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The emergency is over, and the employees are back in the Vermont Yankee plant. But this happy bit of news was too late for press time, so, as usual, the Reformer will only be carrying the disturbing news:
Operator error during a routine maintenance task led to the temporary evacuation of the reactor building at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon Tuesday morning.
There was a release of radioactive materials in the plant but no release from the plant. As reported in the Reformer, I explained that, "While there was no significant safety hazard for workers in the plant or outside, by procedure employees were relocated from some areas in the plant during that time."
According to Neil Sheehan, spokesperson for the NRC, "This is not a safety issue."
Well of course it isn't. Nothing here is. But Sheehan also said (again, according to the Reformer), "Our resident inspectors were … informed that chemistry results showed it was an air slug that went into the reactor vessel, potentially causing a crud burst and subsequent radiation level increases."
Well, we can't have dangerous air slugs crawling around, insinuating themselves into cruddy machine parts, can we? And so yours truly took his vorpal sword in hand. Long time the manxome foe I sought. So rested me by the Tumtum tree and stood a while in thought. I'm sure you know the rest, God. It involves some uffish thinking, a burble or two, and a galumph.
But we're safe now. Have an absolutely frabjous rest of the day!
Fake-Rob
1 comment:
Dear Fake-Rob:
Gee, if excessive rains flooded the parking lots at the Vernon Elementary School so that the VT Public Service Board couldn’t hold its hearing on Vermont Yankee relicensing, I wonder how all the 269,700 gallons per year of radioactive septic sludge VT permits Entergy to spread on it’s fields is staying on site next door with all the overland water flow?!? Along with the septic sludge, VT Yankee dumped 528 cubic meters of stockpiled radiation-contaminated soil/sand (plus an additional 150 cubic meters annually, per NRC permit), spreading or piling it in uncovered, unlined heaps near the cooling towers, next to the river. How does that radioactive sediment fare in the rain? And now that the rad waste dump in Barnwell, South Carolina is closed, where is Entergy Vermont Yankee disposing of all the radioactive detritus (resin filters, crud, air slugs, contaminated underwear, etc.) they routinely generate? Since the site, 300 yards from the Vernon elementary school, was deemed unsuitable for a low level nuclear waste dump due to the presence of (not school children, but) a high water table and jurisdictional wetlands in a state legislature-commissioned study in 1991, surely Entergy is not disposing of their low-level radioactive waste on fields subject to run-off and flooding—are they? Since the VT Agency of Natural Resources and the VT Dept. of Health choose to look the other way, surely Entergy has the civic conscience not to allow these contaminants to run off the site and into the river; surely they would not take advantage of inept federal and state regulations to get away with murder, would they? And although Bill Irwin's 2007 Environmental Report shows higher radioactive contamination in the CT River below the reactor, that is just coincidence, right?
P.S. If you doubt my numbers on the quantity of contaminants Entergy is permitted to dump on site, look them up in the VT Solid Waste Management Facility permits, certification number F9906-A1, and the Federal Register July 19, 2005, Volume 70, Number 137, pages 41400-41441.
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