NEI Nuclear Notes

No two ways about it : Some 45 tons of highly radioactive water leaked Sunday from desalination equipment used to decontaminate the radioactive water in Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and it is unclear if any made it to the sea, a Tepco official said Monday. This isn’t good. No radioactive anything should be flowing anywhere at this point and no excuse mitigates it. Having said that, the threat seems low: "Even if all 300 liters reached the sea, the radiation would be diluted, and the amount that escaped is tiny compared with what has already leaked into the sea (on earlier occasions)," said Genichiro Wakabayashi, a radiology professor at Kinki University, playing down the potential danger of the leak. "The leak (even if to the sea or to the groundwater) would not be enough to increase radiation levels in marine or agricultural products in the Tohoku region," he said. He may be “playing down the potential danger” becau...

Discovery News poses a series of questions to Tom Kaufmann, NEI’s senior media relations manager and Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. We really like this kind of interaction, but perhaps we could make a suggestion. Here’s a question : Often times the topic of Chernobyl comes up when nuclear energy is mentioned. Could a Chernobyl-type accident happen in the United States at a nuclear power plant? Here’s how Kauffman starts out: No. A Chernobyl-type accident can’t happen in the United States. It’s physically impossible. And then Lyman: The short answer is yes. An accident resulting in a large radiological release to the environment comparable to or worse than that of Chernobyl could definitely occur at a U.S. nuclear power plant. See the problem? Either Kauffman or Lyman are wrong here or the truest answer is too ambiguous to be definitive. From the story, there’s no way to know except to apply your own tilt (and where might t...