BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Tens of thousands of gallons of water lightly contaminated with radiation is being trucked to Tennessee, as Entergy Nuclear continues to try to get to the bottom of a leakage problem at Vermont Yankee’s turbine building.
Entergy officials gave the media a briefing this week on decommissioning issues at Vermont Yankee, including last week’s announcement that 97 employees would lose their jobs in about two months.
Joe Lynch, government affairs manager for Entergy, said water started seeping into the turbine building shortly after Yankee shut down at the end of December 2014.
Lynch said the building has a basement about 30 feet deep, and groundwater has been seeping into the building, sometimes as much as 2,500 gallons a day.
He estimated the current seepage at 1,000 gallons a day, but said the water seepage fluctuates and can follow precipitation levels.
Lynch said that Entergy has stored the water, which becomes contaminated once it enters the building. It is contaminated with tritium, but he said it was at extremely low levels.
But he said Entergy was committed to not discharging the water into the Connecticut River, and thus was shipping it to a special firm in Tennessee for treatment and discharge.
“It’s near clean water,” he said. “It’s almost pure water.”
He said that the company has eliminated the open portable swimming pools that it had initially used to store the water, and was now pumping the contaminated water via sump pumps into “flak tanks,” stainless steel tanks.
All the swimming pools, which were derided by Vermont House Speaker Shap Smith as “kiddie pools,” have been emptied, Lynch said. The company now has three 20,000gallon tanks for storage, he said.
The costs will come out of the decommissioning trust fund, he said.
He said the company plans to drill interceptor wells to capture the water before it reaches the turbine building.
The company is also doing its best to plug any cracks in the turbine building foundation, Lynch said.
He said when the plant was in operation, the heat in the building, which he described as a “steam environment,” evaporated the water. He said groundwater is 18 to 20 feet below the surface.
He said the first shipment of 5,000 gallons of water left for Tennessee two weeks ago, and two additional 5,000-gallon shipments will leave this week.
“We’ll eventually ramp up to 20,000 gallons a week,” he said.
Lynch and Michael McKenney, director of emergency planning, outlined the changes that will start in about a month: elimination of the 10mile emergency planning zone, layoffs of 97 people and closure of the company’s headquarters in Brattleboro, and transferring responsibilities to the Vernon facility.
McKenney said 23 of the 37 sirens in the towns in the 10-mile emergency zone will be dismantled after April 19. But he said some towns, including Vernon, have requested that the sirens remain. The sirens will not be connected to Vermont Yankee, he said, but can be used by the towns for other warnings.
He said the 6,000 tone-alert radios, which were distributed to residents outside of the sirens’ reach, don’t need to be returned.
“They’re a handy weather radio,” he said.