Radioactive water found in room at Vermont Yankee
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By DANIEL BARLOW Vermont Press Bureau - Published: January 21, 2010
MONTPELIER — The owners of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant told federal regulators this week that they discovered 150 gallons of radioactive water in a storage room at the Vernon facility.
This standing water filled a room in a radioactive waste building at Vermont Yankee, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The water was highly contaminated, with nearly 2 million picocuries per liter of the isotope tritium, officials said.
Neil Sheehan, a spokesperson for the NRC, said the discovery was made several days ago as Entergy officials continued to look for the cause of a radioactive leak that has contaminated groundwater near the Connecticut River.
"This water seems to be contained in this one room," said Sheehan, who stressed that the NRC does not believe it has leaked into the nearby groundwater. He said when Entergy officials flushed the water from the room – about 100 gallons of it – more came rushing back in.
This news – which comes after reports of tritium contamination at a well at Vermont Yankee – was not announced by Entergy, the owner of Vermont Yankee, or the NRC. Instead, lawmakers at the Statehouse broke the news mid-Wednesday afternoon.
Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, a Windham Democrat, told reporters that surface water discovered in a trench at the site of the Vernon nuclear reactor has tested positive for tritium, with levels ranging from 1 million to 2 million picocuries per liter.
That's about 100 times the amount of the radioactive isotope discovered late last year in groundwater surrounding Vermont Yankee.
"I share the frustration of Vermonters that we have not yet found the source of the problem," said Shumlin, who lives in the same county as Vermont Yankee. "We will get to the bottom of this as quickly as we can."
Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith, a Morristown Democrat, said that in light of recent revelations that Entergy officials misled state regulators and lawmakers about the existence of underground pipes at the plant — pipes that are now suspected of leaking this radioactive isotope – they are calling for independent tests to be performed by the Vermont Department of Health.
"As I've talked with Vermonters, it's clear that their trust in Entergy has been shaken," Smith said. "We're doing all we can to ensure the safety of Vermonters, to find this leak and to determine if the information we are getting from Entergy is accurate."
Wednesday's revelation of the high levels of tritium in the surface water was another dramatic blow for Entergy, which had hoped to spend the 2010 legislative session convincing lawmakers to let them run the plant for another 20 years after 2012.
Instead, they are now trying to convince lawmakers that they did not purposely mislead them by inaccurately stating on several occasions over the past two years that Vermont Yankee did not have underground pipes carrying radiation.
Jay Thayer, vice president of operations at Vermont Yankee, did not return several calls for comment Wednesday. But Rob Williams, a spokesperson for the plant, called the latest tritium discovery "an important finding in the investigation of the source of the tritium found in the monitoring well."
"Engineers and technicians have not identified signs of pipe leakage at this point but will be performing further investigation of the piping there which is used intermittently," Williams wrote in an e-mail.
David O'Brien, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service, said the discovery of this large amount of contaminated water was expected as Entergy tries to find the source of the leak. He said it could mean that they are getting closer to its origin.
"I'm not surprised by this finding," he said Wednesday evening. "This is what you would expect when you get close to the source of the leak."
Few details about the new tritium discovery were clear Wednesday. Shumlin said the contaminated surface water was found in a concrete area on the Vermont Yankee site that is accessible through a manhole. He said he did not know the location of the contaminated surface water or how close it was to the well that tested positive for radiation late last year.
Officials said reports of a second well being contaminated this week turned out to be incorrect. Shumlin said he was told by Entergy officials that the test was a "false positive." Sheehan, the NRC official, confirmed that report.
Sheehan said the NRC will send teams to Vermont Yankee over the next couple of days to observe the progress in searching for the leak. The room where the contaminated water was discovered is about 10 feet by 10 feet, Sheehan said, with pipes running from the radioactive waste storage facility to other storage tanks.
Later testing of that water found tritium levels of about 720,000 picocuries per liter, he added.
That vote continues to remain in doubt. Lawmakers had first said they wanted to see a power purchase contract between Vermont Yankee and the state's utilities before voting. That's still a concern, Shumlin and Smith said, but they now are waiting for the results of an investigation into last year's audit of the plant, which has been called into question.
"I think if we haven't found the leak by mid-February, we'll be having a much different conversation," Shumlin said.
Arnie Gunderson, a member of the Legislature's Public Oversight Panel that conducted a review of Vermont Yankee last year and is now reassessing that review in light of the new information, said he was disappointed that state officials, specifically the Vermont Department of Public Service, did not inform him of this latest tritium discovery.
O'Brien said state officials are working on a "real-time, day-to-day basis" and said Gunderson would have full access to all the information they do.
The original well where tritium was found tested at about 22,000 picocuries per liter, according to the NRC, which is above the Environmental Protection Agency's recommendation of a maximum 20,000 picocuries per liter for drinking water.
daniel.barlow@rutlandherald.com
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