GOTHAMIST: New Yorkers demand action in radioactive water dumping in Hudson River
Concerned residents and advocacy groups are calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul to intervene and stop the dumping of 1.5 million gallons of radioactive water from the defunct Indian Point nuclear plant.
The pleas came during two public hearings held this week. The first — a virtual community meeting on Tuesday — went on for more than three hours, as more than 100 local residents voiced their concerns about the risks and practices around releasing water containing tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, into the Hudson River. In February, the plant owner Holtec announced its plan to discharge this water this spring and summer.
Many who testified said they use the river for drinking water and recreation. At this week’s hearings, regulators tried to ease fears by stating that the released water would create less radioactive exposure than activities like X-rays.
While tritium isn’t as toxic as uranium, it can be potentially hazardous if it is consumed or otherwise enters the body because it emits ionizing radiation that can elevate the risk of developing cancer. This risk can be magnified if the tritium is absorbed by plants or animals in the food chain, as the radioactive isotope can chemically react with organic matter and accumulate to undefined levels.
“The Hudson River is a treasure,” said Alex Beauchamp, the northeast region director of the nonprofit Food and Water Watch, at the public hearing. “It’s time for Gov. Hochul to get off the sidelines.”
Owners of the defunct Indian Point power plant want to dump 1.5 million gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson River as part of the facility’s decommissioning. The discharges wouldn’t be all at once but spread out over multiple discharges of 18,000 gallons.
The radioactive chemical — tritium — cannot be filtered from the water. At least 100,000 people in the Hudson Valley use the river for drinking water. The company paused plans to start discharges in May and participated in community meetings this week to assuage fears.
Community members want the company and regulators to find alternative plan, such as keeping the tritium water in storage so its radioactivity can degrade. It has a half-life of 12 years – and the current plan as a whole is expected to take well over a decade to complete.
Tritium isn’t as dangerous as uranium in head-to-head comparisons, but it can chemically react with organic matter in plants and animals, creating unknown risks to the food chain. Some of those unknowns include the effects on pregnant women and their unborn babies.
Some have called on Hochul to support a state bill that would outlaw radioactive discharges in state waterways. Even without legislation, Hochul could assert her authority via the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which grants the Indian Point facility the right to discharge into the Hudson via a permit.
Such sentiments were expressed on Thursday at a regular monthly meeting for the plant’s decommissioning board that was followed by a public hearing. It lasted four hours as slide presentations from the DEC, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec explained why dumping tritiated water in the Hudson is customary and acceptable, and that residents should drink their water with confidence.
But residents were skeptical. They addressed government officials and nuclear experts about who has regulatory jurisdiction and what to do with the radioactive water. Holtec reps said they were not seriously considering other options other than dumping into the Hudson River, which is already federally classified as a Superfund site.
“This needs to be laid at the feet or hung around the neck of Gov. Hochul because she's the missing person here in this room that nobody's talking about,” said Courtney Williams, a cancer researcher who frequently handles tritium in her lab under strict safety conditions. “She has the authority to instruct the DEC to do the right thing and protect the kids at the elementary school and protect the river.”
Williams’ children, now 13 and 10, attend elementary school about 4,000 feet from the nuclear power plant. She is concerned about the drinking water supply in her town of Peekskill. It’s located about a mile upstream and draws water from a tributary of the Hudson River.
The Hudson can flow north or south depending on the tides and about 100,000 people across seven communities in the nearby area use it for drinking water
Samples collected by Holtec at Roseton Station in Newburgh, about 30 miles north of Indian Point’s nuclear reactors, show no traces of tritium. The state health department also runs its own test from samples collected by Holtec.
How safe is safe enough?
Dr. Edwin Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists
Holtec originally scheduled an initial release of 45,000 gallons for May, but earlier this month, the company sent a courtesy letter to the Indian Point Decommissioning Board, informing them that it would not go ahead with the first radioactive discharge. The company said it is committed to making its first scheduled discharge by August or September, and it would not commit to moving the date later in the year when the river is less trafficked by swimmers, boaters and fishermen. Under federal and state rules, the company is allowed to discharge as much tritium now as it did when the plant was operational.
“We believe this voluntary pause will provide an opportunity for us to further engage with elected officials, the Decommissioning Oversight Board, and state agencies, as well as allow for an opportunity for regulatory agencies to respond to questions raised by stakeholders and the public,” Holtec wrote in its April 13 letter.
But what neighboring town leaders, residents and environmental experts are asking for is an alternative that’s safer than dumping radioactive water into the Hudson River as well as an independent study on human health impacts and a review of standards.
“Exposure to radioactive substances at any level can cause harm, but the risk is proportional to the dose,” said Dr. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. He said if Holtec’s decommissioning follows regulations, the potential health and environmental consequences would be comparable to those that occurred when the reactors were normally operating. But he said there is controversy about whether those limits are set in the right place.
“How safe is safe enough?” Lyman said.
The voluntary pause on the May discharge came after pushback from local communities opposing the legal and federally approved waste removal method of dumping it into public waterways. An online petition garnered nearly a half-million signatures in protest of allowing Holtec to use the Hudson River as a dumping ground.
What is tritium, and how much is too much?
Add two extra neutrons to the lightest, most abundant element on Earth, hydrogen, and it becomes tritium, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about a dozen years.
Naturally occurring tritium is very rare and is only formed from cosmic rays and gases in the upper atmosphere. Nearly all the tritium on Earth is human-made by artificially irradiating lithium or in a nuclear reactor. Outside of being a byproduct of nuclear fission, tritium has common applications. It’s used in optical devices for aiming firearms, illuminated exit signs, lights for watches, and even for medical imaging.
Tritium, which is usually found in liquid form, can bond with oxygen to form tritiated water. That’s chemically identical to common water, and at this point, the radioactive tritium can’t be filtered out.
Colorless, odorless radioactive water finds its way into the human body when people eat or drink food or water containing tritium – which would be unavoidable for those towns along the Hudson River that use it as a potable water source. It can also be absorbed through the skin by swimming or showering or inhaled when in gaseous form.
When tritium enters the body, it disperses rapidly and uniformly into human organs and soft tissue, such as muscle or fat. While half of the radioactive substance leaves the body 10 days after exposure through urine and sweat, it is very common to find tritium in the body.
“The amount of tritium released in Indian Point batch discharges, once diluted in the river, would be virtually nondetectable,” said Neil Sheehan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's public affairs officer. “About 10% of the dose from any tritium exposure comes from the small fraction of the exposure that the body retains as organically bound tritium. We would note that everyone is exposed to small amounts of tritium every day.”
Safe exposure is set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water at 20,000 picocuries per liter for tritium. This concentration level results in a beta radiation exposure of about 4 millirems, considered acceptable under the Safe Drinking Act.
In order to receive that, a member of the public would need to drink 2 quarts (8 cups) of tritiated water each day for a year.
Neil Sheehan, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
“The 4-millirem figure is the EPA annual limit for exposure to tritium,” Sheehan said. “In order to receive that, a member of the public would need to drink 2 quarts (8 cups) of tritiated water each day for a year.”
Millirems are what people need to keep in mind when judging their safety. Natural sources of radiation — cosmic rays, radon gas from the Earth's crust — expose people to 310 millirems annually on average. Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards try to limit the general public’s exposure from the commission’s licensees to an additional 100 millirems per year. (It even publishes a calculator for people to judge their potential exposure).
Under the commission's guidelines and calculations, Indian Point radioactive water release must only add 3 millirems per year to anyone’s full body exposure — or about 3% of their annual limit.
Compared to other common radiation sources, tritiated water exposure levels are small. A full body CT scan can expose the human body to 1,000 millirems for a single procedure. A regular X-ray is about 10 millirems. People get about 30 millirems per year from naturally occurring radiation in some foods, like bananas.
But there are uncertainties about just how harmful tritium is. When it chemically embeds into organic matter, such as plants and animals in the food chain, its radiation dose can intensify tenfold. This intensification would be negligible for the population as a whole, Lyman said, but for vulnerable groups living near sources of organic tritium, the impacts are not so clear and require more study.
Because tritiated water behaves just like ordinary water, it can cross the placenta of a pregnant woman. Current protection standards for radiation do not take this into account.
Among members of the community who attended the hearings and the last two monthly meetings, there are concerns that tritium is more dangerous than previously thought, especially when it comes to its effects on children, women and pregnant mothers. Risk factors have not been assessed specifically for these groups.
There also isn’t much information regarding tritium's effects on marine life.
What are the alternatives?
There aren’t many things that Holtec can do with its tritiated water other than dump it here in New York or dump it somewhere else. In fact, the most common way nuclear plants dispose of tritiated water is by simply discharging it into a nearby waterway.
Other disposal options include evaporation or storing the water on site. Local advocacy group Riverkeeper recommends the tritiated water be stored on site for at least 12 years, equal to its half-life. This waiting period would lessen the radioactivity of tritium by half.
At the monthly meeting, Holtec and nuclear safety expert David Lochbaum said that the option of storing tritiated water onsite through its first half-life is no safer than dumping it in the river. They were quick to point out that the storage tanks are notorious for leaking – the same method used for handling the much more radioactive nuclear waste onsite.
“So instead of dealing with the leak, we should just dump it all in the river,” countered Williams, who is from Peekskill. A 2006 National Research report, stated that research shows there is no threshold, even at low levels, that is considered “harmless or beneficial.” It further explains that while the risk of cancer is higher with higher exposure, there is also an overall lifetime exposure which increases risk.
“I swim in the Hudson at Sleepy Hollow, which is just a few miles south of the plant,” said Tracy Brown, president of the environmental organization Riverkeeper. “I raised my kids swimming in the river over the past 20 years, not knowing that these releases of tritiated water were happening on average once a month.”