Mike Faher reports that Federal regulators have determined that Vermont Yankee plan to send radioactive wastewater cross-country to Idaho will not have a significant effect on the quality of the human environment.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet given the official green light for 200,000 gallons of water to be trucked from the Vernon plant to the U.S. Ecology disposal facility near Grand View, Idaho. But the commission environmental findings, announced this week, show that the federal agency is now comfortable with Entergy assurances that the shipments would not pose radiological or nonradiological problems.
The December 2014 shutdown of Vermont Yankee left Entergy with two kinds of contaminated water ... Process water, which is liquid drained from plant systems, and intrusion water, which is groundwater that has been infiltrated the plant turbine building at greater-than-expected rates.
Both types of water are contaminated with low levels of radioactivity. Entergy had been expecting to deal with process water, but the intrusion problem first came to light in early 2016. At one point, flows were so high, as much as 2,500 to 3,000 gallons daily, that Entergy used open swimming pools and industrial bladders as temporary storage.
The pools are long gone now. Entergy has worked to reduce the intrusion rate and also has been shipping water out of state via a contractor named Energy Solutions, which uses a disposal site in Tennessee.
Generally speaking, they are shipping about one or two shipments per week, depending on how much they have in storage, Joe Lynch, Entergy Vermont Yankee government affairs manager, said during a March 23 meeting in Brattleboro.
Entergy has no plans to send intrusion water to Idaho. Instead, the site is seen as a potential destination for approximately 200,000 gallons of radioactive process water that is currently stored at Vermont Yankee in a large tank called the torus.
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