Vermont Yankee on the banks of the Connecticut River
Gov. Peter Shumlin today linked the discovery of fish containing trace amounts of the radioactive isotope Strontium-90 to Entergy Corp.’s management of a tritium leak at Vermont Yankee.
The Vermont Health Department announced on its website today that measurable levels of Strontium-90 were found in the flesh of a fish taken nine miles north of the nuclear power plant, which is located on the banks of the Connecticut River. The radioactive material was also discovered in the bones of nine other fish that were taken from the river last year and only recently tested. Strontium-90 was first found in the bones of a yellow perch fished out of the river May 31, 2010.
The governor, long an outspoken critic of Entergy Corp., chided the company for “putting their shareholders’ profits above the welfare of Vermonters.”
In December, Shumlin asked the Louisiana-based nuclear giant to continue pumping tritiated water out of contaminated soils on the plant compound after the company stopped extracting contaminated liquid from the ground the previous month. At the time, he expressed concern that the tritiated water would flow into a nearby aquifer. Shumlin also requested a “formal schedule of testing of water, Connecticut River fish, and on-site vegetation be conducted for tritium, strontium and cesium.”
“This is further evidence of the need for extraction wells that I repeatedly called on Entergy Louisiana to set up and keep running last fall,” Shumlin said in a statement on Tuesday. “I am asking my Health Department to keep a close eye on test results moving forward to determine the extent of any contamination that has reached the environment.”
Read Shumlin’s December 2010 letter to Michael Colomb, vice president of Vermont Yankee.
Laurence Smith, the communications director for Vermont Yankee, said Entergy has 31 monitoring wells on the site “that are tested regularly.”
“No groundwater sample from any well at Vermont Yankee has ever indicated the presence of Strontium-90, or any other isotope other than tritium,” Smith wrote in an email. “We do not know why the Governor would suggest Vermont Yankee is the source, but there is no factual basis for that suggestion.”
Bill Irwin, radiological health chief at the Vermont Department of Health, said his team doesn’t believe the Strontium-90 came from Vermont Yankee. There is no unequivocal evidence either way, he said.
It’s possible, but very unlikely, he said, that cross-contamination of the non-edible and edible fish samples occurred.
Irwin says he doesn’t believe the Strontium-90 found in the fish was from Vermont Yankee. “We would need to see a pathway between the source and the fish,” he said. Such a pathway isn’t apparent, he said. No groundwater samples taken near Vermont Yankee have contained Strontium-90.
The radioactive isotope, which has similar characteristics to calcium, can replace the mineral in bone tissue. Strontium-90 can give the body higher doses of radiation, Irwin said, because it is not easily eliminated from the bone tissue.
Strontium-90 has a half-life of 29.1 years in the environment.
Nine of the 13 fish samples were found to have Strontium-90 in non-edible portions of the fish (bones, head, organs and scales). The fish that had the element in its flesh, Irwin says, was captured nine miles upstream from Vermont Yankee in the Connecticut River.
After capture, fish samples are frozen and sent to a lab which is contracted by the state to test them for “hard to detect” radioactive materials such as Strontium-90, iron-55 and nickel-63. The lab first contracted by the state to conduct the tests, Minneapolis-based Pace Analytical Services, failed to meet the state’s testing requirements, so officials terminated the contract between August and September of 2010, Irwin said. Because there are so few labs capable of conducting the tests, he said, finding a new lab was difficult.
GEL, in Charleston, S.C., was given the new contract on May 17. The recent test results issued to the state on July 26 and publicly released today were from the backlog of 13 months worth of samples.
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Mismanagement of a plant and its leaks is NOT good business.
The mismanaging is the reason for not giving the CPG. Vermont has a right and duty to protect Vermonters from a corporation that is negligent in their business.
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Thank you Digger for digging for the important info. Looks like the state’s radiation chief doesn’t agree with the governor about the source of the S90. Personally I hope the governor’s quick-draw McGraw approach doesn’t distract the state’s experts from finding the real source. Both state and feds have good experts, probably best to let them determine the facts before reaching any conclusions.
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Assuming that the 9 plus 1 fish containing Strontium 90 were caught by the VT Health Department near the VT Yankee plant, if, as Bill Irwin, radiological health chief at the Vermont Department of Health intimates, the Strontium 90 didn’t come from VT Yankee doesn’t that beg the more serious question. Where did it come from?
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Or worse yet, what undetected or unreported leak is occurring?
Certainly taking anything Louisiana Entergy Yankee has to say at face value is out of the question.
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I know for a fact that the British Embassy in Dubai dumps their raw sewage into the Dubai Canal at midnight every night. I know that because I was on a river boat restaurant at the time and I thought I was going to lose my dinner. Just saying. Larry ????
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Something fishy here!!!!
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A risk stated by “The Green Investor”
3. Low level of Radioactivity from Normal Operations – The nuclear industry also produces a large volume of low-level radioactive waste in the form of contaminated items like clothing, hand tools, water purifier resins, and (upon decommissioning) the materials of which the reactor itself is built
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There is NO such announcement on the dept of health website, first of all. That’s the first false part of this report.
Second, everything the dept of health says is about how they are moving from lab to lab because this is a difficult measurement, that they are firing labs and getting new labs, and that they don’t believe the Sr came from the plant. They talk about a difficult measurement, various labs, the possibility that the fish flesh was contaminated from fish bones, significant Sr in background so there’s some in all foods and so forth.
However, Shumlin’s group pays no attention to these mere facts about science and measurement. They just say “Entergy Louisiana” and that’s IT. They don’t need facts when they can attack on the basis of “untrustworthy people from the South, drive them OUT of our fair state!”
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Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water. Albert Einstein.
VY creates 2.5 million horsepower in a 12 foot square space every hour. This blows my mind.
The US uranium industry has to import uranium. The Jordanian desert has been found to have a lot of uranium.
This also blows my mind.
We may even have to resort to De Nile.
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The Governor has taken up the antis idea that “If its radioactive it must come from Vermont Yankee” The antis also use the idea that “If anything bad (cancer) or abnormal (two headed calf) happens, it must be due to the plant.
These are non-scientific ideas, designed to exploit fear, and increase it. The objective is to advance a political objective of “Anything but nuclear.” The belief seems to be that if we have abundant power from nuclear energy, we will waste it and wantonly dump the waste into the environment. This is to say we are unable to craft regualtions that control our energy. The only way to get conservation is to create shortages.
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Yeah, but we did find them pipes, didn’t we?
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Since the issue of strontium 90 first came up over a year ago I’ve often wondered why hasn’t Entergy and/or the Dept of Health tested some fish from, say, the Battenkill.
If a fish from the Battenkill tested positive, then logically, VY & Irwin could say with some credibility that the radiation is not coming from the plant. The Fac’t that they have not tested fish from other Vt waters serves only to add to the ever increasing suspicions surrounding this plant and it’s less than truthful owners.
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We don’t need legislation to conserve electric power…we need intelligence.
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Meredith
This was the Health Department’s response when I asked about the website posting of the department’s Strontium-90 findings:
The information was posted to and is available at our Tritium
Investigation website. Here is a direct link to the site, and you can
also find it by going to the Vermont Yankee link currently featured at
the top of our homepage http://www.healthvermont.gov.
http://healthvermont.gov/enviro/rad/yankee/tritium.aspx
Nick Monsarrat, VTDigger
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Thank you Nick! The information was not on the website when I posted this, and then the DOH website was down for several hours. I found the information on their website when the website came back up.
Thank you for posting a link for the readers.
The rest of my comment still stands.
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S90 is a man made material and does not occur naturally. During the 50s and 60s, S90 was used as a tracer to determine leverls of S90 in children. Dentists were asked to collect children’s teeth to assess levels of S90 starting a database to evaluate nuclear fallout as the “smoking gun” as well as associated health risks. The S90 in fish has to come from either Vermont Yankee or nuclear fall out from nuclear explosions. This materials is coming from Vermont Yankee. The S90 also indicates that S90 as well as any other nuclear materials are now becoming part of the food chain.