Just after 1:00 pm on Monday, workers identified a leak on a feedwater venturi meter which was leaking into the drainage system.
The leaking water was sampled to check for tritium. That night, at 11:30 pm, workers grabbed samples from the drainage system in the Auxiliary Building.
Tritium was identified in samples taken from under the drain system in the Auxiliary Building. The sampled water was found to have 46,000 picocuries per liter, over twice as much as the EPA limit for groundwater which is 20,000 picocuries per liter.
The licensee is working to stop the leak via leak injection, and hopes to have the pipe repaired later today. The leaking water is being currently being captured before it enters the drainage system.
The licensee did not have an estimate of the current leak rate, or the leak rate at time of discovery. Additionally they did not have an estimate of the total volume of water which had leaked.
Source: NRC Event Notifications
1 Comment
Will their solution be to raise “acceptable” limits of tritium?
The justification will be that it’s much cheaper than trying to mitigate the tritium releases.
And since there’s no way to filter tritium out of water, what will this do to our health?
Isn’t tritium already being found in the rain and snow around nuclear power plants?
Couldn’t these rain clouds move downwind and contaminate food and water? And the snow-melt end up there, too?
Is there danger to people who ski, snowmobile, play in the snow, and animals who walk through it?
Here’s what Dr. Caldicott says about tritium:
“Tritium combines within the DNA molecule inducing mutations. In numerous animal experiments tritium causes birth defects, cancers of various organs including brain and ovaries, and it induces testicular atrophy and mental retardation at surprisingly low doses. Tritium is organically taken up in food and is concentrated in fish, vegetables, and other food groups, and it remains radioactive for over 120 years. Ingestion of contaminated food causes 10 percent to combine in the human body where it can remain for many years continuously irradiating cells.”
http://rt.com/op-edge/fukushima-catastrophe-health-japan-803/