The company in charge of decommissioning the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth wants to dump one millions gallons of radioactive wastewater into Cape Cod Bay.
The wastewater comes from the plant’s spent fuel pool, from when the plant was still operating. A spent fuel pool is a large pool of water where nuclear fuel from the plant’s nuclear reactor is stored when it is no longer usable. Spent fuel is hot and radioactive, so it spends months or years cooling down in the pool. The water also shields nearby workers from radiation coming off the fuel.
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(2) comments
IT sounds like they have not even considered what to do with this when it was being produced, emptying anything radioactive in the water can only lead to a disaster along the way or in the future, as we consider cleaning up our water on one side, we dump contaminates in the water on the other, cannot have it both ways, seriously their thinking about dumping radioactive water into our water system, sounds like more lawsuits coming up in several years, go ahead and kill the ecosystem, destroy what we have left, this is just asinine.
This is a good explanation of a controversial subject from a recognized local expert. If Holtec could consider dumping this water in Cape Cod Bay, why not move it way offshore, out past George's Bank? Leaving it on-site is one solution, but if it were then to leak from its containment, there would be lots of noise and hand wringing from the anti-nuke people and local politicians.
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