The hits keep coming for TEPCO

When the Salem Nuclear plant (in southern NJ) was almost finished they had a family day for all of the contractors families. I went with my father in law and I saw these triangle shaped frames with 100's of buckets
hanging from them. I asked my FIL what they were for. Jokingly I said the fire brigade. He said no, they are for the welders. I asked what did they do with them. He said, they give them 50 counted welding rods and they better come back with 50 tips after they were used or they were fired. Apparently, the welders would throw the tips when the rod ran out and then would replace with a new rod. The tips were ending up in the water pumps intakes etc. and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. If you dropped it from the cooling tower you had to climb down and go find it. If you were short of tips of what # of rods you assigned you were fired.
This also where I saw workers sitting on rocker arms eating lunch while they were building the backup diesel engine. Pretty cool. I also saw a lot of duck tape being used....that scared me.
 
@OVERKILL

How would this be handled in Canada?

Well, it's tritium, so the same as it's handled anywhere else. Generally, you try to avoid having the tritiated water released in the environment, but tritium is produced naturally and is in all water so a lot of these "concerns" , absent of actual concentration figures, are over the top or even fear mongering. The limit on tritium concentration in water varies on a per-country basis, but it's generally viewed as benign at typical (low) concentration levels. You can tell the Guardian didn't do any sort of investigation into tritium, given that none of that is mentioned in the article.

Up here, the operator would have notified the CNSC immediately if we had a leak (which has happened, but they typically aren't outside the plant unless somebody buggers something up, like the wrong tank gets emptied) and the CSNC would have put out a notice, and then how the media runs with it will vary wildly depending on their bias.

The NRC has a page on tritium here:

You can compare that to the CNSC page on tritium here:
 
Well, it's tritium, so the same as it's handled anywhere else. Generally, you try to avoid having the tritiated water released in the environment, but tritium is produced naturally and is in all water so a lot of these "concerns" , absent of actual concentration figures, are over the top or even fear mongering. The limit on tritium concentration in water varies on a per-country basis, but it's generally viewed as benign at typical (low) concentration levels. You can tell the Guardian didn't do any sort of investigation into tritium, given that none of that is mentioned in the article.

Up here, the operator would have notified the CNSC immediately if we had a leak (which has happened, but they typically aren't outside the plant unless somebody buggers something up, like the wrong tank gets emptied) and the CSNC would have put out a notice, and then how the media runs with it will vary wildly depending on their bias.

The NRC has a page on tritium here:

You can compare that to the CNSC page on tritium here:
A more less sensationalized article. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/...icello-nuclear-plant-radioactive-tritium-leak
 
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