No hearing set on mine water dumping in Schuylkill

The Schuylkill River is at the center of a project that would see contaminated water from an upriver coal mine dumped into the river to supply water to the Limerick Generating Station.

Comment: Can you believe the article? They are making decisions about water that will benefit Corporate America and the health of the people is set aside! Remember the article when laws are made in Virginia to benefit the Canadian Uranium Corp that wants to mine uranium mining in all of Virginia!

By Evan Brandt, ebrandt@pottsmerc.com

POTTSTOWN — Eight months after promising a Pottstown-area public hearing on a project in which contaminated water from an upriver coal mine is dumped into the Schuylkill to provide water for the Limerick nuclear power plant, there is still no date set for the hearing.

However, the Delaware River Basin Commission, which has oversight authority of the project, will be discussing the matter next month as part of its bi-annual review of the project, which is being pursued by Exelon Nuclear to benefit the Limerick Generating Station.

"We currently do not have a date yet for the public hearing," said DRBC spokeswoman Katherine O'Hara. She said the staff is continuing to work on analyzing the data collected over the last six years, and the last six months, in order to make a recommendation to the full commission.

"It's still going to happen," she said of the hearing.

She said the agency is cognizant of the need to make the final recommendation available to the public in plenty of time to make any public hearing on the issue worthwhile.

"We want to have it out to the public to give them plenty of time" to understand it and thus bring informed questions and comments to the hearing, she said.

The meeting set for July 29 in the agency's Trenton, N.J. headquarters is one of two held each year to discuss the latest data collected from the river and to share information among the DRBC, Exelon and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which may also issue a recommendation in support or opposition to the project.

At the crux of the matter is water pumped from a Schuylkill County coal mine which, unlike water from many other Pennsylvania coal mines, is not acidic.

For the past six years, the water has been pumped from the Wadesville mine to augment the river's flows as a way to allow the power plant to draw more water from the Schuylkill, particularly during the summer months when flow is low.

Currently, when the water level in the Schuylkill drops too low, the plant must draw water from a series of pipelines and water flows in the Perkiomen Creek and Delaware River.

As part of its application, Exelon has agreed to make annual contributions to a watershed improvement fund that is based on the amount of water it has avoided pumping in from the Delaware.

Pottstown has become a focus for the project because the Pottstown Water Treatment plant in Stowe, 70 miles downstream from Wadesville, is the first place downstream of the river from the mine that water is drawn in for public consumption.

Exelon asked the Pottstown Borough Authority, which owns the plant, to endorse the project, while the Alliance for a Clean Environment, which points to the high levels of iron and manganese in the water, has argued for the opposite.

The authority has, to date, issued no endorsement.

The water pumped from the mine shows 80 times the safe drinking water level for manganese and 20 times the standard for iron.

However, 2005 tests at the Pottstown intake showed those levels to have been diluted down to 17 times the safe standard for manganese and 1.5 times for iron. Those contaminants are removed by processing at the water treatment plant, but may add to the cost of plant maintenance.

The mine water has been added under the authority of the DRBC as a "demonstration project," and Exelon has filed an application to make the permission permanent.

In December, the agency extended for one year permission to continue to conduct the project as a demonstration while it continues its review of Exelon's request to make the permission permanent.

O'Hara said the granting of extensions such as the one used in this case is unusual for the DRBC, but not unheard of.

Data on the project is available at www.state.nj.us/drbc/wadesville.htm — which is the DRBC Web site dedicated to sharing the information with the public.

URL: http://www.pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/07/06/news/srv0000005681596.prt

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Heat shuts down French nuke plants: Who keeps lights on?

Comments: France, France, France, the nuclear renaissance, what about not putting all your eggs in one basket! Attention Southern Senators, who wants to build 100 new nuke plants in America because they want to be like France! Maybe not! The south is very hot, hotter than France is, our rivers are very warm, and our ocean temperatures are very warm in the summer! People of America and France, demand our leaders to use green energy and renewable energy. Uranium is not renewable and uranium mining ruins Mother Earth! NO TO NUKE POWER, NO TO URANIUM MINING!

Posted by Greenbang on July 3rd, 2009

The current heat wave is putting a strain on UK energy supplies, in part because France has had to reduce its nuclear power output, requiring it to import more of its electricity from Britain.

As reported in the Times Online, EDF has been forced to slow down many of its inland nuclear plants in France as warmer river temperatures have made it more difficult to provide adequate cooling for reactors. As a result, France has had to import as much as 1,000 megawatts of electricity from the UK at peak times to meet its own demand.

According to IT vendor F5 Networks, such circumstances are “only a taste of things to come, as temperatures continue to surge, and the global threat of climate change continues to hang over businesses.”

“The UK is keeping France running as a third of its nuclear power stations are switched off, there is already a debate around whether the UK faces a real electricity shortage in the near future,” said Owen Cole, technical director for UK&I at F5 Networks.

“Given that there is credible, independent research to suggest there is a real threat, enterprises have no choice but to incorporate this scenario into their business continuity and disaster recovery planning,” Cole said. “They cannot assume consistency of power supply. Strategic planning should incorporate a two-fold approach — working out firstly how to conserve energy, and secondly how to use energy more efficiently without affecting the business.”

He added, “Modern data centres can use the equivalent energy to small towns. Given the huge amount of power involved, heat efficient resources must be considered to allow power conservation, so if electricity supply is cut, backup generators can use this excess energy to help ensure critical operations are running. On the usage side, imperatives include reviewing options around the dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of equipment on a per-need basis, thereby using only necessary power.

“On the national policy level, if we don’t make plans to cope with the possible restricted supply of energy, we face becoming more reliant on other countries — we might have to buy in our supply. This sort of loss of control over energy policy isn’t a favourable scenario. If the UK is helping other countries already, who’s going to be left to leave our lights on?”

http://www.greenbang.com/heat-shuts-down-french-nuke-plants-who-keeps-lights-on/

New study: Nuclear workers at higher risk for cancer

Comment: Nuke plants are clean, well not!

By BOB AUDETTE, Reformer Staff
Thursday, July 2

BRATTLEBORO -- Are nuclear power plant workers at higher risk to die of cancer?

A study conducted by a Canadian researcher concluded the risk is substantially higher to them than to the general public.

The document, "Exposure to Radiation and Health Outcomes" was made public last week. It was written by Mark Lemstra, who was formerly a senior research epidemiologist for the Saskatoon, Canada, Health Region.

Lemstra left -- or was relieved of, depending on which source you read -- his job last year after a dispute over a report he authored that documented the health disparities between different socioeconomic categories in Saskatoon.

In the radiation report, in which Lemstra reviewed 1,725 articles related to radiation studies, he concluded that nuclear power plant workers have a "relative excess risk" of getting cancer.

In epidemiology, excess risk is defined as the difference between the proportion of subjects in a population with a particular disease who were exposed to a specific risk factor and the proportion of subjects with that same disease who were not exposed.

In the case of nuclear power plant workers, that risk factor is low-dose radiation.

Radiation protection standards are based mainly on risk estimates from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Japan, according to a report called "The 15-Country Collaborative Study of Cancer Risk Among Radiation Workers in the Nuclear Industry."

There has been some controversy over the validity of basing low-dose standards on the results of high-dose exposure.

Of the 1,725 reports reviewed by Lemstra, 22 were cited as references.

Lemstra concluded that not only do nuclear power workers have a higher risk of dying of cancer, they also have a higher risk of dying of other causes not related to cancer, such as heart problems.

Lemstra also quoted a German report that determined that children who live within 10 miles of a nuclear power plant have a higher rate of leukemia than those who live outside that radius.

What Lemstra failed to note in his report however, is that the German researchers said they could not conclusively state that the rates were higher because of the proximity to the nuclear power plants or because of some other environmental factor.

Lemstra's report was briefly reviewed by Bill Irwin, Radiological Health Chief of the Vermont Department of Health, who withheld most comment on the report until he has had a chance to further review it.

Nonetheless, said Irwin, "This kind of literature review is rarely used for policy making, but some people find it useful."

While Lemstra used "highly reputable references" such as the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, said Irwin, "It may be better for people to read the complete reference rather than rely on just those parts of the references cited in the report. A more complete picture is provided in the original documents, and readers may draw different conclusions than those drawn by Dr. Lemstra in his report."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also hesitated to comment on Lemstra's report, stated Neil Sheehan, NRC spokesman, in an e-mail to the Reformer.

"One observation made by a staffer who reviewed it was that the controls apparently were not as rigid as would have been expected," he stated. "We will continue to evaluate new studies to determine if further action on the NRC's part is warranted."

A spokesman for Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant had no comment on the Lemstra report other than plant worker exposure limits are set by the NRC based on recommendations by the National Council on Radiation Protection.

There is no database of cancer deaths for power plant workers at specific plants such as Vermont Yankee because death certificates are filed at the place of death and have no reference to the person's occupation.

In 2004, a study conducted by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health was released, which tracked workers from 15 nuclear utilities in the U.S. for periods of up to 18 years between 1979 and 1997.

More than 53,000 U.S. nuclear power workers were included in the study, which concluded "that employees in the commercial nuclear industry are less likely than the general population to die from cancer or non-cancer diseases due, in large measure, to the so-called 'healthy worker effect,'" according to an executive summary of the report.

The healthy worker effect is based on the premise that nuclear industry workers have to be healthy and are usually required to have annual medical check-ups.

"The researchers did report, however, a strong positive and statistically significant association between radiation dose and death from arteriosclerotic heart disease, including coronary heart disease," stated the executive summary.

However, stated the principal investigator of the Columbia/Mailman study, Geoffrey Howe, "While associations with heart disease have been reported by some other occupational studies, the magnitude of the present association is not consistent with them, and, therefore, needs cautious interpretation and merits further attention."

He suggested that further follow-up studies be conducted to clarify the study's findings.

"The most important results of this study were findings with respect to radiation-related leukemia and radiation-related other cancers," stated the executive summary. "Positive, although non-statistically-significant, associations with radiation were seen for mortality from some forms of leukemia and other cancers as a whole."

While Lemstra refers to two studies conducted following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which concluded there was no increased rates of cancer deaths in nearby residents, he does not cite other studies such as the Columbia/Mailman study.

However, he does cite the 15-Country Study, which found that of 24,158 deaths, 6,734 were from cancer.

"These results suggest that an excess risk of cancer exists, albeit small, even at the low doses and dose rates typically received by nuclear workers in this study," according to the study.

Some researchers have cautioned that it is easy for systemic errors to creep into large epidemiological studies "that originate from different countries with different recording procedures," according to the Journal of Radiological Protection.

Researchers have also been quick to point out that correlation does not imply causation, which means that correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other.

It does mean however, that a correlation discovered in a study should be the subject of further investigation.

Lemstra's report can be found at www.policyalternatives.-ca/reports_studies.

Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com, or 802-254-2311, ext. 273.

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