Power company Entergy has shipped to Tennessee about 64,000 gallons of contaminated water that had been stored in portable swimming pools and industrial bladders at the company’s shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, spokesman Marty Cohn said Monday.
The use of the pools, which was revealed in photos released in February, drew criticism from local residents and lawmakers, with Vermont Speaker of the House Shap Smith equating the containers to “kiddie pools.” The remaining contaminated water in storage, which intruded the facility’s turbine building, has since been moved out of the pools and into bladders and other containers.
Entergy has pumped more than 80,000 gallons of water from the turbine building. The total shipment campaign will involve moving about 200,000 gallons to a processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., through contractor EnergySolutions.
“We’re shipping out between 10 and 20,000 gallons per week,” Cohn said. “And that’s been our schedule.”
Meanwhile, water continues to seep into the turbine at rates between 1,000 to 3,000 gallons per day, according to Cohn. The company has three shipments planned next week, he said.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said Monday that water intrusion remains an issue at the Vermont plant. Any regulatory issues, he said, will be detailed in an inspection report expected at the end of April or in early May. But based on preliminary findings, Sheehan added, Vermont Yankee is in compliance with NRC regulations. The use of swimming pools did not represent any violations.
Sheehan said Entergy has explored interceptor wells and caulking to deal with water intrusion, which is not limited to the turbine building. Sheehan said the company will also need to deal with the water left in the torus, a doughnut-shaped structure at the base of the reactor building that holds large amounts of water for cooling purposes.
Entergy in January submitted a license amendment request to allow transportation of low-activity radioactive waste from the plant to the US Ecology hazardous waste facility in Idaho. NRC has requested additional information from the company, most notably a response on how Entergy plans to verify the radioactivity of the water for these shipments. According to NRC’s request, the concentrations of the radionuclides in the water were based on data from a single sample.
“It is not clear if any other samples have been taken and, if so, what the range of concentrations observed was,” according to the document, which was made public earlier this month. “Because the potential dose was estimated based only on one sample, the uncertainty in the concentrations, and therefore dose, may not have been adequately captured.”
Cohn said the license amendment does not interfere with the current shipment campaign to Tennessee. It allows the company to have a backup transportation method, he said.
The Vermont Yankee plant closed in December 2014.
