BRATTLEBORO — Howard Shaffer's Viewpoint piece [“The Banana Menace,” The Commons, Nov. 10] questioned whether nuclear energy foes will ever put Vermont Yankee's tritium leaks into perspective. Consider what follows to be an attempt to do just that.
What we're dealing with is not simply the tritium (and cobalt, cesium, and strontium) that has been leaking into the public domain groundwater and probably the Connecticut River. The attention to tritium may simply be because the word tritium attracts more public attention than a scientific discourse on curies, picocuries, and roentgen equivalent men (rems).
VY's tritium leaks from underground pipes (that company officials initially denied even existed) suggest that some of the 38-year-old plant's infrastructure might be lacking in proper maintenance. Pipes might be corroding, regular inspections might have been neglected, and there could be metal fatigue. And to the extent that these variables could be applied to the plant as a whole - e.g. underground cables not certified for submersion in water - there is certainly cause for concern.
Also, let's not be fixated on the exact number of picocuries in a liter of tritiated water.
We're all subjected to a certain amount of background radiation (granite bedrock or solar rays, for example), which isn't necessarily inconsequential. But to knowingly add to that body burden of radioactive exposure might be construed as inflicting premeditated harm. The National Academy of Sciences in its seventh Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation report noted that no amount of ionizing radiation can be considered safe.
It is a joke to suppose that citizens opposed to Vermont Yankee would be picketing local supermarkets because of radioactive bananas. Bananas, like dental X-rays or cross-country flights, are elective. VY's radioactive emissions are not.
But we're not supposed to complain. Issues of safety, we're told, are the exclusive province of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And consider this: banana plantations don't require evacuation plans or security guards with machine guns. Terrorists probably aren't scheming to blow them up. They don't produce waste material deadly for a million years, nor material useful for making bombs. Banana plantations don't require eventual decommissioning. The government doesn't need to bother monitoring fence-line banana radiation.
Mr. Schaffer stated that “regulations on emitted radioactivity protect the public with a huge margin of safety.” One doesn't get that impression from reading The People of Three Mile Island by Robert Del Tredici or Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth by Alla Yaroshinskaya.
It's not simply about the tritium. It's not about bananas. It's not about somebody's “political agenda.” It's about the menace of nuclear power and the imperative to develop electrical energy, as soon as possible, which doesn't threaten the health and safety of people or planet.