More Nuclear Power Plants - Yeah, That's the Ticket

Daniel Dayen at FireDogLake:

We know now that the containment dome in the Gulf has failed, meaning that the underwater gusher spurting 200,000 gallons into the water will persist for weeks if not months. Tar balls have hit the shore in Alabama, and the toll on marine life will be great. With months left to play out in this story, the support for offshore drilling as a solution to our energy needs will continue to dissipate.

But if this story gets bigger, don’t expect that energy conversation to shift to nuclear power anytime soon:

Radioactive water that leaked from the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant has now reached a major underground aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey, the state’s environmental chief said Friday.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has ordered the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station to halt the spread of contaminated water underground, even as it said there was no imminent threat to drinking water supplies.

The department launched a new investigation Friday into the April 2009 spill and said the actions of plant owner Exelon Corp. have not been sufficient to contain water contaminated with tritium.

There’s no “imminent threat” to drinking water at the moment, but of course when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 there was no sign of an underwater leak. Much like that persistent leak, amounts of tritium could spread into the groundwater and eventually hit wells or aquifers. This could be many years off – 14 to 15 years according to the EPA – but with tritium a known cause of cancer, and with the uncertainty surrounding the source of the leak or whether it could accelerate, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

It’s also worth factoring into the costs of new nuclear plants, as the Obama Administration has favored and as Republicans have boosted for years. The bigger problems with nuclear power are both what to do with the waste byproduct after the fact, and how to pay the extreme cost of building a reactor before the fact. But during the process of creating nuclear power, there are potential disasters that can result. As with offshore drilling, it is correct to say both that nuclear power is mostly safe and that it poses an unacceptable risk. Because the nature of an accident can be so widespread and catastrophic as to cancel out all the positive safety reports that preceded it. Plus, if the industry capture in regulating the nuclear industry is anything like that with offshore drilling, then we may not know the full extent of a disaster until it’s too late.

Read the whole thing.