Gundersen: Underground pipes in off-gas system likely source of tritium at Yankee

Vermont Yankee graffitti. Photo by Josh Larkin

Arnie Gundersen is a nuclear engineer who serves on the Vermont Yankee Public Oversight Panel. He is also the chief engineer for the paralegal services and expert witness research firm Fairewinds Associates of Burlington.

Entergy has long maintained there are no underground pipes at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. Gundersen questioned Entergy’s assertions and insisted there had to be pipes under the facility. In early January, water containing the radioactive isotope tritium was found in a test well and in groundwater near the plant. Underground piping is suspected to be the source of the leak.

Gundersen gave a powerpoint presentation to the Senate Natural Resources Committee last week. What follows is the transcript of an interview with Anne Galloway, editor of Vtdigger.org., conducted after that presentation.

Q. Could you talk about how you came to the conclusion that there is underground piping at Vermont Yankee?

Arnie Gundersen: What (Entergy) told us (the Vermont Yankee Public Oversight Panel) was that they had no underground pipe and that the only underground pipe that they had was a drain in the chemistry lab that had been plugged years ago. It hadn’t been excavated, but they knew there was some radioactivity under the plant from this little chemistry drain. That was what we all believed even as late as June. Uldis (Vanags, the state nuclear engineer for the Vermont Department of Public Service) testified under oath that one of the reasons this plant would be easy to decommission is because there’s no contamination.

Q. Where are the master plans of the facility? Aren’t there blueprints of the plant?

AG: There are blueprints of the facility somewhere.

Q: Who has the blueprints?

AG: I’m sure now Entergy does. This week, Entergy told us when they went back, they found seven pipes in the last three weeks that they didn’t know were there, some of which have been there for 33 years.

Q: How many are there total?

AG: I don’t know exactly, but there are around 40 that are radioactive. Now that’s just what they call buried pipe. They try to split hairs here, and they try to differentiate between “buried,” which is in direct contact with either concrete or dirt, and what they call “underground,” which can be in a concrete structure where the pipe is in it, but not in direct contact with the dirt.

So there are other “underground” pipes that are not in that count of 40 “buried” pipe in direct contact with dirt or concrete.

Q: How many “underground” pipes are there?

AG: We don’t know; we’re trying to figure that out.

Q: So some of them are in concrete spaces, they’re in little rooms underneath the facility?

AG: Right, like a long, long basement, sort of, but they have a roof on them, and they are underground. There’s dirt above them and around all sides.

So anyway, until June we all thought there weren’t any. I got appointed to the role of Joint Fiscal Committee oversight. I asked for a report, and (officials at Vermont Yankee) refused to send it to me electronically, but they sent me a hard copy that was 120 pages. I started to read it, and I started hearing about these underground storm drains that have radioactivity in them. That piqued my interest, and I did a little more research, and I thought there’s got to be an off-gas system.

(Gundersen explained, noncondensable gases created in a boiling water nuclear reactor wind up in the condenser. If noncondensable gases stayed in the condenser, the plant would have to be shut down. The condenser has to be kept in a vacuum, so the off-gas system sucks the air off to maintain the vacuum. In addition to sucking the air out, the off-gas system also sucks the radioactivity out and sends it up that big stack. That’s why boiling water reactors have a big stack.)

Q: So what you’re saying is, you thought there might be an off-gas piping system underground?

AG: Originally, we had been led to believe that all those pipes were above ground. The more I studied, the more I thought, that can’t be. They have to be underground. That’s when I started asking the department (about it).

At the end of July, I wrote to the department, and I said, hey, (and I wasn’t saying we were lied to) there’s a misunderstanding here. I highlighted two things, the off-gas systems and the storm drains.

Then on Aug. 13, (David) McElwee (Vermont Yankee’s chief engineer), got back to me, and he said, no, the off-gas system does not have any water in it that could get into the ground, and the issue is closed.

Act 1 of my slide show ends in June when everybody was singing by the same sheet of music, and everybody believed, or was led to believe, there were no underground pipes. Act II (starts in) July when I discovered it, and I bugged the department through August, and I bugged the department in September, and I bugged the department in October. And they just forwarded my e-mails to Entergy, and Entergy said there is no problem, and they never became curious.

Q: Why wasn’t the Department of Public Service involved in finding out what was going on?

AG: That’s a good question. I don’t know. They have never been involved, though. If you go back to 2003, I testified that the off-site dose (radioactive emissions as a result of the “uprate,” a 20 percent increase in power production at the plant) was going to go up. Entergy said no, it’s not. The Department of Public Service blew me off. I testified the towers were weak. Entergy said they’re not, the department said they’re not; they blew me off. (One of the cooling towers collapsed in 2007.)

The decommissioning white paper Maggie Gundersen (his wife and founder of Fairewinds Associates) and I put together? We used materials that came from the department that they just didn’t analyze. (In 2008, the Gundersens estimated it would cost nearly $1 billion to decommission the plant and that Entergy’s decommissioning fund, which is supposed to cover the cost, is valued at under $400 million.)

The department under O’Brien has always sided with Entergy and has never, ever taken the technical recommendations I did. And like, here’s Maggie’s white paper. I mean, what could be more definitive than their own numbers (Entergy and DPS)? And yet unless pushed, (the department) will believe Entergy. And of course when Peter Bradford (a former NRC Commissioner) and I got appointed back in July of 2008, the governor and O’Brien went after us as lunatic anti-nukes.

It’s been the department’s reaction to always support Entergy, and they would have continued to support Entergy were it not for this leak. Had the leak not occurred, they might have gotten away with it.

I gave a courtesy copy of the report on the existence of underground piping “you’re not telling us about” to Entergy and to the department at the same time I sent it to the Joint Fiscal Office (in October). Two days later, Rob Williams (spokesman for Vermont Yankee) attacks the report, as opposed to doing some serious searching to find out whether it was right or wrong.

He sent a press release out on Oct. 22 saying he’d read the consultant’s report and he didn’t like the tone of it. We were too negative, he said, and the issues cited as serious are really just routine.

Well, I’m sorry, lying and not telling us about underground pipe is not routine, it’s serious. I talked to Peter Shumlin (president pro-tem of the Vermont Senat), and he agreed he was going to put it on the agenda for January when the Legislature came back. And of course they came back and within three days there was a leak.

Q: Where do you think the leak is?

AG: I’m pretty sure it’s in the off-gas system. We should know in the next day or two, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the system that I said was underground and radioactive and that the department blew me off on.

Q: What leads you to that conclusion?

AG: The department is saying that I wasn’t specific enough. I said off-gas, and I guess I didn’t point to the specific line. The ground-penetrating radar picked up a problem in the off-gas line, and that’s what they’re digging at in the last couple of days. There may be others, but certainly it looks like ground-penetrating radar is leading them to the off-gas system.

Q: So not only was your report ignored, but Entergy attacked the report. Why do you think the corporation continues to refuse to work with the administration and the legislative leadership on figuring out what was going on and admitting that they screwed up?

AG: I don’t think they can admit they screwed up because of the potential criminal probe going on. It’s not as if they can just throw money at this problem. They did throw money at problems in the past. In 2003, when I was a witness on the stand, they tried to impeach me with information I hadn’t seen. And I caught them. That led to the $50,000 fine against Entergy, and the funds were given to the New England Coalition (a Brattleboro-based non-profit group opposing Vermont Yankee’s relicensing).

I was working for the coalition all summer to do a document search. Well, they only gave us a little bit of documents. Then on the stand, I was testifying and they tried to impeach me. It turns out they had 200,000 documents they hadn’t given the coalition. So what happened then was, the coalition asked for another for six months so I could review it. I was a schoolteacher, and at this point it was October, and I couldn’t provide 100 percent reading of this stuff, and the department said naw, they can do it in six weeks. I had six weeks to read 200,000 pages.

The department sided with Entergy again. The $50,000 fine was nothing compared to what I might have found in the 200,000 pages.

Right after that, they tried to build a temporary building they didn’t tell anybody about. They were pretending it popped up like a mushroom. The coalition discovered it, and I did all the research on it, and they provided us the material two days before the hearing. I testified on it.

This didn’t just pop up; they were planning to do this for a year, and they never told the department.

They got fined another $82,000 for that. But again, the coalition said we have limited resources, we just discovered you guys have been lied to and it resulted in this $82,000 fine, but we need more time so our expert can look into the lies about the building. Well, the department’s position was like Entergy’s. This was O’Brien; he said they had a choice – they didn’t have to look at this building. And the Public Service Board said you alerted us to this building — but we’re not going to extend the proceedings.

The department has always gone out of its way to give Entergy everything it needs to move the ball down the field. Maggie and I, from a technical standpoint, have been the only two forcing the department to represent the people. It is the Department of Public Service. There’s a “P” in the middle of it, you know. And it hasn’t happened. I don’t blame the worker bees, this starts up at Douglas and O’Brien, and their agenda is clear — they want to get this relicensed.

Q: Even now?

AG: They think all of these issues are just speed bumps on the road to relicensing.

Q. What do you think of Douglas’ call for a time out on the Legislature’s decision on whether to relicense Vermont Yankee?

AG: I don’t think it was coincidence that I’m testifying about how the department is in cahoots with Entergy, and Douglas steals the limelight. (Douglas’ press conference occurred in the middle of Gundersen’s presentation to lawmakers last Wednesday.)