The headline Monday read NRC Report Vt. Yankee hasn’t done all promised.(paywalled)
However it reads as if Entergy had done nothing at all. According to the NRC, Entergy had promised, after the tritium leak a year ago, to do more studies on radioactive tritium and groundwater contamination.
Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that Entergy Nuclear had promised to do more studies on the issue of the tritium and other radioactive contamination and groundwater protection, but hadn’t carried out all those promises.
“No significant findings were identified,” Sheehan said Friday. According to the[NRC] report, Entergy “has yet to complete its longterm groundwater monitoring program.”
While noting that Vermont Yankee failed to complete its longterm groundwater monitoring program as they had promised ,the NRC obligingly employs a little of its faith based regulatory rhetoric:
Sheehan said the NRC believed that Entergy “effectively evaluated the contaminated groundwater with respect to off-site effluent release limits, and the resulting radiological impact to public health and safety; and complied with all applicable regulatory requirements and standards pertaining to radiological effluent monitoring, dose assessment and radiological evaluation.” Emphasis added
Well as long as the NRC believes they have effectively evaluated the contaminated groundwater, no doubt it will be too busy this week to work on past promises as today they start a simulated radiation leak exercise. A control room simulator will “create blueprints for everything associated with an actual disaster”
Once the plume is originated by the computers, plant employees will use wind patterns to track which way it would travel and state hazardous material technicians will be sent out to various sites to collect simulated measurements.
William Irwin, chief of Radiological Health for the Vermont Department of Health ironically spoke of accountability when he said.
"We’re going to hold companies and people more accountable as a state. Vermonters should be proud of the systems in place."
its a good thing they will at least be taking virtual action and virtual measurements while running a simulation.
Of course, they could be taking real actions and real measurements on the real leaks and plumes they already have that are moving through the groundwater.
Oh, and about those 2 pumps. They didn’t post an immediate threat to public health, so we didn’t think it necessary to inform you that our backup systems that would help ward off a disaster weren’t even ready to go…
That’s a keeper! It well-describes the common practice of vaguely assuming that “the market” will keep any service industry on the rails!!
on another forum, kind of makes one wonder what info Mr. Irwin is privy to.
Hey, sounds like a new computer game & toy for the bureaucrats & NPP employees to play with & probably is. As far as this ‘virtual’ simulation hogwash, that’s really all it is.
And, why just now? These things should have been done from jumpstreet. Someone cleaning out the files & find some things they missed? Oops! Or, due to VT agencies Entergy complicity under the Douglas regime, never followed through on, as it may alert the gullible public & awaken the masses to the fact that there is an everpresent danger.
Better late than never! But really, it is quite obvious that this is now being considered necessary. I wonder how many of these folks have private planes & helicopters, or access to them.
As we now know from news stories in past year, due to design flaws, flawed ‘safety standards’, as well as settings which have been also found to be flawed & incorrect, VY could have a runaway reactor fire & their control room settings would show no problem. Meltdown or another catastrophic occurance is not the remote possibility they deem it to be as the apologists chatter away about the supposed ‘redundencies’.
The reality of this has been clear due to the many wake up calls we have had during this past year, @ least one of which was eerily ominous-Entergy’s Indian Point 2 had transformer explosion & fire @ precisely the same time as VY’s ’60 drops per minute’ fiasco, just 2 short months ago ‘Drops’? Hey, how big were those drops, anyways.
And, complete w/an ‘unusual event’, due to earthquake in Quebec. Hmm. On a continuum, mishaps, events & failures in the past year alone seem to dwarf the 2004-2009 sector, which makes the mission to ‘save Yankee’ a cruel joke.
Losing over 75% of control room warning lights? Seriously? They never told us what the cause was, though Vanags was dispatched posthaste. More greasy palms? Those pesky cables submerged in water connected to safety systems, perhaps?
NRC still has not definatively ruled on this after their wishy-washy waltzing. Some pretty fancy footwork I must say. So, Entergy has a plan? They’re monitoring them, they say?
All of this is a joke, really. It is merely being done as a CYA undertaking so that if this were to occur, esp after D’OH! notorious complicity, they will have their papers neatly filed & all in order so that in the event of an investigation it will pass bureaucratic muster.
Get real! We will not be allowed to leave. We will herded like the cattle ALL bureaucrats & government functionaries think we are, however, make no mistake, they, Entergy & VY employees have a plan for themselves & their families. We will be left high & dry.
I & my husband are not going to count on these clowns to do a gd thing to help us, however we are preparing.
After law enforcement, bureaucrats, those in charge have shepherded all the politicians, wealthy friends w/clout, own friends & family to safety, then & only then, maybe, those of us who do not accept their ‘evacuation plans’ will be allowed to leave.
Hey, remember Katrina, federal government, FEMA, & the governor who allowed the ‘indigent neighborhoods’ & less fortunate to die? We should expect no more.
Add some virtual clean air, virtual clean water, virtually safe bridges, virtual health care, virtual housing, and virtual food to make our virtual reality complete!
Our lives, health & safety in part, co-opted by VY, Entergy & Bill Irwin apparently running the show w/’simulators’.
http://www.reformer.com/localn…
The same Bill Irwin who was caught red-handed conspiring w/Entergy & was in fact successful in altering as well as changing the fenceline dosage calculation? That is, after Entergy moved the fenceline by purchasing the surrounding property. Also successful in circumventing legislative oversight of this w/his ever-present accomplice Dave O’Brien.
http://vtdigger.org/2010/01/31…
And, who has slithered from regulatory/oversight juncture to juncture, in one instance taking a legislator aside during relicensing deliberations about that pesky Arnie Gundersen claiming there were ‘buried/underground pipes’? Who then attempted to silence Arnie Gundersen. Info was in fact found to be accurate & directly involved w/the infamous ‘leak’ of 2009.
Again, he or DOH appears with accomplice PSD/DPS O’Brien, discrditing Fairewinds & in collusion w/Entergy following following an analysis by Fairewinds:
http://www.reformer.com/localn…
Quite a pair these two, always on hand to do Entergy’s bidding. They’ve surely done Entergy Louisiana proud.
Expect more of their slippery calculation methodology & environmental witchcraft:”The dosimeters track total radiation from the atmosphere, space and from the earth’s core, he said. The data collected is then averaged and subtracted from the numbers collected at the Vermont Yankee plant.”
Now we have dueling dosimeters along w/competing calculations on DOH website???
“Each location has two readers, one from the Department of Health and the other from Vermont Yankee, Irwin said.”
“Fairewinds Associates, Inc also recommends that the Legislature instruct the Department of Health to cease publicizing ENVY information on its State Website, but rather to instruct Entergy to issue the information in the form of a Press Release so it is clear that such information is an ENVY opinion is not misrepresented as an official position of the State.”
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/jfo…
You may remember this little photo:
An NRC spokesman described the problems like so: “I don’t know if I’d characterize it as rotting, but more sagging, deformation in some of the wood.”
not so cool
Indeed. [Photo courtesy of The New England Coalition]
For the whole original story see Vermont Daily Briefing, August 23, 2007. Things really haven’t changed much.
VDB