, this way it is heavier and it can carry more heat) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium)
2- the water used to cover the still radioactive uranium that has been used as fuel
So... thoughts and prayers :/
Though if it was heavy water, "Poisoning would require that the victim ingest large amounts of heavy water without significant normal water intake for many days to produce any noticeable toxic effects." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_biologic...
With this and the article below, I think it will be next to impossible for anyone to build a new Nuclear Power Plant. That is sad since I think Nuclear could have been a good short/medium term bridge to renewals.
https://gothamist.com/news/dumping-radioactive-water-hudson-...
And even if it's not, regulatory bodies in cahoots with the industry can always raise the safety thresholds! Worked wonders in the past!
Things leak all the time in industrial work. This one was not particularly damaging, but because it's nuclear, it's under a million times more microscopic scrutiny than any equivalent leak from a chemical plant.
It does not matter if it is harmless, people reading these articles will freak out should a proposal be submitted for a new Plant.
So yes, these articles will put the last nail in the coffin of the nuclear industry in the US. All they need to do is reach the mainstream press.