BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Water continues to leak into the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant turbine building, a problem that has cost Entergy Nuclear more than $2.5 million in the past two years to ship the lightly radioactive water out of state.
Joseph Lynch, senior government affairs manager for Entergy, said last week the company was collecting between 500 to 600 gallons of tainted water a day, down from the 2,500 to 3,000 gallons a day the company first was collecting.
Since the problem was discovered in 2015, the company has shipped a total of 608,000 gallons, at a cost of about $4 a gallon, to a licensed disposal site in Tennessee owned by a company called EnergySolutions.
Lynch said the water table in the vicinity of the turbine building is about 15 feet below the surface, and the basement of the turbine building is at least 30 feet below the surface. The company is trying to seal any problem areas in the turbine building’s foundation, he said, but he said the infiltration would likely continue.
He said the company had taken several steps to stop the infiltration of the water, but so far hasn’t been completely successful. The water outside of the building’s foundation is not tainted with radioactivity, he said, but becomes so once it enters the building.
He said that other buildings at the Yankee site in Vernon do not have the same problem.
Lynch said the water infiltration in all likelihood was always present in the turbine building, but theorized while the nuclear reactor and its turbine were running, the building was so warm that the water evaporated.
He said the water is collected by sump pumps and stored until about 5,000 gallons is collected and shipped.
The problem was first discovered shortly after Vermont Yankee shut down in December 2014.
Lynch gave an update on the water infiltration problem at Yankee to members of the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel last week.
He told the panel the costs of the collection and shipping were being paid out of the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust fund since it dealt with radioactive materials. He said the decommissioning budget did include an account for the treatment of radioactive water, but he said he didn’t know the figure.
At the height of the problem, the company was shipping four, 5,000-gallon shipments to Tennessee each week. Lynch said the shipments are down to about one a week.