Iodine, Anti-Nuclear, St. Lucie

Uh-oh.

The level of Iodine-131 found at the Queen Lane treatment plant is the highest of 23 sites in 13 states where the particles have appeared following the massive radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Lower levels were found at the city's two other plants.

Er:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told the Daily News yesterday that Philadelphia water samples from last August contained nearly twice as much radioactive iodine as the recent samples collected after the Fukushima disaster.

Although numbers aren’t given, I’m going to take a guess and say that in neither instance was the level of iodine-131 high enough to raise a danger flag. No harm in being careful, of course. From the Philadelphia Daily News.

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Always on the lookout for interesting anti-nuclear energy editorials and op-eds, I’ve actually come up rather short. Sometimes, the ones I find are so weak that I don’t want to highlight them. It’s no fun smacking around straw men, after all.

Here’s an example and it actually is a kind of a straw man. Columnist Jack Ray at the Springfield (Ill.) News-Leader wants to abandon nuclear (and coal-fired) energy in favor of renewables. He tries to get around some of the obvious drawbacks:

The only reason that solar, wind, and geothermal technologies are not sufficient enough to provide the majority of our energy needs today is that our nation has not made a serious effort to fund the necessary research and development that they deserve.

Hmmm! Well, maybe, though it does seem an awful lot of research funds have been pointed in those directions. But the real problem is that Ray seems to be after bigger fish:

Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, we appear to be a short-sighted country with a significant population that does not want to pay any taxes, including those that in the long run could make our country a much safer and healthier place to live for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The anti-nuclear angle kind of gets lost pretty quickly.

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A follow-up on the St. Lucie public meeting (see post below for a preview):

Residents packed the Florida Power and Light meeting room, which are usually not so popular, according to FPL.

That was what we expected.

Some wanted to know if a hurricane or other disaster could damage the reactors or spent fuel storage areas and release radioactive material.

FPL's Michael Waldron said no. "For example, in the case of our Turkey Point plant, in 1992 it got a direct hit from hurricane Andrew and performed exactly as expected. Here at St. Lucie, hurricanes Jeanne and Frances, one after another, hit this plant directly and it survived just fine," said Waldron.

And this, too. It sounds like it went pretty well, with FPL able to answer questions put to it:

FPL has run out of room to keep all of its spent fuel in cooling tanks, and for several years, has stored them in containers, called dry casks.

…

"The amount is irrelevant. They license you to store it. We take it out of spent fuel pools and put it in dry storage," said Waldron.

"It's our position that dry cask storage is perfectly safe. This system has been used since the nuclear industry began so there's some spent fuel that's been on-site for 30 years or more," said [NRC spokesman Joey ]Ledford.

This is all good: the public should show up and should ask difficult questions. The article doesn’t really cover the tenor of the meeting, but it does seem this happened and that FPL and the NRC gave correct answers. It’d be interesting to know how the audience took the answers, but I assume if there was pandemonium or sheer rejection, that would have been noted.

River Park in Port St. Lucie.

Saturday Morning Update

From NEI’s Japan earthquake launch page:

UPDATE AS OF 9:30 A.M., MARCH 26

Japanese scientists yesterday detected higher levels radioactive iodine in seawater at water outlets near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

“Iodine 131 was detected at a level 1,250 times the national safety limit,” Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said during a news conference. Officials said there is no immediate danger to residents near the plant from these levels.

Samples taken on Friday were significantly higher than those taken on Wednesday, which had 147 times the legal concentration of I-131. Authorities said the concentration of radioactive materials in the water will decrease as the water is diluted by ocean currents. Indeed, a sample taken at 8:50 a.m. on Friday had one-fifth the concentration of I-131 as the earlier measurement. Three subsequent measurements that morning showed fluctuation. All were below the highest level found at 8:30 a.m. on Friday.

“As of now, there is no report of adverse impact on the marine life, especially beyond kilometers [of the plant],” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. “Experts say there is a very low possibility, but we must strengthen our monitoring.”

Efforts to cool the reactors and fuel pools continues at the Daiichi site. Fresh water is now being used to cool reactors 1, 2 and 3 in lieu of seawater. Workers began injecting fresh water at reactors 1 and 3 on March 25 and at reactor 2 on March 26. Meanwhile, two U.S. Navy barges carrying 500,000 gallons fresh water are en route to a port 37 miles south of the Fukushima plant.

Iodine-131: Not an Issue in the United States

Here’s the bottom line first: no one in the United States is in danger from iodine-131, a radioactive isotope present in discharges from Fukushima Daiichi. No one needs potassium iodide to combat it because there is no danger of it. Got it? Let’s proceed:

NEI has a new fact sheet on iodine-131, about which Japan has issued a warning. This is from NEI’s update this morning and posted below:

Japanese authorities have advised Tokyo residents not to provide municipal drinking water to infants or use it in mixing powdered milk for infants because of abnormal levels of radioactive iodine (I-131) detected in the drinking water. One water sample (5,700 picocuries per liter) indicated approximately twice the Japanese government guideline and prompted the restriction for infants. In an emergency in the United States, state and local officials would closely monitor food and drinking water supplies and quarantine any contaminated supplies as needed to prevent public exposure. U.S. officials use pre-established guidelines for safe consumption of food and water set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Iodine-131 can roost in the thyroid and eventually cause cancer. It is considered dangerous to infants, children, pregnant women and fetuses, but not really to anyone (other than pregnant women) after age 20. Potassium Iodide is recommended when there is iodine-131 present – it floods the thyroid with iodine so iodine-131 finds no way to enter, but care has to be taken with it.

There are definite reasons not to fool around with potassium iodide. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Thyroid Association, The Endocrine Society, and the Society of Nuclear Medicine issued a letter to explain this:

However, KI [potassium iodide] should not be taken in the absence of a clear risk of exposure to a potentially dangerous level of radioactive iodine because potassium iodide can cause allergic reactions, skin rashes, salivary gland inflammation, hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism in a small percentage of people.

So:

We discourage individuals needlessly purchasing or hoarding of KI in the United States. Moreover, since there is not a radiation emergency in the United States or its territories, we do not support the ingestion of KI prophylaxis at this time.

So there you go. Read the fact sheet, read the letter and be informed.