Tritium

TRITIUM:
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unusual one indeed.

Because upriver at the Savannah River Site (SRS), the nuclear facility 22 miles east of Augusta along the Savannah River near Aiken, South Carolina, a leak sent toxic waste — including tritium — spilling onto the ground and into the river.

The leak actually began on December 22, but was not discovered until the 24th. According to an article by Brian Costner at GreenLeft.org this was because the technician responsible for authorizing transfer of the samples to the testing lab was out with the flu.

The leak cut off industry and drinking water supplies in the area for a week, shut down shellfish harvesting and food processing plants, and cost local industry severely in lost production time.

It led the City of Savannah to implement its own independent monitoring system rather than to rely on the monitoring done by SRS, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

And it's not the first time it happened.

For years, SRS was one of the primary nuclear facilities in the United States, during which time radioactive contamination leaked into the air, soil and water.

According to a 1987 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report, groundwater at the site has been contaminated with tritium, plutonium, uranium, lead, mercury and other hard metals and volatile compounds.

And in 1984 a small quantity of depleted uranium was released into Upper Three Runs Creek.

The creek and all other surface water from SRS flows into the Savannah River.

Now Savannah tests the water daily.

"We believe what our federal folks are saying up there that everything's okay but we went the extra mile and started doing testing ourselves. To make us feel warm and fuzzy we go up there and test the plant," says Savannah Water and Sewer Director Harry Jue. "That gives us a four-day advance warning of any problems up there. That way we have time to react, notify the public, shut down or whatever."

And fish from the Savannah River are tested for radiation at least every two weeks.

"The Savannah River is a main concern for several reasons," EPD Environmental Radiation Monitoring program Manager Jim Hardeman told the Augusta Chronicle in August of this year. "In the early 1990s, we started seeing an increase in radionuclides in fish. The other event that got us paying more attention to SRS was the finding of tritium in groundwater in Burke County."

According to EPD's reports, tritium levels in the fish ranged from 15 to 90 times the normal level, but those concentrations are deemed safe by EPD.

EPD also monitors soil, milk, vegetation, peaches, pecans, corn and other crops. SRS says they have largely cleaned up their act.

"The Site has reduced tritium releases to the lowest levels since its early operations, levels that should generally decline," says an SRS Fact Sheet. "These reductions result from several factors, including the shutdown of all SRS reactors... (There have been some small increases recently due largely to stabilizing legacy fuel materials in the chemical separations facilities — a temporary operation.) Research and development activities are under way to reduce exposure even further."

Some of the tritium, though, is still there.

Tritium can't be treated and there is no process for removing it from the water or ground, so it simply has to dissipate on its own. Tritium has a half-life of 12 1/2 years, which means it takes that long for the tritium to dissipate by fifty percent. But since dissipation rates slow dramatically for the last fifty percent, it takes much longer for the tritium to completely vanish.

"With radioactive material, they generally consider ten half-lives have to pass by before you have a fraction of what you started with," says Sara Barczak, Safe Energy Director at Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "That would be about 130 years for all the tritium from the original spill to dissipate."

People can absorb tritium into their bodies in three ways: through ingestion, such as drinking water or eating fish contaminated with tritium; through breathing it in the air; and through direct absorption into the skin, for instance, showering with tritium-contaminated water.

But according to SRS representative Rick Ford, tritium will flush out of the body naturally in a relatively short amount of time, and can even be helped along.

"Tritium oxide (tritium water) behaves just like regular water in living organisms (including fish, trees and humans). In other words, it does not bioaccumulate; natural elimination replaces every molecule of water in our bodies every few days," Ford wrote in an e-mail to Barczak. "In fact, the ancient treatment of choice for our site workers who had been exposed to tritium oxide was to 'go home and drink a couple of six-packs of beer.'"

The EPA and EPD have established tritium levels for drinking water, but there are no long-term studies on which to base these levels.

"The tritium drinking water standards are not based on extensive research," Barczak says. "With the debate on drinking water standards, the question of safe isn't really relevant. It's more, 'These are allowable standards,' and not really based on health studies. It's more, 'What does industry need, and how can we keep these levels as low as possible?'"

According to a 1996 report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, possible health effects run the gamut.

"Tritium can also cross the placenta to affect fetuses," the report states. "Health effects can range from cancer to genetic effects and developmental problems."

But until some definitive study can prove certain health risks of tritium, Savannah continues to pump water from the river to its I&D plant.

While nobody in the city of Savannah drinks the water, Jue says Savannah has three or four interconnections between the lines from the I&D plant and the groundwater lines. The lines from the Savannah River to the city's water supply are kept closed except for emergencies, which Jue says have occurred several times over the last 20 years.

And in case of emergencies such as the Christmas Eve spill, outlying areas that drink the Savannah River water — such as Hutchinson Island, Travis Field, Godley Station North, portions of Pooler and Port Wentworth, and Effingham County, if the Commissioners are successful in their plan to run Savannah River water to Effingham — can be switched from the Savannah River lines to the aquifer lines.

For now, at least, the Savannah River is open for business.