19 October 2007
Search on for radioactive leak
by Adam Smeltz, The Centre Daily Times
- asmeltz@centredaily.com The radioactive water leak may still be flowing.
Or the hole — wherever it is — could be as dry as the Sahara.
On Thursday, workers at Penn State’s Breazeale Nuclear Reactor had yet to find out.
“We’re still stressing that there is no risk to the public,” said Neil Weaver, a spokesman with the state Department of Environmental Protection in Harrisburg.
Just about 11 days have passed since university workers determined that a leak had sprung in the 71,000- gallon pool that holds the small reactor near University Drive and Hastings Road.
They quickly shut down the research device. This week, they set about draining half the pool into an on-site holding tank.
That process was finished Wednesday, said William Dreibelbis, a manager of health and environmental programs on campus.
He said Thursday that the drawdown had not been in place long enough for workers to determine if the leak is in the empty half — the south end — or in north end.
“One of our greatest risks right now is the safety of the people working in an over-20-foot pit,” Dreibelbis said Thursday, referring to workers in the pool basin.
He said about a dozen Penn State employees are contributing to the work. The drawdown is intended to help them locate the source of the leak, he said.
Meanwhile, it also provides an opportunity for an outside contractor to re-line and resurface the pool basin.
Dreibelbis said it’s too soon to tell how much money the ordeal will cost Penn State or when the reactor may resume operation.
The university, in official statements, has described the water leak as slightly radioactive and said the situation poses no public health threat. Representatives from the DEP and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses the small research reactor, have supported those statements.
A’ndrea Messer, a Penn State public information officer, said the leak rate is estimated at fewer than 16 gallons an hour.
Water is thought to be draining into the ground beneath the reactor facility.
The fluid itself carries about 28,000 picocuries of tritium, a radioactive isotope, in each liter, Dreibelbis said.
That’s about 8,000 picocuries per liter more than the safe drinking-water limit established by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
But because the reactor water is probably mixing with less-radioactive water already in the ground, Dreibelbis said, “I think it would be really hard even to find this elevated tritium in any water table.”
“It doesn’t represent exposure to the populace,” he said. No water wells are within the immediate vicinity of the reactor, though some public water supplies for College Township and the University Park campus do sit some miles downstream.
Calls to representatives of those public water systems were not immediately returned Thursday.
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has said Penn State will want to check groundwater around the reactor facility and monitor for any seepage. If radiation levels creep above EPA-accepted limits, the university could face the specter of government enforcement action.
Sheehan said Thursday that it’s too soon to tell whether the university may be in violation of any rules. Dreibelbis said the university already has taken samples from four monitoring wells that were established earlier near the reactor.
Results from those samples were not ready on Thursday, he said.
About 50 research and test reactors are in the U.S., according to the NRC. Leaks like the one at University Park are relatively rare at the facilities, said Scott Burnell, an NRC spokesman just outside Washington, D.C.
The most recent similar leak he could recall was logged about two years ago in Denver, he said.
“It is reasonable — and it is required — that licensees for reactors maintain their facilities and procedures and policies for spotting any sort of instance such the one they see right now” at Penn State, Burnell said.
The NRC has no information to suggest that the leak at Penn State has anything to do with poor maintenance, he said.
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