Statement by Kay Drey, NIRS board of directors secretary, opposing state park at Big Rock nuclear plant in Michigan.
Every nuclear power plant releases radioactive waste to the air and into the lake, river or ocean that supplies its cooling water – as a part of its everyday, routine operation. It does not take an accident.
No economically feasible technology exists to filter tritium from a nuclear power plant’s releases to the air and water --- and therefore the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require that tritium be filtered. And there’s not a monitoring technology on the market that can detect the amount of tritium that is released in the continuous flow of discharge water. In the case of Big Rock, that of course means into Lake Michigan.
Radioactive gases are also released into the air and into the lake as a part of the reactor’s routine operation. Noble gases also cannot be filtered. To repeat: it does not take an accident or a spill or a leak for these materials to be released. Although the gases can sometimes be held up in tanks for some of them to decay, radioactive gases are often released into the environment in amounts that cannot be accurately measured. Radioactive noble gases – like krypton and xenon – that are dissolved in the discharge water or are released to the atmosphere turn into such radioactive toxins as cesium-137 and strontium-89 and -90, materials that were considered to be of the greatest concern during the atom bomb test fallout days in the 1950s, when my children were born.
Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of around 30 years, which means they will be releasing radioactive particles and rays for at least ten times that long, or 300 years. One of the noble gases that is released is xenon-135. It turns into cesium,-135 that has a half-life of more than two million years.
What all this means to the site where the Big Rock reactor operated for 35 years is that the sediment near where the discharge pipe dumped the reactor’s radioactive waste water is no doubt contaminated. Some of the soil at the plant site would also be contaminated where radioactive water leaked from the discharge pipe and where radioactive gases and particles that were released to the atmosphere fell back down to the earth during rain, snow or temperature inversions. Not everything was dispersed off into distant lands. Some of the radioactive wastes in both planned and accidental releases without doubt remain at the plant site today.
Because it is not possible to operate a nuclear power plant without releasing cooling water in which the hydrogen has become radioactive, the nuclear industry and the federal government like to discount the hazards of radioactive hydrogen (called tritium). Thirty years ago an Oak Ridge health physicist attempted to reassure me that: “Tritium is no big deal. All it can do is destroy a DNA molecule.”
But tritium is a big deal. Just as water containing ordinary hydrogen and oxygen is a component of all living cells, tritiated water, a major byproduct of nuclear power plant operation, can also be incorporated into all the cells of the body. Many laboratory studies have shown that long-term chronic exposure to low concentrations of tritium is more damaging than previously believed. Some of the hazards resulting from tritium uptake include mutations, tumors and cell death. Our Nuclear Information & Resource Service web site has 16 scientific abstracts of articles that describe just some of the reproductive, genetic and other health hazards. The beta particle discharged from a tritium atom travels faster than the speed of a jet airplane. It can do lots of damage to whatever cell it hits.
Since a radioactive material continues to release radioactive particles and rays for at least ten half-lives --- and since tritium has a half-life of 12 years, some of the tritium routinely and accidentally released from Big Rock is no doubt still on site. And lots of other longer-lived radioactive waste materials are, too.
This is not a safe site for picnics, wading, or other outdoor recreation activities.
-30- Kay Drey
515 West Point Ave.
St. Louis, MO 63130
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