The Strontium Fish and Lochbaum and Markey

In a recent post, The Strontium Fish and the Associated Press, I described how AP wrote stories about Vermont Yankee releasing strontium 90 without mentioning the quantities of these releases. As I pointed out in the post, the releases were on the order of 10 to the minus 7 or minus 8 curies a year. The AP described releases, but did not describe the quantity of strontium released. The amounts were in the ten-billionths of a curie range.

Markey and Lochbaum

Representative Markey of Massachusetts, a long-time nuclear foe, saw this plant-released strontium-90 theme and decided to run with it. (Maybe Markey saw it in the AP articles.) Markey wrote a letter to the NRC, accusing the NRC of letting Vermont Yankee get away with lying to the press. Here's a link to Chairman's Jaczko's answer to that accusation. Jaczko said: The quoted licensee statements in your question are not without foundation based on the above information. (Vermont Yankee is the licensee).

Aside: For more information on Markey, Vermont Yankee, and the NRC, I recommend Victoria Barq's posts at NEI Nuclear Notes.

Markey's letter to Jaczko includes a copy of a letter from David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, written to the Entergy spokesman Larry Smith. (You can read the entire Lochbaum letter in the link.)

In his letter, Lochbaum says:

I was forwarded a copy of the statement you (Larry Smith) released on August 2, 2011, which contained the following statement. "There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Vermont Yankee is the source for the strontium-90...."

'Absolutely no evidence'?

Really? Come on.

How about the report that Entergy submitted to the NRC on May 11, 2011...(that) stated that 3.17 E-08 curies were released in gaseous form...during the 1st quarter of 2010...Past reports (show other releases)....

So what you said in the statement about not detecting strontium-90 in the monitoring wells may be true, but it is not the whole truth is it Mr. Smith? In fact, it is so short of the whole truth as to be very misleading bordering on deceitful.

Mr. Lochbaum includes the numbers 31 billionths of a curie, but he uses a shorthand that not everyone will follow. Then Lochbaum calls Larry Smith's statement "misleading bordering on deceitful" for claiming Vermont Yankee releases do not affect the amount of strontium in the local fish. In my opinion, Lochbaum is assuming that nobody reading his letter will have any idea of what 3.17E-08 means. It means 31 billionths of a curie.

However, in the next paragraph of his letter, Lochbaum has to backtrack. After all, he is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Lochbaum just called Smith's statement "misleading," but if he ends there, Lochbaum is in trouble. If he ends there, somebody is going to notice that Lochbaum is saying that a plant release of a few billionths of a curie ...ended up in this fish. Not a scientific conclusion! So Lochbaum continues, trying to get on firmer ground:

The whole truth is that Vermont Yankee routinely releases strontium-90 to the environment. This fact does not mean that Vermont Yankee is the primary or sole source of the strontium found in the fish. But this fact also means that Vermont Yankee cannot be excluded as a potential source, as your very misleading statement sought to establish.

Whew. With a statement that is more propaganda than science "Vermont Yankee cannot be excluded as a potential source," Lochbaum attempts to step back into scientific credibility.

Science and Propaganda

Really, Mr. Lochbaum? We cannot exclude the potential of a meteor hitting Radio City Music Hall tomorrow. In the exact same sense, we cannot exclude the potential that some of that billionth part of a curie of Sr 90 wandered nine miles up the river and got into that fish.

We also must include the fact that Lochbaum chooses to use the least-accessible method of expressing scientific notation. Then he doesn't explain the notation. Lochbaum uses tortured sentence construction, such as "cannot exclude."

In my view, everything in this letter is constructed as propaganda, not science. Lochbaum lards his letter with "oh shucks" verbiage and then accuses Entergy of lying. He makes no attempt to explain anything, or put anything in context. He seems to be just hoping that nobody notices the weakness of his statements.

Really, Mr. Lochbaum? Come ON! For Pete's sake, man! Write science, not propaganda!

My conclusion: Entergy told the truth. I leave it to my readers to judge Mr. Lochbaum's words. Perhaps he has expressed himself in a way that is so short of the whole truth as to be very misleading bordering on deceitful.

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Update: Victoria Barq at NEI Nuclear Notes has an excellent post published yesterday: NRC’s Jaczko Responds to Rep. Markey on the Sr-90 Issue at Vermont Yankee

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Geeky addendum

To see the effluent reports for Vermont Yankee for yourself, you can see radioactive effluent reports from 2005 to 2010 at this page on the NRC website. For earlier years, you have to go to this NRC page and do a search by clicking on Begin Web-based ADAMS search.

Some example results:

2002

Strontium 89 and strontium 90 releases, by quarter.

All as particulate, all from the stack, 2002, all in curies:

• First quarter. Sr 89 --5.5 times 10 exp -5
• Second quarter. Sr 89-- 1.3 times 10 exp -4
• Third quarter:Sr 89--3.5 times 10 exp -5
• Fourth quarter: Sr 89--5.78 times 10 exp -5
• In the second quarter, there was also a release of Sr 90-- 1.75 times 10 exp -7 curies.

Total release of Sr 90 for the year 2002 was 1.75 times 10 exp -7 curies, or approximately 2 millionths of a curie. Total release of all types of radioactive Sr for the year was 2 ten-thousandths of a curie.

2005

The equivalent release numbers for 2005 were: no strontium 90 detected, but Sr 89 release of 6.3 times 10 exp -6 one quarter, and 6.5 time 10 exp -6 another quarter. These were all high-level releases (from the stack) as in 2002. However, in 2005, there were also ground-level releases of Sr 89 and Sr 90 in the first half of the year, at the level of 1 times ten -8 curies. Total releases here are in the neighborhood of 1 ten-thousandth of a curie, mostly Sr 89, not Sr 90. Sr 90 was at 10 exp -8 curie level.

2010

As Lochbaum said, 31 billionths of a curie of Sr 90. But he made it sound pretty scary. Entergy tries to mislead! Deceitful! Sr 90 released! Etc etc etc.

She Said: A Review of the Zeller Article about the NRC

She Said

As I noted in yesterday's blog post about Japan and the New York Times, the New York Times published an article by Tom Zeller that described the NRC as a practically toothless watchdog:Nuclear Agency Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry.

The article is one-sided and mostly quotes people who are associated with the Union of Concerned Scientist. It is really no surprise that Tom Zeller has left the New York Times and joined the Huffington Post, where this type of one-sided journalism will get more scope. According to news articles about Zeller's switch, HuffPo is probably paying him on the order of $300,000 a year.

I don't think he is about to write a more balanced article about nuclear very soon. His NYT article was all he-said, where "he" was a nuclear opponent.

I guess it is up to me to do the she-said article. I don't have time or resources to be as lengthy as Zeller, but I will make a start. I also recommend Dan Yurman's insightful article on the New York Times Barbeques the NRC.

Zeller's Examples:

Example One: Exelon allowed pipes to get too thin at the Byron plant.The agency did not catch the problem until a worker was cleaning a pipe and he broke it.

My take: the agency definitely should have caught the problem. The description in the article claims that the resulting leak shut the plant down for twelve days. The problem was caused by corrosion in the service water system. Service water causes reliability problems in many power plants.

This is a reason why the agency should have caught the problem earlier, but it is also a reason that Zeller's description of the incident is overblown. "If enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident..." That's quite a reach: from service water corrosion to fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Example Two: The NRC hired people in the 1970s. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which developed and regulated nuclear, was divided into two agencies about forty years ago (mid-1970s). One agency, DOE, developed nuclear. The other one, the NRC, regulated nuclear. At that time, many years ago, people in the regulatory group of the AEC were moved into the newly-formed NRC.

In Zeller's article, Peter Bradford said "there wasn't much of a change," because the NRC was started with people from the AEC group. The agency also started off with the rules they had developed in the AEC.

My take: Huh? What did Bradford think they should do? Fire everyone and start making new rules from scratch? The new agency had a new charter without conflict of interest, and it started from the work done by the old agency. Sometimes I think Peter Bradford lives in an alternate reality. He doesn't show much understanding of how things are done in companies and agencies.

Also, forty years ago might be just-yesterday to some people, but not to me. Yes, I am a grandma, but forty years ago is still a long time. Why would the personnel at NRC forty years ago be an issue worth mentioning in an article written this weekend? I guess he couldn't find anything current to criticize, so he decided the break-up of the AEC wasn't done well, and that was an important topic.

Example Three: Vermont Yankee got its license renewal, despite "leaking tritium" and having the vote go against it in the Senate. Lochbaum views the situation with alarm.

My take: My whole blog is about how Vermont Yankee is a well-run, well-regarded plant. Lochbaum asks "How can a plant like that get a license renewal?" Well, because it is a top-performing plant.

I have a question also. My question is "How come only Mr. Lochbaum gets quoted about this plant?"

Mr. Zeller. You could have asked me about this one.

Example Four: Monticello and License Renewal. The problem seems to be that the NRC reviews forward-looking issues for license renewal and sometimes quotes the plant submissions directly in the renewal documents.

My take: Aging-management assessment is the proper assessment for license renewal. Other license issues at a plant are reviewed on an on-going basis. Also, the fact that the license quotes some input from the licensee (a smoking-gun of collusion, in Mr. Zeller's opinion) strikes me as appropriate. Once you get a technical issue written correctly, you should keep using the same wording.

Example Four: Fire-retardant material mandated after the Brown's Ferry Fire is not fire-retardant enough.

My take: The industry adopted two levels of safety in response to one problem. The Brown's Ferry fire occurred in 1975 when a worker was inspecting electrical cabling with a candle, checking for drafts. The first level of safety improvement was to forbid workers to do inspections with a candle! The NRC also required a second level, fire-barriers.

Mr. Zeller says that the new fire-barrier material was not reviewed carefully enough. I am not an expert on barrier material, so I cannot assess this. On the other hand, the change in protocol was the important part. Without candles, there shouldn't be a problem with cabling catching fire.

Example Five: The Davis Besse Reactor Head Inspection. This was a bad situation, where boric acid had eaten at the reactor head at Davis Besse. It led to shutdowns, lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and fines. Millions of dollars in fines.

My take: This was a terrible situation. However, the aspect of the situation Mr. Zeller stresses is that Davis-Besse was able to persuade the NRC to put off an inspection until their next plant outage. I don't think this is fair to the NRC.

At that point, Davis-Besse wasn't inspecting for thinning of the reactor head. (Photo from Wikipedia shows the famous hole-in-the-head.) The plant didn't expect reactor head thinning, and such a thing had never happened before. They were inspecting for cracks in nozzles, and it is quite possible that waiting until the next refueling outage for that inspection was the reasonable thing to do.

I am not saying any of this was good. I am just pointing out that the situation was far from as cut-and-dried as it is presented in Zeller's article. I suggest a recent Dan Yurman post on the history of David Besse.

More examples: At this point, the article is too muddy for me to assess. For example, after pointing out that reactors have been operated more safely in the last ten years (lower levels of worker irradiation, fewer scrams) Zeller jumps back to 1998 to make a point about a budget-cutting move in Congress at that time.

Zeller also has two stories of NRC employees who used to work for industry, or later worked for industry. Neither story seems particularly compelling to me in terms of collusion or revolving doors or whatever. Buried in the middle of all of this is a short piece about how NRC inspectors insisted Duke do more inspections .

At the end of the article, the time-line jumps around and congressional committee squabbles are reported upon as major events. I'm not going to try to review it.

Conclusion:

This article is not typical of the New York Times coverage, which usually strives for at least a he-said, she-said presentation of the facts. I am glad to see Mr. Zeller leave that newspaper. We will all be happier when the New York Times stops doing this type of reporting.

Transformer Fires? Erosion-Corrosion? Recent Events at Indian Point and Vermont Yankee

Two days ago was not the best day for Entergy. Indian Point Reactors Unit 2 was taken off-line by a transformer fire, while Vermont Yankee was shut to repair a 60-drop-a-minute leak of radioactive water within the plant. In my opinion, the best description of these incidents is in the Wall Street Journal.

Quick on the trigger, David Lochbaum of Union of Concerned Scientists was on the job about the transformer fire, while Ray Shadis of New England Coalition hopped aboard to discuss the leak. You can read their remarks in the Brattleboro Reformer.

In this case, they have made statements without knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge isn't their job. They are paid for anti-nuclear activism, not for scientific or technical credibility. Unlike science, which actually looks for causes, Lochbaum and Shadis's remarks always fit this theme: "The plant is aging and can't run anymore."

Okay. Let's look at the facts, instead.

The Transformer Fire at Indian Point

Quoting Mr. Lochbaum:

David Lochbaum,

director of the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said both problems were probably due to their age. As plants get older, they face more and more such challenges, said Lochbaum......Transformer explosions happen, on average, about a half dozen times a year at U.S. nuclear power plants, Lochbaum said.

Really? It happened because the transformer was old? The Wall Street Journal is pretty famous for digging deep, and they asked Entergy about that transformer. Here's the answer:

The transformer that failed was made by Siemens AG (SIE.XE) and installed in 2006, Nappi said.

The question then arises: Why would a new transformer fail?

Well, because it is new.

They Don't Build Them Like They Used To

Transformer fires are nothing new, but more transformer fires are happening. There's a company whose business is transformer fire prevention. (There are several companies in this market, but this is the biggest one I found by Googling.) Transformer Protection Corp.

Transformer Protection Corporation says on its website that they expect transformer fires to increase in the future because: .....This (regulatory) weakness, in addition to the globalization market, has opened the door to a disturbing drop in the quality of new transformers...Many experts anticipate that the number of failures will increase significantly in the near future, from 1% in 2001 to 2% in 2008 ..... In addition, the shorter lifetime of new transformers will sharply increase above this rate after 2008

The website also notes that there were around 800 transformer fires in the U.S. in one year. I have no idea if Lochbaum's "a half-dozen fires at nuclear plants" is correct. If it is correct, I can rephrase his statement as below.

• Less than 1 % of the transformer fires in the U.S. were in nuclear plants last year.
• Nuclear plants should be careful to not replace transformers unless they absolutely need to do so. The old (aging) transformers usually have better life expectancy than their replacements.

Erosion Corrosion

For years I was a member of NACE and a working corrosion engineer. Mr. Shadis's description of erosion-corrosion is accurate. It is a terrible, sometimes catastrophic form of corrosion. It breaks pipes.

In other words, erosion-corrosion rarely seeps. It busts things. It causes pipe failure. I would say "Erosion-corrosion never seeps" but I have been a corrosion engineer too long to be throwing around the word "never." Things happen, you know. Not everything goes according to form. Erosion-corrosion could make one through-wall pit, under some complex circumstances, a single pit that leaks. It would be unlikely to leak at a drop-per-minute rate, however. Also, erosion-corrosion is rarely seen in straight flows of steel pipes. It is far more common in copper, or at places where the flow in a pipe becomes turbulent.

Let's say that erosion corrosion would NOT be the first thing I would consider in a case of seepage in a straight run of pipe. Indeed, Vermont Yankee had seepage around a weld, the most common thing on earth, corrosion-wise. Mr. Shadis decided that to say that the seepage was erosion-corrosion because that was the worst thing he could think of. It was not a likely cause for the leak.

As I said, Shadis is paid to attack the plant, and that is what he does. Most of the time, frankly, he does it better than he did in this case.

Mythical Fire Salamander From Wikipedia

Monday Blue Ribbon: People Making a Difference to Nuclear

Two prestigious nuclear blogs are choosing to post good news on Mondays to start the week off well. Nuclear TownHall often posts Good News Mondays, while Dan Yurman posts Nuclear Energy Videos for Monday at Idaho Samizdat.

People in the nuclear industry are doing things I greatly admire, but I sometimes don't think these things are "worth posting about." Now, I am going to honor these people and their accomplishments on Mondays. It's my contribution to a good week!

My two honorees this Monday are (drum roll, please)

Robert Hargraves and Margaret Harding.

Robert Hargraves, the LFTR, and the Blue Ribbon Commission

Robert Hargraves has been a active proponent of nuclear energy. He teaches the Rethinking Nuclear Power class at ILEAD (life-long learning at Dartmouth College), has written the book Aim High about the promise of thorium fuel cycles, and has presented talks on thorium to local meetings of the American Nuclear Society, the Mechanical Engineering Department at Columbia, as well as in many other venues. I can also recommend his Google Talk on thorium reactors.

Bob has also been a steady supporter of Vermont Yankee relicensing. He wrote the popular letter suggesting that Vernon move to New Hampshire. When I posted it on my blog, it received amazing numbers of hits. Bob also did an excellent short slideshow on Vermont Yankee at the local Rotary Club. The slideshow is a fine introduction to Vermont Yankee. Bob and I are members of the Coalition for Energy Solutions, a local group of energy professionals. Most recently, the Coalition wrote a report countering the VPIRG ideas about replacing Vermont Yankee power with a mixture of wind turbines and solar. Bob is also the creator of the prosperity and birthrate chart that clarified so much in my post: It's the Energy. Why I Love Nuclear.

Today, perhaps even as you read this, Bob is testifying before the Blue Ribbon Commission on alternative fuel cycles for nuclear. I find it very heartening that his tireless, fact-based work will be part of the Commission's deliberations.

Margaret Harding, Boiling Water Reactors, and David Lochbaum

Margaret Harding is an experienced nuclear engineer who blogs at her web site, 4Factor Consulting. David Lochbaum, nuclear specialist and foe of the nuclear industry, has started a new series of blog postings at his employer's site, the Union of Concerned Scientists. His posts are called "Fission Stories." They describe mistakes and problems at reactors, mostly from the seventies and eighties, along with dire warnings that the same thing is likely to happen again tomorrow.

For a long time, nobody challenged Mr. Lochbaum on these event descriptions. Most of us pro-nuclear advocates are busy with current events, not events from thirty years ago. Many of us don't have the expertise to truly go head to head with Lochbaum, who is a master of the half-truth. It takes time to dig up the old records in NRC and interpret them correctly. So Lochbaum's "Fission Stories" went unchallenged. His latest post is about power oscillations in boiling water reactors.

However, Margaret Harding knows "Fission Fiction" when she sees it. Ms. Harding has a B S in nuclear engineering, and 28 years of experience in the industry. More specifically, she was a technical professional in the GE BWROG (Boiling Water Reactor Owners Group) when it solved the power oscillation problem that Lochbaum claims was not solved. The cure was the Option III system using in-core sensors to automatically determine when the reactor was in an oscillation mode and needed to shut itself down. Harding explains this all in her post Fission Fiction--Or How David Lochbaum Got It Wrong,

Mr. Lochbaum posted a story on the Union of Concerned Scientists website about an event in 1988, then proceeded to link it to a 2005 event at a different plant and makes the case that the nuclear industry is filled with screw-ups and near misses......(However, in the 2005 incident) Perry's Option III system WORKED AS DESIGNED.

On the Union of Concerned Scientist's site, Lochbaum is described as "widely quoted in the media and a frequent guest on network news programs." Maybe Lochbaum's half-truths have met the challenger they need. Hopefully, mainstream media will learn that they can get a great "he said she said" story if they quote Lochbaum and Harding. When they quote Harding, the things "she said" will be accurate. This will be a refreshing change from the current situation.

Harding's post has been been picked up by NEI Nuclear Notes, as well as Idaho Samizdat. Can the mainstream press be far behind? (Answer, alas, is probably "yes".)

One Person Can Make a Difference

Nuclear advocates get tired of the constant, repetitive lies of the opponents. It is important to acknowledge the people who stand up for nuclear: testifying before committees or answering the half-truth assertions of well-known opponents. People like Bob Hargraves and Margaret Harding are making a difference for all of us.

A Short Monday Mop-Up

Peter Shumlin won the Democratic nomination for governor with 197 votes. Douglas Racine, the runner-up, knows that the last time Vermont recounted, the count changed by 239 votes. Racine has called for a recount.

At Vermont Yankee last night, some alarm circuits failed due to an internal power supply failure. The "unusual event" (lowest-level emergency classification for the NRC) was declared at 7 p.m. and was lifted by 8:30. We can expect much handwringing from the opponents, who will explain that such an event means the plant is unsafe and everybody is going to die unless the plant is shut immediately. However, I want to point out Susan Smallheer at the Rutland Herald wrote a clear and accurate article about this blown-fuse "emergency".

Blue Ribbon graphic from Wikimedia

Mop Image also from Wikimedia

Thanks to Robert Hargraves and Margaret Harding for the use of their pictures on this blog.