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MEDILL
There are four nuclear reactors on Lake Michigan's shoreline, and all of them store their spent fuel onsite, less than one mile from the water.
Nuclear worries abound in Great Lakes region. Do solutions?
by Rory Keane
Jan 26, 2012
Courtesy of Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Most of the nuclear reactors operating in the Great Lakes region were built in the '60s or '70s.
Rory Keane/MEDILL
The Nuclear Clean Air Energy Indy Car, sponsored by Entergy Nuclear, the power utility that owns Palisades Power Plant in Covert, Mich. The Indy Car was on display Wednesday at Illinois Institute of Technology.
An aging fleet
A building spree of nuclear reactors in the ’60s and ’70s has left the Great Lakes, and much of the U.S., with an aging fleet of nuclear plants that are showing signs of age.Braidwood
One nuclear power plant that came under scrutiny in the AP stories was Braidwood. Braidwood came online in 1988 and operates just a few miles upstream from the Kankakee River in Illinois.
Braidwood spokesperson Neal Miller said that “during environmental monitoring in 2005 we found an onsite tritium leak,” and “some tritium migrated off the property, got into one private drinking well, but it was less than 7 percent of the EPA’s safe drinking level. We take full responsibility for that.”
Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, and Miller estimated that the 2005 leak would take about eight years to dissipate completely. Braidwood’s groundwater table doesn’t drain into the Great Lakes.
Palisades
Palisades Power Plant in Covert, Mich., is operated by Entergy Nuclear. It is one of the oldest nuclear plants in operation in the country, first coming online in 1971. Shutdowns in 2011 have raised concerns over Palisade’s reliability.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held hearings earlier this month to determine violations in the wake of the shutdowns.
“Palisades has had issues that have come up; multiple unplanned shutdowns,” said Prema Chandrathil, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Curt Dale, owns a cabin three miles away from Palisades, said he has made peace with his nuclear neighbor, as best he can. “You don’t rest particularly easy with something like that, in case something bad were to ever happen,” said Dale.
Palisades had its operating license renewed until 2031.
Total attendance in the hall for Jeff Terry’s 2 p.m. lecture: roughly 12 people. But in this era of virtual gatherings, Terry later indicated that some 39 classrooms were online for his webinar.
Terry, an IIT physicist and former head of the school's health physics program, began by addressing the issue of dwindling scientific ranks in America.
“I think that having people better educated is better for modern society. And hopefully they could use some of that knowledge to make better choices,” Terry said.
At the end of the day, it’s all about choices.
A new report from a group called the Illinois Public Interest Research Group has drawn attention to the choice that Illinois, and 30 other states, has made about nuclear energy.
The report, titled “Too Close to Home,” cites numerous articles that followed the unfolding disaster at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant and concerns in the U.S., including a series of Associated Press stories dating from summer of 2010.
According to the report, over 10 million Americans in Great Lakes states, excluding Indiana and Minnesota, receive drinking water originating within 12 miles of a nuclear power plant. The AP stories cited focused on radioactive isotopes that could leak into drinking water.
Great Lakes residents might zero in on that section of the report, where warning flags are thrown up about the possibility of a radioactive form of hydrogen, known as tritium, leaking into groundwater from nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversees the safety operations for all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. There are two inspectors at each plant. However, “tritium leaks have occurred with great regularity at U.S. nuclear plants,” according to the report. It goes on to cite the AP stories, which claim that tritium leaks “have occurred at 75 percent of U.S. plants, and that a great number of them have taken place in the past five years.”
The Nuclear Energy Industry, a pro-nuclear group, has taken umbrage over the report and its sources.
According to Mitch Singer, a spokesperson with the Nuclear Energy Industry, the report is “just a rehash of a series by AP that has been discredited.”
“There has never been a leakage of tritium into groundwater that would be a danger,” he said. Singer went on to mention two voluntary water-monitoring programs that nuclear plants follow, the Groundwater Protection Initiative and the Underwater Piping Initiative, enacted in 2006 and 2009, respectively.
Beyond the stir over potential tritium leaks via underwater piping, there is controversy over the storage of spent nuclear fuel.
Since the federal government’s long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Yucca Mountain, Nevada was scrapped, nuclear plants along the Great Lakes have had to continue storing fuel onsite.
“The used fuel has been stored at the plant sites, and it has been for 50 years or so,” said Singer. “We're hoping that the federal government will honor its obligation to safely store it in the future,” he said, noting that the blue ribbon commission on spent fuel management would release a finalized report on Jan. 29.
There are 11 operating nuclear power plants along Great Lakes shorelines in the U.S. Of those 11, four are located within one mile of Lake Michigan’s shoreline. The newest of these four reactors, Donald C. Cook in southwestern Michigan, was granted an operating license in 1977.
“Lake Michigan alone faces some of the major safety violations in the country,” said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, an activist group. He said “the opinion of the NRC and company was…‘dilution is the solution.’ We call that delusional.”
Again, the debate gets kicked back to everyday choices. In a city like Chicago, where 70-75 percent of the electricity comes from nuclear power, the choice gets boiled down to what we’re comfortable living with, and what we’re willing to live without.
Terry looks at things on a grander scale. In part, his profession makes him suited for examining things with a macro lens. He’s a scientist.
“At some point, where do you draw the line? Where is the risk of an incident equal or worse than the benefit? That’s what you really have to decide,” said Terry.
He acknowledged that nuclear isn’t perfect, and that future nuclear incidents are inevitable.
“The thing is, everyone has to decide. And the thing is, everybody has to be educated enough to make these choices rationally,” he said.
