Last year, I talked about the way that VY was gaming its numbers by comparing two different measuring techniques and treating them as the same. Apparently that’s not the only numbers problem with VY.
First, from the Department of Health’s Website:
Vermont Yankee officials also updated the situation regarding soils removed during well drilling operations and site excavations. Approximately 310,000 pounds of soil and other solid waste from the groundwater contamination investigation have been packed into 10 tractor-trailer like containers for shipment to a licensed radioactive waste disposal facility.
Then from the Brattleboro Reformer:
…When the leak of tritiated water was discovered, the public was told by Entergy, which owns and operates Yankee, it would need to dispose of 240 cubic feet of earth from the excavation around what was determined to be the source of the leak.
If a cubic foot of dirt weighs on average 40 pounds, that’s only 9,600 pounds. So where did the other 300,400 pounds come from?
Now, far be it from me to accuse anyone of anything here. I’m not sure whether that 310,000 figure is due to a… “miscommunication” or simply a lie. If, however, I were asked directly, I’d suggest that it’s more likely just the nature of the sloppiness with which VY and the Department of Health have handled this whole situation: not paying close attention to figures and information, making statements without fact-checking. Honestly, I don’t know who to blame for this particular mistake, but at this point I don’t much care. The administration has coddled VY and VY, at least until this year, seemed to think they could get away with pretty much anything.
This is what I call the Mike Tyson syndrome: you tell someone for years that they can get away with pretty much anything: you cover for them. You clean up after their mistakes (after all, they’re your bread and butter). And then suddenly they bite someone’s ear off. It’s hard to separate culpability at this point, between the administration and VY, because it’s been mutually assured deception all along.
someone finally got the dirt on Vermont Yankee.
Are we supposed to believe that the operators of the biggest science project in the state are math challenged? Nice try VY.
The numbers I have seen for dirt, sand, and the like all hover around 100 pounds per cubic foot. The loamier and more organic it is, the more it trends towards 60, and the more sand and gravel in it the more it trends towards 105. That is for bone dry soil. Water bumps it up by 20 pounds or so. Wet sandy soil could weigh in at 120 pounds per cubic foot, but then 240 cubic feet only gets us to 28,800 pounds. There’s a factor of ten missing.
A standard 40 foot shipping container has a volume of just over 2700 cubic feet. A standard 20-foot container has 1360 cubic feet. 240 cubic feet of soil would feel kind of lonely spread out over ten of those.
Entergy said 240 feet of “soil,” but the later report said “soil and other solid waste.” I guess there was a lot of solid waste, whatever that was.
Maybe for Entergy the difference between soil and solid waste is like the difference between buried and underground. I’d be interested in finding out the composition of those container loads.
Nuke operators tend to gather up low level nukewaste on their site for a while, to make up a large enough load to economically ship out. It would make no sense, after all, to send out an 18 wheeler, containing only a pair of soiled overalls.
Sometimes when you imagine a conspiracy, there was a conspiracy. Sometimes not.