In my experience, the public only gets glimpses the inner workings of the highly secretive nuclear power industry when something goes wrong. This week, we learned that pieces of radioactive rubbish are occasionally put on flatbed trucks and driven across the country. We also learned that, just as in boxes of cereal, contents can settle during shipping, although when that happened with a piece of radioactive rubbish from Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island plant, the company got a slap from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The problem, reported in the Red Wing Republican-Eagle, happened in October 2008. The Prairie Island nuclear plant on the Mississippi River near Red Wing needed to ship fuel sipping equipment, a device used to move spent nuclear fuel around in storage pools, to a disposal site in Waltz Mill, Pennsylvania. A fuel sipper is apparently a flat thing with cords coming out of it, and it’s shipped in a special box designed for low-level radioactive waste. A thicket of rules applies to the transport of this stuff, and that includes testing for any fugitive radiation. The rules are intended to keep passing drivers from inadvertently getting zapped with radiation as they drive by a truck - the nuclear equivalent of a stone falling off the back of a dumptruck into your windshield.

That didn’t happen in this case, possibly only by happenstance, since the villainous radioactive particle decided to settle on the bottom of the container, rather than the side. The unplanned cargo shift was discovered at the truck’s destination during a standard radiation test. The inadequately secured piece of trash had slipped inside the shipping box, NRC spokeswoman Victoria Mitlyng told me. The danger to the public was minimal, she said, even with the fugitive particle. If someone had crawled under the flatbed truck and lain there for a half hour, that person would have received the equivalent radiation of a chest X-ray, Mitlyng said.

Nevertheless, this is a no-no, as far as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is concerned, so it issued an enforcement action known as a “preliminary yellow” finding. Aside from the radioactive mishap, the NRC faulted the company for failing to train its workers properly so they would know how to package the dangerous material securely.

Mitlyng said nuclear plants typically send radioactive refuse on the road a couple of times each week. When I asked her if anyone has ever been dosed in this fashion, she said: “In the history of nuclear power in this country, we haven’t had incidents where a member of the public was overexposed to radiation, either in a nuclear power plant, like Three Mile Island, or in the transporting of nuclear material.”

Xcel Energy has asked permission to run the Prairie Island plant for another 20 years. The NRC has set up a site for those wanting more
information on the license extension.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Businesses in hot water, Dangerous products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.