Just who the hell writes these headlines anyway?

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Per today’s Rutland Herald:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Entergy Nuclear praise for its response to the radioactive tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee reactor earlier this year, but said the company didn’t do nearly enough to prevent such a leak according to standards set by the nuclear industry.

Read the whole piece.  The NRC (absurdly, but that’s not the point) praises the “quick” response from VY to the leak, but that’s pretty much an extremely small piece of the article.  The rest of it talks about how the NRC basically slams Yankee for having poor enough standards to have allowed the leak to take place in the first place.

But the headline does not suggest this.

What is the title for this piece?

It’s “NRC praises Entergy for tritium leak response”

The article is excellent.  The headline is just plain hackery.

3 thoughts on “Just who the hell writes these headlines anyway?”

  1. I think the headline and article do a reasonable job of summarizing a 31 page report. The headline is probably a closer match to the report than is the story, but both fit. The bulk of the report speaks to the leak response, and covers that in a very positive way. The overview of the causes of the leak, and poor detection program is relatively small. My take-away from the NRC report is that NRC was very happy with the Entergy program and identified no violations or finding of significance.

    This is what I would consider the key paragraph in the cover letter accompanying the NRC report:

    “Based on the results of this inspection, the NRC determined that Entergy-Vermont Yankee (ENVY) appropriately evaluated the contaminated ground water with respect to off-site effluent release limits and the resulting radiological impact to public health and safety; and that ENVY complied with all applicable regulatory requirements and standards pertaining to radiological effluent monitoring, dose assessment, and radiological evaluation. No violations of NRC requirements or findings of significance were identified.”

    NRC did identify some things that could have been done better to have prevented the leak or helped to identify it sooner, but overall, NRC issued a positive report. Those failures to identify the leak were apparently related to the implementation of a “voluntary” industry standard, rather than NRC rules. The key paragraph covering this area is at the end of the report as follows:

    “Implementation of  the NEI 07-07 Ground water Protection  Initiative (GPI) is voluntary. Under the initiative, each site was to develop an effective, technically sound ground water protection program by August 2008.  The inspectors’ review identified that at Vermont Yankee, not all of the objectives established in the GPI had been met.”  

    From my perspective the extraordinary thing here is that the leak didn’t violate any NRC regulations, and wasn’t considered “significant.” I spoke with several of the NRC staff at the April 19 public forum, and what really strikes me is that they consider this business as usual, and that these kinds of leaks are a routine part of running a nuclear plant. I can’t imagine what it would take to qualify as a “significant” finding or problem, but it sure looks like NRC is in business to support the industry, rather than regulate it. That’s disturbing.

    In my opinion, the Rutland Herald coverage of the NRC report is reasonable, but the oversight provided by NRC is clearly not supporting the public interest.

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