leak contained tritium, a radioactive form of water, and a basket of more serious radioactive particles, such as cesium and plutonium. Whether or not there was danger to the public — and how to meas- ure the degree of danger — had yet to be determined. I asked NRC for the company’s incident report and any related filings about the present leak and the system under scrutiny. Neil Sheehan, the northeastern regional PIO, responded with a list of document numbers. These can be plugged into the search engine on the agency’s ADAMS site and the documents will pop up, ready for reading or downloading. It’s a good way to delineate what the current problem is and what regulations may have been violated. The documents clearly showed that there was a recurring problem and that the leak was more serious than the company had indicated. ADAMS also had maps showing where the monitoring wells were and what systems in the vicinity contained or carried radioactive liquids. The high spike in radioactivity indicated that there were dan- gerous isotopes, perhaps cesium 137 and plutonium, flowing into the groundwater — wherever that went. But reading reports in ADAMS covers only the problem you know about — in this case, a leak somewhere in the three miles of underground piping, not the related issues that may have led up to it. That’s where Lochbaum comes in.
A uniquely neutral watchdog
Lochbaum is a nuclear safety engineer who worked as a con- sultant in the industry for 19 years before joining the Union of Con- cerned Scientists, or UCS. A watchdog on safety issues and inconsistencies in regulatory practices, he is unique among sources in his neutral assessment of safety issues.
His stature is such that in 2008 he left the UCS and worked for the NRC for a year, rewriting its safety manuals and teaching the NRC’s instructors how to improve their teaching of safety procedures to nuclear plant operators. At UCS, he issues annual reports delin- eating what the agency has done right and what it has done wrong. Lochbaum also has a 30-year, cross-indexed database of everything that has gone wrong at any nuke plant in the nation. He spots trends and patterns before most, and can readily share that information.
In the case of Indian Point, Lochbaum took a look at the maps provided by the NRC and explained what each of the nearby systems were, how much water they held, what was clean and what was ra- dioactive, and whether a system was always in use or only used for special circumstances, such as refueling. Drawing from his database, Lochbaum also pointed out similar events and their outcomes. That led me to two additional calls.
First, each state with a nuclear power plant has an arrangement with the NRC to provide state oversight over certain plant opera- tions. For plants along a coast, there is a Bureau of Coastal Zone Management within the individual states’ Department of State. I contacted New York’s Department of State for details on where the groundwater goes, what towns get water from the river and whether their filtration systems are capable of removing ra- dioactive material. Residents of those towns have a higher risk than casual kayakers.
A key industry source Second, I called the Nuclear Energy Institute (
www.NEI.org), 17 SEJournal Summer 2016
Getting the Grid
When writing about nuclear power, it’s important to understand that electricity is a commodity and, like sugar or cotton, its value is affected by many factors in its market place.
The market for electricity lies in the operation of a competitive regional grid. In much of the country, that electric grid is managed by nonprofit organizations called Independent System Operators (ISOs) (
http://www.isorto.org/about/Role ) or Regional Transmis- sion Organizations (RTOs). While utility companies generally own and maintain the actual wires and infrastructure on the grid and are paid by customers to deliver electricity, the ISOs and RTOs act as traffic directors for electricity, constantly taking the pulse of the grid and directing the flow of energy in the most efficient manner. With automated energy dispatch systems, the RTOs and ISOs are constantly accounting for outages, changing demand, weather impacts and other variables. RTOs and ISOs also can help the shift to a lower car- bon and more efficient energy landscape, since they can improve efficiency through their operations and they can integrate distributed renewable energy resources onto the grid and encourage demand response — lowering energy demand at key moments. RTOs and ISOs also run wholesale electricity markets
where energy is bought and sold for varying time frames, from real-time and day-ahead to “capacity sales” where generators are paid to be available to provide a certain amount of energy in the future if demand gets that high. Nuclear plants, along with coal and natural gas plants and other generators, sell their energy into these auctions. Ten different ISOs and RTOs operate in North Amer- ica, covering about 60 percent of U.S. power supply. The PJM Interconnection serves Washington D.C. and parts of 13 states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Mary- land, West Virginia, Virginia and parts of northern Indiana and northern Illinois. MISO, the Midwest ISO, covers the rest of Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, other U.S. states and Canadian territory. The Southwest Power Pool serves states including Nebraska, Oklahoma and part of Texas. California, New York and New England have their own ISOs; as do Albert, Ontario and New Brunswick in Canada. In parts of the country not covered by ISOs, utilities or other entities op- erate the grid.
At the state and national level, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (
www.FERC.gov) has the final say over siting and operation of electric power lines as well as oil and gas pipelines.
— Contributed by Kari Lydersen Midwest Energy News
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