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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

With these kinds of headlines you always have to figure out how many actual radioisotope solutes are in the water solvent. Otherwise, dilution seems to make it worse. 1 liter of radioactive water diluted into 50 billion liters of water becomes 50 billion liters of radioactive water to the headline writers.

> The EPA safe drinking water concentration for tritium is 20,000 picocuries/liter. It is not expected or likely that this concentration would be exceeded as a result of this event.

https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/air/t...

I think radiation just freaks people out in general, so these headlines are super effective at getting engagement.

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There is remarkably little information in this press release. The volume of leaked water is meaningless without specifying the tritium concentration. Even if they have nothing to hide, they certainly make it look like they do.

It would be nice if they reported radiation leaks like this in terms of equivalent hours of coal plant emission.

You would probably have to measure it in years or decades of equivalent coal plant emissions.

According to a 1978 paper [1], a 1 GW coal power plant releases something like 50 GBq per year. The Minnesota Department of Health did not release the activity of the water that was leaked from the nuclear plant. However, according to one article, "In water directly below the plant, the picocurie-per-liter count was in the millions." [2]. 1.5 Ml of water at 1 million pCi/l would correspond to 1.5 Ci or 56 GBq of total activity. This is a very conservative estimate, since the water below the plant is probably already significantly diluted by ground water.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

[2] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-xcel-radioactive-minnesota.htm...

So the headline could be "nuclear plant leaked the equivalent of 1 years worth of radiation from a large coal power plant diluted to below safe levels in 1.5 Ml of water"

The big picture isn't about "nuclear vs. fossil fuel" anymore, it is "nuclear vs. renewables".

I write "vs." because we need to tackle the climate challenge as quickly as possible and have limited resources, therefore the need for optimization is clear: boosting the better approach and neglecting anything else.

Nuclear plants probably kill less wildlife and people per delivered kWh than lithium extraction does for making batteries.

No one technology is adequate. Even as we ramp lithium production as fast as we can, we’re facing production shortages for the next few years. More shortages of other stuff will hit each technology as it ramps.

This looks like a “spray and pray” sort of situation to me. We should pick the top 5-10 technologies, and throw enough funding at each to get it to be a 33% solution. In five years, fund the top two or three at 100%, but don’t cut funding for the rest.

(I’m counting geologically fixed atmospheric carbon capture and efficiency measures in that top N computation, fwiw)

> Nuclear plants probably kill less wildlife and people per delivered kWh than lithium extraction

Uranium extraction has not negligible effects. Recent case: https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20230124-french-uranium-miner-l...

> Even as we ramp lithium production as fast as we can, we’re facing production shortages

Maybe, however the big picture seems clear: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicl...

> We should pick the top 5-10 technologies

Globally we did so during the last 20 years, as many nations (including the US) tried hard to build and then use nuclear reactors and also renewable sources of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

Or in term of electrons wasted talking about coal when the problem is nuclear plants leaking like newborn babies (again)

With the proviso that the radiation from coal plants amounts to a rounding error among their total health harms.

Well, this confusion could be solved by disclosing exact details on the leakage, but despite my research I can’t seem to find any other number than 1.5M liters. I don’t see any evidence that the reporters made up the number.

Instead, the company and government agencies just reiterate that “it’s safe”.

Yes it's kind of weird that they leave out this information because this negatively impacts the trust you have in the decision.

I could be wrong as it was a couple days ago that I read this and I didn’t go through and parse out the differences between the two, but I think this local article may have a bit more detail:

https://archive.is/p0hTx

According to that, the concentration of radiation in the water directly under the plant is at least 50x above EPA limits. But that is where virtually no dilution will have occurred. If plant officials and state regulators are to be believed, the other monitoring locations around the site don’t yet show anything to get super worried about.

Edit: Just to note, I live in the general area, but not particularly close to this specific location. Lucky for me I live in the area with water contaminated by 3M PFCs rather than Xcel Energy radiation. /s

More than that the problem is that authorities knew about this in November but the news is only reporting four months later. Why?

Because it wasn't a big deal but someone out there wants to take attention away from something else.

My guess

From https://phys.org/news/2023-03-xcel-radioactive-minnesota.htm...

> "We are well above the 20,000 picocuries per liter EPA standard," Clark said. In water directly below the plant, the picocurie-per-liter count was in the millions.

I'm not sure if the millions of picocuries per liter are measured in the leak site or after it's diluted.

Anyway, I made an approximate calculation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35205070 and with tritium 10 millions of picocuries per liter is 9uSv/L. So if I made no mistake and you drink 1 liter of it, it's like 2 dental x-ray or 1/4 of a flight from NY to LA. https://xkcd.com/radiation/

[flagged]

Level of dilution is crucial here. It may be less radioactive than a banana.

Yeah, nothing to worry about, it's all safe, trust us!

You have the same "trust is" situation about safety of fracking, mining, chemical industry, water treatment plants, lead leaks from pipes, baby formula, plastic bottles, and air quality downwind from fossil power plants.

Radioactivity level is actually one thing you can easily measure yourself without having to trust the big bad government.

BTW: did you know coal power plants release uranium into the air? Coal is "clean" only in election ads. The real one is too expensive to filter, and burned in such massive volumes that even tiny impurities are significant.

>did you know coal power plants release uranium into the air?

Yes. A small amount, and not in concentrated form the way nuclear output or nuclear power plant waste is...

I also don't have concerns with bananas

> and not in concentrated form the way nuclear output or nuclear power plant waste is

So we're back to square one: it's not actually concentrated. The report says "the levels of tritium in the water are below federal thresholds".

These aren't barrels of green goo like in the Simpsons.

I do happen to have radiation detection equipment and can always check my water to see if it's even remotely above background. I know that with doses below 100 mSv (nearly 20x avg natural background for a year), there is no measurable risk of long-term cancer increase (not to mention acute radiation sickness, obviously) [1]. I'd happily drink water with trace contamination well below known hazardous levels. In fact, we all do this every day.

In this case, increases of trace contamination have not been found or expected in any drinking water supply from this event.

Dept of Health says [2]:

> Currently, there is no health risk due to this situation. Monitoring wells are being sampled frequently to track the migration of the plume while the plant works to recover the tritiated water. Should the monitoring well results indicate protective action is necessary, it will be taken at that time.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...

[2] https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/air/t...

Background radiation is very different from drinking alpha or beta emitters.

Don't drink those if you can help it.

Radon is the primary component of natural background radiation. It's an alpha emitter.

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon

And radon kills thousands of people a year through lung cancer. Alpha particles are bad inside you

It didn’t reach the Mississippi or into drinking water sources, so no one is drinking it at all.

According to whom? The regulators who hid this from the public for four months?

Given some of the ridiculous takes here if I were them I would also have waited four months for a resolution and not mentioned it unless it was an emergency.

And as someone who lives just downstream from this plant and would have been directly impacted from drinking the water: yes, I will continue to be trusting the Minnesota Department of Health over reactionary HN commentary.

How long did you trust the Minnesota Department of Health when it came to the PFAS discharges from the 3M plants? Decades? Do you still trust them?

Still trust them more than random people on HN!

Xcel reported it when it happened to the state—which they didn't even have to do given how low-concentration it was[0]—the NRC published that it happened on their website in November so it wasn't a "secret"[1], the levels are being monitored from wells, and the plume didn't travel far enough to affect anyone. Now they're pumping out and filtering the water to remove it.

What are you trying to get at here? What is the outcome you wanted? If this is some sort of anti-nuke power plant take based on an unfortunate but basically non-event then just say so and I'll excuse myself from replying any further.

[0] https://www.startribune.com/xcel-is-cleaning-up-a-radioactiv...

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/...

Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask. Your comment would be fine without that first bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

EDIT COMMENT ABOVE: As per Dang's advice, I would take out the first line above if I could, but I can't edit that comment anymore.

Consider it gone.

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