Search Results for: tritium

…y is objecting to safety analyses. I’m saying that if I read an article on tritium leaks at a nuclear plant, I want to know what the concentration of tritium in the ground water is and how much of it is likely to end up in drinking water. I don’t want to know the concentration of tritium in the spent fuel pools and that it’s X times the EPA’s drinking water limit. Similarly, if I read an article on radioactive material from fracking technology, I…

…ifies benzene as a known human carcinogen. The same organization says that tritium can increase the risk of cancer “as with all ionizing radiation”. Here is what the EPA also says about tritium – “because it emits very low energy radiation and leaves the body relatively quickly, for a given amount of activity ingested, tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides.” As far as I can tell, the only media outlets that have carried the Texas Cit…

…n increase the risk of any illness. Additional Reading NRC Backgrounder on Tritium, Radiation Protection Limits, and Drinking Water Standards Aside:After reading the above fact sheet, I learned that I have been incorrectly computing the potential doses from tritium based on obsolete information. The drinking water limit in the US is 20,000 picocuries per liter. When that was determined in 1976, it was based on a computational assumption that a per…

…ent in certain kinds of nuclear weapons. Don’t get me wrong – I think that tritium is an exceedingly useful isotope with incredible commercial potential, but I would rather see it be used in small, distributed, high value energy applications. As it decays at its steady and predictable rate, tritium releases low energy particles. In the nuclear lexicon, these particles are called “beta minus” particles, but an electrical engineer would call them el…

…or oil. And then, another crisis just happened. In New Jersey, radioactive tritium just leaked into the aquifer from a nuclear plant. It’s getting in people’s groundwater. Hopefully that disaster can show people that we’re really gambling with our children’s future when we’re giving tens of billions of dollars to nuclear energy in this bill. Joe Romm, a guy who generally claims that he is not opposed to nuclear energy, stated that the source of hi…