Posted on 03/18/2023 4:12:04 AM PDT by fluorescence
Minnesota regulators said Thursday they're monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant, and the company said there's no danger to the public. The leak was first detected in November of last year.
"Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment," the Minneapolis-based utility said in a statement.
While Xcel reported the leak of water containing tritium to state and federal authorities in late November, the spill had not been made public before Thursday.
"If at any point there had been concern for the public safety, we would of course, immediately have provided more information," Chris Clark, president of Xcel Energy-Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, told CBS Minnesota on Thursday. "But we also wanted to make sure we fully understood what was going on before we started raising any concerns with the public around us."
State officials said they waited to get more information before going public with it.
"We knew there was a presence of tritium in one monitoring well, however Xcel had not yet identified the source of the leak and its location," Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Michael Rafferty said.
"Now that we have all the information about where the leak occurred, how much was released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location, we are sharing this information," he said, adding the water remains contained on Xcel's property and poses no immediate public health risk.
"The groundwater beneath the facility, it's been determined that it moves in the direction of the Mississippi River, slowly, but that's the direction that it flows, or moves, underground," Doug Wetzstein ... told CBS Minnesota.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Do you need a permit to hunt mutated wildlife?
Tritium? Does anyone know what that is? They don’t know enough about it to know it is only harmful for a short period of time. Tritium is hydrogen that has 2 neutrons. Usually hydrogen doesn’t have any neutrons but a lot of hydrogen has 1 neutron. It is called deuterium. It is very stable. Lots of deuterium was created during the Big Bang that is still around today and will be when the Big Crunch happens. But Tritium is unstable. The second neutron decays to a proton and releases an electron that is relatively harmless. The half life of tritium is something like 12 years and the electrons that come out are very low energy and don’t do much harm. They called that electron a beta particle before they knew it was an electron. Uranium gives of alpha particles which are whole helium nuclei, 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Alpha particles are massive and hurt life hell on a microscopic scale. Beta particles are like a wad of paper compared to alpha particles which are like bullets.
Tritium is formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays interacting with hydrogen in water molecules.
Tritium is nothing, a low energy beta emitter. Rickover once drank a glass full to show how harmless it is.
Sort of ...
Alphas are massive, but also easily stopped. As in, a sheet of paper will stop them. Your clothes will stop them. If they're released inside your body, the surrounding tissue stops them and can be damaged.
Umm, without numbers this is meaningless, at best. Usually, this is the sort of crappola 60 Minutes lies about.
Everything in the universe is radioactive. Your urine is.
What matters is how much of what type, not gallons.
Should not care about what happens in 3rd world moslem countries...
Let them glow in the dark...
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