Published: January 31st, 2012 at 10:36 am ET
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Title: Illinois Nuclear Plant Shut Down Over Power Issue
Source: AP
Date: January 30, 2012
[...] Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng said officials can’t yet calculate how much tritium is being released. They know the amounts of tritium are small because monitors around the plant aren’t showing increased levels of radiation, she said. [...]
“It was standard procedure that they would notify county officials,” [Candace Humphrey, Ogle County's emergency management coordinator] said. “There is always concern. But, it never crossed my mind that there was any danger to the people of Ogle County.” [...]
Mitlyng said Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors were in the control room at Byron and in constant contact with the agency’s incident response center in Lisle, Ill. [...]
Read the report here
Published: January 31st, 2012 at 10:36 am ET
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“The steam contains low levels of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, but federal and plant officials insisted the levels were safe for workers and the public.”
If they are manually releasing the steam containing the tritium, shouldn’t they know how much steam is being released and be able to calculate the levels of tritium in the steam? And shouldn’t they know the level of tritium being released in order to insist that the levels are safe?
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Again, very much in character for nuke plant operation. Shoddy, sloppy, deceptive, negligent, and abusive practices. Shouldn’t it have been a regulated industry practice that plants calculate the amount of ionizing radiation to be released into the environment before release….not regular practice to calculate or guess after its released and then, of course, just lie about it afterwards?
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Whistleblower, Ann Harris, said this about radiation releases from nuclear power plants:
“Every time the temperature of the reactor goes up or down…if they bring it down 5 degrees or 10%…if they start moving it up, raise the production up. Every time they do that they have to dump radiation out into the air. People don’t know that. They think they only get it when they’re notified. Notified? Let me tell you what. They can dump 50 times a day. They can dump every 30 minutes, but they can only dump a legal limit in one of those times. But whenever you add it all up, that’s cumulative.”
@53 mins in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77vkuPtqN4A
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Thanks, Mack. That’s good information. I’ll have to stay up and watch this tonight.
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Would you trust the reassurances of a Russian gypsy bellydancer???
Actually, I respect and am appalled all at the same time the NRC for having her do PR for them
http://www.bellydancechicago.net
WHAT A TRIP!!
As for saying on the one hand the tritium release levels are low, then saying they haven’t been measured undermines the thimbleful of faith I had left in that agency…
And I still think vented steam from a reactor core has many more isotopes than just radioactive hydrogen…once things are overheated at the CORE
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Wish I could live up to the ideals of my avatar, but I’m feeling the very human emotions of rage and disgust. The next nuke stooge that says “it never crossed my mind” or “no one could have foreseen”, should be immediately immediately airlifted to Fukushima, and dropped into the spend fuel pool while we watch on live television. God, I hate these evil f&%$#rs and their death industry.
Does anyone have any doubt that another Fukushima is just a matter of time, with all these aging plants being run beyond their design lifetimes, and supposedly being monitored by a bought and paid for regulatory agency?
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nohobear, what you are expressing would, in a Vulcan, logically be examined as a possible manifestation of Bendai Syndrome.
However, in a human, it is a not-unexpected response, and one cannot rule out it’s efficacy as a survival mechanism.
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Arnie says the chances are 300 percent that a major accident will happen in the USA.
That means a chunk of America will be wiped out forever….what could be worth that????
The Byron plant engineers know exactly how much radiation is coming out of the plant, they aren’t saying because it is probably harmful then think of all the litigation. It will always be a small amount no matter what…it can’t be anything else in a high population area.
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You are correct, sir! They put all their cards on the table for us to read their hand. Everyday it is easier to figure out how these organizations operate to the point where you can predict the next press release! It makes me laugh!
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I vote to dunk them in the spent fuel pool and roll them in radioactive pollen, skewer them with the rods and charbroil them in Hell.
Too much?
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Not too much Alice!
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Maybe they should be concerned for the 4 county’s east of the and Chicago then there is beyond, monitors around the plant may not be down wind !
—-
This tells me it nastier then they want you to know !
Tritium is also produced in heavy water-moderated reactors whenever a deuterium nucleus captures a neutron. This reaction has a quite small absorption cross section, making heavy water a good neutron moderator, and relatively little tritium is produced. Even so, cleaning tritium from the moderator may be desirable after several years to reduce the risk of its escaping to the environment. … new Tritium Extraction Facility[11] at the Savannah River Site beginning in November 2006.[12] Tritium leakage from the TPBARs during reactor operations limits the number that can be used in any reactor without exceeding the maximum allowed tritium levels in the coolant.[13]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
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Headlines are …
Rockford residents upset over garbage pick up delay
By Michael Peppers ROCKFORD (WREX) Confusion causes a delay in garbage pickup and some people in Rockford say that stinks. The complaints have come from people who live near city alleyways. People
> WATCH VIDEO
Illinois State Police Trooper Brent Massingill honored
Rockford College opens up campus to potential students
UPDATE: Police release name of officer involved in fatal shooting
Mitt Romney starts to extend lead in Florida
Study shows Illinois debt of unpaid bills could worsen
State Rep. Winters picks a side in Manzullo vs. Kinzinger race
Shirland students have the recipe for lunch menu success
Hononegah School District names current staff member Superintendent
AH ! Bottom of the list:
Byron Station power loss causes stir
Fire departments receive a rare emergency call to the Byron nuclear plant today.
A missing plume of steam, a deafening roar and a troop of fire engines turn out to be no cause for alarm today in Byron.
“I first noticed the roar about ten o’clock this morning,” says Byron resident, Charles Fisher. “I had heard it before.”
That roar Fisher and most other Byron residents hear is steam being released manually from the Byron Station nuclear energy facilities.
A power loss causing one of the large cooling towers to shut down means the large white plumes… read more …
http://www.wrex.com/
Found this in the AM.
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forty eight hours,
ten plumbing articles,
is that all we need
to save us from particles
and nuclear gasses –
plumbers with pants low
under the sink,
showing crack asses -
it makes me blink,
I’m amazed, the absurdity
confounds my brain
to think we just need
to unplug the drain -
but oh wait
now I get it -
the hot-gurgle circle
is really a hi-tech
faith in the miracle
of tech-cornucopian
voodoo with smoke
and it’s fingers crossed
and hoping with hope
we don’t decide we’ve
been played for dopes -
time to put nuke-power
OUT on the ropes!
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*snaps fingers in appreciation*
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Another thing I hate about nuclear. Take a look at this picture and notice what is in the foreground:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Station.jpg
Cornfields. Three MIle Island was also surrounded by farmlands and dairy cow grazing fields. Since these plants are too dangerous to put near populous areas, they end up getting put in rural ones near farmlands. How much of the tritium released by these plants–routinely or otherwise– ends up getting absorbed into the produce of the farmlands surrounding the plants? None of us have anyway of knowing if the corn, milk, wheat, etc., that goes into the food we buy was sourced from farms located in the shadow of nuclear reactors.
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Sorry–I must correct my grammar: None of us HAS any way of knowing
(former English teacher)
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you mean that you don’t put your little hand held up to your beer and milk at the store? i do. i just explain to people that i don’t want to eat any bullshit. i scan all my veggies and meats. i scan a simple bag of wheat or box of noodles. and i put it on top of meats and soups in my fridge. haven’t found anything yet. im sure there are particles or amounts that are way too small for my little POS radex to even detect, but at least if there is a major contamination in my food i might know.
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Another former English teacher here also saw it. Thx for correction. Now kiddies, remember to eat all your vegetables!
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I once met a man who took photos of nuclear plants for the annual report of Babcock & Wilcox, the numnuts who built and operated Three Mile Island. He said his instructions were to always show them silhouetted against a blue sky, no clouds (might be mistaken for gaseous emissions), with nature all around and, if possible, an animal in the foreground. Nice bucolic image. He also reported that after he took the photos, he got out of the area as fast as he could.
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from the nuclear plumbing school of old banged up, overworked reactors
repost
leaked list OF IAEA safety equipment!!
CAN BE USED AS TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT PLUG
http://thepipeplug.com/
other IAEA sponsored products suitable for the nuclear industry include:
http://www.huntsman.com/advanced_materials/index.cfm?PageID=5865 (araldite)
http://www.gaffatape.org/
IAEA approved safety procedures!!
http://www.ehow.com/how_5246727_remove-gaffa-tape.html
i feel reasured/sarc
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There are so many problems at Nukes now, it is almost like a Brontosaurus caught in a tar pit, begging for a mercy kill. Indeed, let’s help them, encourage your regulators and politicians to Shut Them All Down.
This is the second plant in the US! to be scrammed after loss of off site power, even though they have “4 lines coming into the plant”, hows all that redundancy working out for ya?!
http://nukepimp.blogspot.com/2012/01/death-throes-o-bronto.html
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Tritium 101:
“A typical reactor is only allowed to release about a thirtieth of a teaspoon of tritium in a whole year! A bad year is maybe a whole teaspoon of tritium. That’s how deadly this stuff is! And if that teaspoon of tritium evaporates, do you think it gets measured accurately, and properly reported? What it does get is a special dispensation from the NRC to release the extra tritium that year.
If they leak tritium, which is almost always bound up as HTO, chances are pretty good it will evaporate, and never make it into the ground. We will breath it as water vapor. It will be in doses too low to measure accurately, thanks to all the tritium everyone is already dumping into our environment. (There is very little ‘natural’ tritium on earth at any one time.)”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/13/san-onofre/ “The Perils of Tritium”
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Tritium is a nuclear weapons material, says Ann Harris, Whistleblower.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77vkuPtqN4A
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no wonder they don’t want to squander much of in “regular” reactor releases…have other plans for it.
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*much of it*
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“Radioactive tritium used to be considered ‘harmless’ but recent research indicates that it may be much more hazardous to human health that previously believed. For example, an expert with the UK government at their Health Protection Agency (HPA) concludes that the cancer risk for people exposed to tritium (anyone living within 50 miles of any military/civilian nuclear facility) is actually twice as high as experts had previously thought.” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12984-tritium-hazard-rating-should-be-doubled.html
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from this article:
“… the weighting factor for tritium was lowered in 1969 because of pressure from the US military.”
What is wrong with these people? They think their purpose is to “protect” their country, but this is how they do it? By pressuring agencies to allow them to release greater amounts of sh-t into the air on the home front?
What is it that drives people like this?
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Tritium; Harmful to your health;
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/tritiumbasicinfo.pdf
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