The Centipede Drops Another Shoe

Clockwork timing (4.00 / 3)

 'Let me see lets have the good news first'
A little strotium 90 suddenly pops up two days (on a Friday no less! ) after the headline:  
NRC praises Entergy for tritium leak response .
This is a well managed PR stage, if only the power plant was run as well.

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by: BP @ Sat May 22, 2010 at 11:00:41 AM UTC

Timing the clockwork (4.00 / 2)

March:  General Assembly is in session and considering shut-down bills and scrutinizing Entergy operations.
Entergy's behavior? Entergy hides information which it has a duty to disclose to public at large.

May:  Legislators go home for the summer and Entergy is no longer under legislative scrutiny.
Entergy's reaction? Entergy sneaks information under the door (right before a weekend) that it has been hiding from public view since March.

Sneaky.

Deceitful.

Expensive.

Dangerous.

Untrustworthy.

Incompetent.

Unsafe.

Lying.

Screwing Ratepayers.

Screwing Vermont Taxpayers.

Trashing Vermont's Environment.

ENTERGY VERMONT YANKEE:  Laughably worthless and ridiculously expensive contribution to Vermont's energy portfolio.

sláinte,
cl

-- Religion is like sodomy: both can be harmless when practiced between consenting adults but neither should be imposed upon children.

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by: Caoimhin Laochdha @ Sun May 23, 2010 at 12:53:03 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

If I were a food producer, (4.00 / 3)

...either a farmer or a cheese maker or a specialty food processor in Vermont (you listening, Ben and Jerry's/Unilever?) I would be screaming for an immediate VY shutdown.

I'm interested in a shutdown for very pragmatic safety reasons, but food producers should be concerned with pragmatic marketing reasons. Reputation is a very delicate thing, and even if strontium 90 in Vernon doesn't threaten cheese from Cabot or ice cream from St. Albans, consumers in other states don't necessarily know that.

"Vermont, the formerly pure, green place, now with the leaky nuke plant." How's that for a state image?

Same goes for tourism. "Maybe we'll skip Vermontium 90 and ski in Colorado this year."

Minor Heretic
"Damned for 25% of eternity"

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by: Minor Heretic @ Sat May 22, 2010 at 13:32:22 PM UTC

Those at greatest risk from Strontium 90 (4.00 / 2)

... are babies and children, because most of the human skeletal structure is formed rapidly between conception and age 18.

Strontium is an alkaline earth element, very similar to calcium.

As a matter of fact, from the human body's perspective, strontium looks just like calcium, but while calcium builds strong bones, strontium builds deadly bones.

Children take in, use, and get rid of radioactive strontium in the same ways as stable strontium. Children are likely to be more vulnerable than adults to the effects of radioactive strontium because relatively more goes into bone when it is growing. Also, children are potentially more vulnerable than adults to radiation damage because they keep radioactive strontium in bone for a longer time.

Children would be expected to have the same types of effects from exposure to radioactive strontium as exposed adults. Children can be exposed to radioactive strontium at levels higher than background without showing increases in cancer rates. Evidence from one foreign population showed that children who drank water containing unusually high levels of radioactive strontium for 7 years showed an increase in leukemia. High levels of radioactive strontium cause more bone damage and higher bone cancer rates when animals are exposed before birth or as juveniles rather than as adults. In humans and animals, radioactive strontium can be transferred into milk or across the placenta into the fetus.

The half-life of Strontium-90 is 29 years. This means that half of the strontium built into your child's bones just before birth would still be radioactive when that child reached age 29.

The thing that makes strontium-90 exposure so nasty is that, when strontium-90 decays, it doesn't just immediately become non-radioactive. Instead, it breaks down into yttrium-90, which has its own radioactive half-life of something a little shy of 30 days - each time an atom of strontium-90 gives off its "extra energy" into your child's unsuspecting cells, it creates a new, very excited little yttrium-90, which is fated to shed its own highly damaging high-energy beta particle ... also into your child's cells.

Strontium-90 is not just the gift that keeps on giving, it's a double-whammy of radioactive destruction.

Beware the Everyday Brutality of the Averted Gaze

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by: mataliandy @ Sun May 23, 2010 at 02:02:50 AM UTC

but... (4.00 / 2)

i hear we (comcast) are demanding a judgement from the PSB on burlington telecom. too bad management at BT (or intervale compost) didn't get invited to that christmas party... or sponsored the governor's ball...

potentially leaking organic matter into the river - shut it down!

actually leaking all sorts of nasty stuff into the ground and water... well.

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by: bmike @ Sun May 23, 2010 at 04:27:46 AM UTC