The Centipede Drops Another Shoe

Here we go again.  

Vermont Yankee revealed Friday that strontium-90 has been detected in soil near the site where a tritium leak had previously been discovered at Vermont Yankee. More recognizable by name to most of us Baby Boomers than tritium, strontium-90 contamination truly is cause for alarm and poses a whole new set of challenges to the prospect of eventual clean-up.  As nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen explains, contact with the radioactive isotope is extremely dangerous, as it concentrates in human bone, causing leukemia.

“This is the worst,” Gundersen said. “This is the most harmful, the hardest-to-detect and the most soluble.”

It’s interesting that this information took so long to reach the public.  The Free Press reports that the results of the March 17 soil sampling that revealed the strontium-90 contamination were received on Monday, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was only notified on Thursday.

My guess is that VY spokesman Larry Smith has the spin-cycle in full revolution.

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

9 thoughts on “The Centipede Drops Another Shoe

  1.  ‘Let me see lets have the good news first’

    A little strotium 90 suddenly pops up two days (on a Friday no less! ) after the headline:  

    NRC praises Entergy for tritium leak response .

    This is a well managed PR stage, if only the power plant was run as well.

  2. …either a farmer or a cheese maker or a specialty food processor in Vermont (you listening, Ben and Jerry’s/Unilever?) I would be screaming for an immediate VY shutdown.

    I’m interested in a shutdown for very pragmatic safety reasons, but food producers should be concerned with pragmatic marketing reasons. Reputation is a very delicate thing, and even if strontium 90 in Vernon doesn’t threaten cheese from Cabot or ice cream from St. Albans, consumers in other states don’t necessarily know that.

    “Vermont, the formerly pure, green place, now with the leaky nuke plant.” How’s that for a state image?

    Same goes for tourism. “Maybe we’ll skip Vermontium 90 and ski in Colorado this year.”

  3. … are babies and children, because most of the human skeletal structure is formed rapidly between conception and age 18.

    Strontium is an alkaline earth element, very similar to calcium.

    As a matter of fact, from the human body’s perspective, strontium looks just like calcium, but while calcium builds strong bones, strontium builds deadly bones.

    Children take in, use, and get rid of radioactive strontium in the same ways as stable strontium. Children are likely to be more vulnerable than adults to the effects of radioactive strontium because relatively more goes into bone when it is growing. Also, children are potentially more vulnerable than adults to radiation damage because they keep radioactive strontium in bone for a longer time.

    Children would be expected to have the same types of effects from exposure to radioactive strontium as exposed adults. Children can be exposed to radioactive strontium at levels higher than background without showing increases in cancer rates. Evidence from one foreign population showed that children who drank water containing unusually high levels of radioactive strontium for 7 years showed an increase in leukemia. High levels of radioactive strontium cause more bone damage and higher bone cancer rates when animals are exposed before birth or as juveniles rather than as adults. In humans and animals, radioactive strontium can be transferred into milk or across the placenta into the fetus.

    The half-life of Strontium-90 is 29 years. This means that half of the strontium built into your child’s bones just before birth would still be radioactive when that child reached age 29.

    The thing that makes strontium-90 exposure so nasty is that, when strontium-90 decays, it doesn’t just immediately become non-radioactive. Instead, it breaks down into yttrium-90, which has its own radioactive half-life of something a little shy of 30 days – each time an atom of strontium-90 gives off its “extra energy” into your child’s unsuspecting cells, it creates a new, very excited little yttrium-90, which is fated to shed its own highly damaging high-energy beta particle … also into your child’s cells.

    Strontium-90 is not just the gift that keeps on giving, it’s a double-whammy of radioactive destruction.

  4. i hear we (comcast) are demanding a judgement from the PSB on burlington telecom. too bad management at BT (or intervale compost) didn’t get invited to that christmas party… or sponsored the governor’s ball…

    potentially leaking organic matter into the river – shut it down!

    actually leaking all sorts of nasty stuff into the ground and water… well.

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