People are dunking on firefrog600, but I feel sensationalist reporters are more to blame because math does not get clicks, articles about "nuclear leaks" with no sense of scale get clicks.🤐 Don't be too hard on the guy repeating what he heard in the supposedly respectable news. (Be hard on journalists instead.)
Braidwood, the nuclear power plant mentioned above, had a "leak" in 1998. I'm going to go on a little tangent about this with some more concrete numbers because it's one of my pet topics where "leak" is surprisingly far from "poisoning" once you look at the specific amounts involved. Nuclear power in America is so very strictly regulated, it's almost certainly killing more people for
lack of nuclear by making them live around as-yet-unreplaced fossil fuel power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of America has a very low bar for what constitutes a leak, TLDR: any measurable release of radioactive material that makes contact with outside land in an unplanned way. There is no exception for minuscule quantities or trivial concentrations.
In 1998, the Braidwood nuclear power plant leaked tritium-contaminated water measured to be 247 nano-curies per liter at its highest concentration. Written out, that's 0.000000247 curies per liter.
To give those numbers some context: 1 curie is the amount of radiation given off by 1 gram of radium. Pierre Curie taped a gram of radium to his arm during research, developed a bloody rash and radiation burn after one day, but survived after removing the radium sample.
(Aside: I will pre-emptively anti-suggest asking the GM exactly how many curies or density constitute a place of desolation.
)
Going down from that highest concentration, some of the water was less radioactive to begin with, much of it was collected by digging up the leak area and disposing of the soil as radioactive waste just in case, and some more of it diluted on contact with regular water in the ground. According to a NRC report, after cleanup efforts the remaining radioactivity in a monitoring well was down to
1.7 nano-curies per liter, less than 1% of the above already-tiny value. This was onsite at the nuclear power plant; any contamination to groundwater of people living nearby would have diluted even further than that.
The practical effect of this for a human:
Suppose you were to drink exclusively from the monitoring well all your life, and have about 5 liters of that water in your body at any given time. Added up over the course of 100 years, this theoretically inflicts about 1/3000th of the radiation damage that Pierre got in his test.
And it would be even less harmful because spreading it out gives your body time to repair the damage. (It's like how 10000 raindrops over the course of a rainy season are less harmful than a 10kg object being dropped on your head in one go.) And then even less than that again because tritium has a half-life of only twelve and a half years, so it can't add up for more than twenty-five.
That's the level of safety American nuclear power plants usually operate at: even when there's an accidental leak, drinking the nano-contaminated water remaining on a leak site is still orders of magnitude away from being dangerous. Merely living nearby is not going to get you poisoned.
