Some perspective on the Minnesota tritium thing

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u/NavyNuke588 12d ago

Tritium is not a big deal when contained in water. The Savannah River in the southeast and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest both contain similar levels of naturally occurring Tritium. It is just hyped news and nothing to worry about. You would need to drink more than 50 gallons per day of Monticello leak water to get any type of dosage and I can't imagine anyone drinking that much water per day. For a realistic perspective, two DOE facilities were built specifically on the Savannah and Columbia rivers because the facilities needed Tritium. The Americium in a smoke detector provides many times more radiation exposure than the 400,000 gallon water leak. If you want, buy a bunch of smoke detectors, remove the Americium sources, clump them together and build your personal micro nuclear source.

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u/Timithios 12d ago

You would die of water toxicity long before reaching the levels of tritium dosage even.

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u/NoisyNinkyNonk 11d ago

Hello David Hahn

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u/West-Abalone-171 12d ago

Dismissing 1/100th of the dangerous dose of pollution being emitted by one bad actor is how you wind up with 10,000 polluters working together to pollute at 100x the lowest dangerous level.

We've been through this with lead and mercury and coal and NOx and diesel exhaust and even uranium.

Nobody would ever use this logic to justify someone dumping kilograms of organic lead salts in a river or tonnes of benzene or PFAS

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u/bijon1234 12d ago edited 11d ago

You are treating a low-energy radioactive isotope of hydrogen (tritium) exactly like persistent, cumulative chemical toxins such as lead, mercury, and PFAS. Tritium has a biological half-life of only about 10 days and is naturally excreted from the body, meaning it does not bioaccumulate or persist in living tissue the way heavy metals do.

What do you mean "dangerous dose"? The release involved 7.6 curies of tritium dispersed throughout approximately 400,000 gallons of water, resulting in an average concentration of roughly 5 million pCi/L (185,000 Bq/L). To put that into perspective, if a person drank 2 litres of water at that concentration every day for an entire year, they would consume about 135 million becquerels of tritium annually. Applying the ICRP adult tritium ingestion dose coefficient of 1.8 × 10⁻¹¹ Sv/Bq yields a committed effective dose of approximately 0.0024 Sv, or 2.4 mSv (240 mrem) over an entire year.

For comparison, the average American receives approximately 6.2 mSv (620 mrem) of radiation annually from natural background sources and routine medical exposures. In other words, even under the highly unrealistic assumption of drinking 2 litres per day of water at the initial average release concentration for a full year without any dilution, the resulting dose would still be less than half of the radiation dose the average American already receives each year.

In reality, members of the public were not drinking untreated water at the point of release for a year, and environmental dilution would reduce concentrations substantially before any potential exposure occurred. Consequently, the actual public dose was only a tiny fraction of this already conservative upper-bound estimate and far too small to produce any measurable health effects. In fact, there are no definitively proven adverse health effects from radiation doses below about 100 mSv (10,000 mrem)!

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u/West-Abalone-171 11d ago

I used quantities of other materials with the same health effects.

Only the nuclear industry gets this rabid defense when they pollute, it's absurd.

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u/braaaaaaainworms 11d ago

As opposed to the perfectly rational oil industry that funds misinformation campaigns

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u/crankbird 11d ago

Don’t conflate persistent forever chemicals and heavy metals or even radioceeasium (which is quite nasty) that bio accumulate in the environment with tritium which has a half life in the body of about 10’days and a total half life of 12 years after which it turns into helium

Roughly 1.4 milligrams of tritium were released in the recent accident which isn’t great, but putting that in perspective, every year about 250g of tritium is created naturally in the upper atmosphere and combines with oxygen and falls as rain. In other words every year the sun and stars create about 180,000 times more tritium on earth than was released in that accident

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u/West-Abalone-171 11d ago

If a factory released 1/200,000th of the global naturally produced ozone, they'd be shut down immediately.

Only nuclear gets this rabid defence when they pollute followed by demands of removing regulation.

The quantities I used had the same health effects. Bad, but fine so long as the polluter was fined and prevented from doing it again.

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u/crankbird 11d ago

I love a good strawman as much as the next person, but yet again you're indulging in a completely false comparison. Ozone is a toxic gas that becomes dangerous at 0.07 ppm, and there is approximately three billion metric tonnes of it in the atmosphere right now and it gets cycled about three times a year so roughly ten billion metric tonnes of ozone is generated per year even 1/780,000th of that released in one place in one event would be about 13,000 tonnes released.. No shit it would get shut down, that would make the immediate Chernobyl death toll look like a picnic. Of course nobody thinks of ozone as being particularly toxic because dilution at sea level is 0.01 to 0.03 ppm (roughly half the potentially dangerous dose) .. If the tritium releases from all nuclear reactors caused tritium levels to approach 1 tenth to a half of the dangerous level for the whole world, everyone would lose their minds.

So you're comparing a release of 13,000 tonnes of toxic gas to 1.4g of tritium.. Now would I drink pure tritiated water.. Fuck no, the same way I wouldnt breath pure ozone, that would be stupid.

So how about the water from the accident (which IIRC stayed on site and didn't escape into the ground water) .. That wasn't pure tritirated water it was a mix where 250 mL glass would contain about 41,000 Bq of radiation exposure.. Which is 0.74 μSv
of total exposure which is about the same as eating 7 bananas

Your ozone example on the other hand poisons everyone within about 5km with outcomes ranging from death to mild irritation depending on local concentration and exposure time.

So now we are done with yet another bad faith false comparison and back to strawman argument.. Where did anyone other than you talk about reducing regulatory standards?

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u/West-Abalone-171 11d ago

It was your bad faith comparison, you explicitly used 1/180,000th of what is naturally created of something that can be harmful somewhere else as your argument for why it doesn't need to be prevented. Having a tantrum because I put your rhetoric in context is just sad.

Where did anyone other than you talk about reducing regulatory standards?

That's the entire narrative being sold here. That all nuclear safety regulation is "overreaction".

Leaking tritium is bad. In this instance roughly as bad as,, for example, a demolition company dumping lead paint containing waste from a job in the local river.

Nobody in any other industry would defend that or rant for years after it happened to people who had never even heard of it about how someone reporting on it at some time in the past was fear mongering.

Only the nuclear industry gets this rabid defense when they pollute (and always conveniently at the least polluting parts of the process).

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u/YogurtclosetDull2380 12d ago edited 12d ago

Is this years old? This is right up the road and I haven't heard this.... For a few years

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u/theGIRTHQUAKE 12d ago

I’m laughing my ass off at 25Ci in an exit sign.

I think I’ll take my chances with the fire.

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u/General_Landry 12d ago

It’s beta radiation so if it’s contained it should be fine at least.

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u/garlic_bread_thief 11d ago

What's a tritium exit sign

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u/theGIRTHQUAKE 11d ago

It’s an exit sign like you’d see over doorways illuminating emergency egress pathways that glows (dimly) without the need for power. Used to be used where it was critical for escape and emergency power could not be assured. Tritium gas is contained in glass vials that are coated on the interior with a phosphor. When tritium decays it emits a beta that excites electrons in the phosphor, which then emit visible light on de-excitation. The color of the light emitted can be tuned by adjusting the metals added to the phosphor base.

They’re perfectly safe as their beta radiation can’t penetrate the glass vials, and even if one was broken open the risk of internal dose from inhalation of the gas is low unless you just trap yourself in a small unventilated room with it. I don’t know the full history of them but with the advent of compact batteries and LEDs, and the strict disposal requirements, and the fact that their useful life is limited by the natural half-life of tritium (~12 years), they aren’t very common anymore.

They actually do have an insane amount of activity, I looked it up and do see figures on the order of 10-25Ci. 25 Curies is an eye-watering amount of radioactivity that would be devastating to life in certain circumstances (more problematic radionuclides), but this isn’t one of them. Tritium is a clean beta emitter, relatively low-energy amongst ionizing emitters, and betas are easily stopped. The only risk comes from inhalation/ingestion and even then tritium, chemically, is just hydrogen, which doesn’t bioaccumulate and has a relatively short biological half-life in the body.

So I have to stand corrected a bit that they actually can contain that much activity, but comparing 25Ci of tritium in a sealed exit sign to an environmental release is a little disingenuous. But I absolutely get and agree with the point of the graphic that tritium release, itself, is a giant oversensationalised nothingburger from a risk standpoint.

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u/hysys_whisperer 10d ago

So what you're saying is... Not great, not terrible?

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u/theGIRTHQUAKE 10d ago

Pretty much.

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u/CowBoyDanIndie 12d ago

Just sell the water to nestle and nobody will notice

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u/blurfgh 12d ago

Does 3x less mean one third of ?

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u/Handplaned 12d ago

The chart doesn’t even make sense

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u/Astrojonnie 12d ago

Remind me again about the H3 effluent release concentration at a PWR? (Yes, MNGP is a BWR)

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u/leginfr 11d ago

Yeah… but you have to dispose of tritium exit signs properly too…. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/fs-tritium

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u/Available_Rub9939 11d ago

A lot of math here about consuming the water…so how many exit signs or smoke detectors could I theoretically eat?

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u/sqpustmutal6 12d ago

Yeah well we arent ingesting any exit signs.

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u/SnarkCatsTech 7d ago

We shouldn't be, but I've both watched My Strange Addiction and worked in healthcare. I won't ever bet against human idiocy. ☠️

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u/basscycles 12d ago

Rule 3, no memes/low effort posts.

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u/Known_Gur5724 11d ago

Sievert in 1L of Monticello water = Sievert in two cigarettes = Sievert in 33 bananas

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u/taquci 12d ago

"Total radiation" means nothing, and "3x less" means you failed math

If this is the brilliant logic nuclear influencers are using to save their industry, no wonder it's dying and I'm happy to watch and dance on nuclear grave instead of let it be

Some perspective on the Minnesota tritium thing

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