Tag Archives: perry

The first ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is up and running.

by ColinEllzey Posted on October 12, 2017

In a memo leaked last week, Department of Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert recommended White House staff pivot to a “theme of stabilizing” with regard to messaging around the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

President Trump, however, appears to have missed that particular update. On Thursday morning, he threatened to pull federal relief workers from the devastated island just three weeks after Maria made landfall.

Meanwhile, most of Puerto Rico is still without power, hospitals are running out of medical supplies, and clean water remains scarce.

Trump isn’t the only prominent Republican refusing to recognize the severity of the crisis. In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, accused host Chris Cuomo of fabricating reports of the severity of the disaster.

“Mr. Cuomo, you’re simply just making this stuff up,” Perry said. “If half the country didn’t have food or water, those people would be dying, and they’re not.”

45 Puerto Rican deaths have been officially confirmed so far, and reports from the ground indicate the unofficial number of deaths due to the storm is higher.

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The first ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is up and running.

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In Which I Waste a Lot of Time on Climate Change Yahooism

by ZUVSharynwebpp Posted on June 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Boy did I waste some time yesterday. It started with this post from David French:

The Environmentalist Left Has to Grapple with Its Failed, Alarmist Predictions

I’m pasting below one of my favorite videos, from a Good Morning America report in 2008….Truly, it’s a stunning piece of work, depicting the deadly dystopia that awaited Americans in . . . 2015. Manhattan is disappearing under rising seas, milk is almost $13 per “carton,” and gas prices skyrocketed to more than $9 per gallon. But if you’re familiar at all with environmentalist predictions, there’s nothing all that unusual about the GMA’s report (except for its vivid visuals).

….As I wrote in early 2016 — after the world allegedly passed Al Gore’s “point of no return” — environmentalist predictions are a target-rich environment. There’s a veritable online cottage industry cataloguing hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions” made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of “Seven big failed environmentalist predictions.” The Daily Caller’s “25 years of predicting the global warming ‘tipping point’” makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere “hours to act” to “avert a slow-motion tsunami.”

….Is the environmental movement interested in explaining rather than hectoring? Then explain why you’ve been wrong before. Own your mistakes.

I would be a lot more impressed with complaints like this if conservatives had spent the past decade loudly insisting that although climate change was important and needed to be addressed, we shouldn’t panic over it. That would be defensible. Needless to say, that’s not what they’ve done. Instead, for purely partisan reasons, we’ve gone from lots of Republicans supporting cap-and-trade to a nearly unanimous rejection in 2010 of what they now fatuously call cap-and-tax, followed in 2016 by the election of a man who’s called climate change a hoax.

Still, alarmism from activists is nothing new, so I was ready to believe plenty of them had gone overboard. At the same time, I was suspicious because the GMA video was rather oddly cropped. It was a hyperactive promo for a forgettable ABC program called Earth 2100 that aired eight years ago, so I wasted some time watching it. Here it is, so you can watch it too if you want to make sure I describe it accurately:

The program is very clear at the beginning that it’s dramatizing a worst-case dystopia of climate change if we do nothing. That said, the show’s actual depiction of 2015 includes these vignettes: an oil shortage spikes gasoline prices to $5 per gallon; higher oil prices make suburbs less desirable places to live; eating meat uses a lot more oil than eating grain; Congress approves 40 new coal-fired power plants; a huge storm hits Miami; a huge cyclone hits Bangladesh; a drought in China causes wheat shortages; and world leaders fail to reach agreement on greenhouse gas reductions.

That’s…not at all what French describes. And it’s not especially alarmist, either. The big drought was (is) in South Sudan, not China, and the most intense cyclone ever was in the eastern Pacific, not Bangladesh or Miami. It was the Lima conference that produced no climate agreement (that would have to wait for Paris at the tail end of 2015), and for pretty much the reasons described in the program. Extreme weather events have increased and wildfire damage in the western US has intensified. But the show did get a couple of things wrong: there was no oil shortage and no new coal-fired plants.

After I finished my vintage TV watching, I trudged through each of French’s catalogs of ridiculous environmental predictions. First up was Mark Perry’s list of bad prediction from the first Earth Day. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about a random assortment of stuff from 50 years ago, but whatever. Perry has a list of 18 items, and of them, (a) six were from Paul Ehrlich, (b) two were vague warnings about humans destroying the planet, which we were certainly doing in 1970, and (c) four were dire predictions of things that might happen if we did nothing. But of course, we didn’t do nothing. That leaves six: two predictions of famine, two predictions of resource shortages, one prediction of mass extinction, and one prediction of an impending ice age. I can’t find any backup for the mass extinction thing, but the guy who allegedly predicted it got a Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, so how bad could he be? Nor could I find any backup for the supposed prediction of a coming ice age, and the data it’s based on makes it seem unlikely.

So if we agree that Paul Ehrlich was just way off base, we’re left with four guys who got some stuff wrong. If this is the best we can find from the entire maelstrom of the environmental movement of 1970, it doesn’t sound like those guys did so badly after all.

Next up was the Federalist list, but it was pretty much the same stuff.

Finally there’s the Daily Caller’s list of bad predictions about a global “tipping point.” I had to trudge through each one and click through to see what it really said, and it turns out the first five cases were all routine statements about how much time we had left until the next climate conference, where we really had to get something done. The sixth was from Prince Charles, so who cares? The seventh was a claim that we needed to do something by 2012 in order to keep climate change from getting out of control. The eighth was a piece about the unsustainability of eating lots of meat. And the ninth was a 1989 prediction that we needed to get moving on climate change by 2000 to avoid catastrophe.

So we have a grand total of two people saying that we need to act fast or else it will be impossible to keep future climate change under 2°C. This is a pretty mainstream view since there’s a lot of inertia built into climate change, so I’m not sure why this list is supposed to be so scandalous in the first place. We do need to act quickly if we want global warming to peak at 2°C or less. What’s wrong with saying that at every opportunity?

When you get done with all this, there’s virtually nothing of substance left. Sure, some people got some stuff wrong. That’s always the case. The whole point of science is not to get everything right, but to have a mechanism for correcting its errors. And if you look at consensus views, instead of cherry picking individuals, I think environmental scientists have as good a track record as anyone. Aside from creating listicles that get passed around forever on the internet by ignorant yahoos, what’s the point of pretending that they’ve been epically wrong for decades and need to offer up abject apologies before we ever listen to them again?

There’s no need to answer that. I think we all know exactly what the point is.

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In Which I Waste a Lot of Time on Climate Change Yahooism

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You’ve Probably Forgotten Half the Terrible Things Donald Trump Has Already Done to Our Planet

by TravisMorgan58 Posted on April 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been an eventful 100 days.

Since taking office, Donald Trump has done his best to fulfill his campaign promise to roll back environmental regulations and liberate business from what he insists are job-killing, growth-impeding, unnecessary constraints. During a Republican primary debate in Michigan, he articulated his vision for the Environmental Protection Agency this way: “Department of Environmental Protection. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form. We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out.”

So now at the 100-day mark, if not mission accomplished, he has certainly gone a long way towards fulfilling that dream.

Since 2009, Climate Desk, a collaboration among 14 news organizations—Mother Jones, CityLab, Wired, Slate, Reveal, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Grist, HuffPost, Fusion, Medium, the New Republic, Newsweek and High Country News—has tried to fill a void in climate coverage and explore climate change in all its complexity. And while the previous seven years have certainly had their fill of complexity, the Trump administration, with its the potential to unravel hard-won climate agreements and undo a generation or environmental protections, poses even greater challenges for journalism. Or, to borrow a line from Trump, this is more work than our previous life.

To mark the first 100 days of the Trump era, Climate Desk partners have put together a series of stories examining what’s changed so far. In New Republic, Emily Atkin writes that Trump has already “done lasting damage to the planet” by issuing executive orders, initiating regulatory rollbacks, and approving oil pipelines. This article by Jonathan Thompson of High Country News looks at Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s efforts to protect the coal industry as it faces increased competition from natural gas, wind, and solar power. In a memo earlier this month, Perry warned that “regulatory burdens” were endangering the nation’s electricity supply. “Judging by Perry’s memo, and by much of the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions during the first 100 days, they yearn for a time when such memos were pounded out on manual typewriters,” writes Thompson.

Karen Hao in Mother Jones gives us a historical perspective on the EPA, returning to a very different 100-day mark: the first 100 days of the agency’s existence. In a look at what the Trump administration has done to the Office of Environmental Justice, created during the George H.W. Bush administration, Nathalie Baptiste explores what has happened to a program which defined its mission as reducing the disproportionate impacts environmental problems have on minority, low-income, and indigenous people. And Rebecca Leber examines how Trump’s assault on environmental regulations could be considered one of the greatest successes of his administration—at least according to his standards.

But before exploring some of these stories, take a look at a brief but revealing timeline of some of the highlights of the assault on the environment during the first 100 days of the Trump administration:

Jan. 20: Within moments of Trump’s inauguration, nearly all references to climate change disappear from the White House official website. While there’s nothing unusual about a new administration changing the website, the new language is telling. “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule,” reads the new site’s only reference to climate change. “Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”

Jan. 23: The EPA receives a gag order on external communication, including press releases, blog posts, social media and content on the agency website. A former Obama administration EPA official describes the action as “extreme and very troubling.”

Jan. 24: Within days of becoming president, Trump signs an Executive Order that reversing environmentalists’ hard-won efforts to block the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. On the same day, Trump meets with three Detroit auto industry executives and promises big regulatory rollbacks.

Jan. 25: The Trump administration reportedly mandates that all EPA studies and data be reviewed by political staffers before being released to the public. These restrictions far exceed the practices of past administrations, according to former EPA staffers.

Feb. 7: The House Science Committee, led by climate denier Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), holds a hearing titled “Making EPA Great Again.” Smith attacks the agency, accusing it of pursuing a political agenda and using questionable science to burden Americans with regulation.

Feb. 17: Scott Pruitt, Trump’s controversial EPA pick, is confirmed by the Senate. In his former career as attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times.

Feb. 28: Trump signs another executive order to dismantle the Waters of the US rule, a controversial Obama-era policy intended to protect waterways and wetlands from pollution.

Mar. 9: In a television appearance, Pruitt dismisses the basic scientific understanding that carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause of climate change. He then questions the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions. His comments are condemned by scientists, environmental activists, and Obama EPA administrator Gina McCarthy. That same day, the head of EPA’s Office on Environmental Justice, Mustafa Ali, resigns from his post after a 24-year career, saying he had “not heard of anything that was being proposed that was beneficial to the communities we serve.” He adds, “That is something that I could not be a part of.”

Mar. 16: Trump proposes slashing the EPA’s budget by 31 percent, as well as cutting spending on climate change programs across the State Department, NOAA, NASA, and the Interior Department. “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” says White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney during a press briefing.

Mar. 27: In his most significant environmental order yet, Trump begins begins the process of gutting Obama’s landmark Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era climate policies.

Apr. 26: Trump signs another executive order, this time in an attempt revoke national monuments created by Obama and Clinton. It’s uncertain whether this is even legal.

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You’ve Probably Forgotten Half the Terrible Things Donald Trump Has Already Done to Our Planet

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Donald Trump Just Gave the Most Insane Campaign Speech Ever

by HollieHazon Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Speaking at his first campaign rally in South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump addressed his critics and fellow Republican presidential candidates calling for him to step out of the race.

He specifically fired back at Sen. Lindsey Graham’s comments calling Trump a “jackass” yesterday by giving out his personal cell phone number.

Keeping in line with his obsession over who is and who is not smart, Trump said of Graham, “He doesn’t seem like a very bright guy. He actually probably seems to me not as bright as Rick Perry. I think Rick Perry probably is smarter than Lindsey Graham.”

Other low-lights included in the near 45-minute stump speech: “If you can’t get rich dealing with politicians, there’s something wrong with you” and “I’m the most militaristic person ever.”

Watch below for the entire spectacle:

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Donald Trump Just Gave the Most Insane Campaign Speech Ever

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Scott Walker Has a Texas-Sized Fundraising Problem

by AshleeBriggs Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Before most GOP presidential contenders set foot in Iowa or New Hampshire, they typically first hit another pivotal state: Texas. The Lonestar State is the undisputed center of the Republican Party’s donor base, so almost all of the GOP hopefuls have trekked regularly there and established extensive fundraising operations in Texas. But there’s one big exception: Scott Walker, who formally announced his presidential bid on Monday.

The union-busting Wisconsin governor may be a conservative darling, but he’s way behind the curve when it comes to courting Texas’ biggest money men. Bill Miller, a top Texas lobbyist who regularly advises megadonors on their contributions, says he’s heard almost no buzz from the donor class about Walker. In the past, Miller has worked with major political benefactors including the late Bob Perry, a Texas home builder who gave more than $70 million to conservative causes over the years and was the major funder behind the 2004 Swiftboat Veterans for Truth group. This year Miller says he’s talked to clients about many of the Republican candidates, but not Walker.

“No one is asking about him,” Miller says. “None of our clients. We have a huge client base. It’s oddly quiet for a guy that’s supposedly top three among the potential nominees.”

Walker has previously received backing from the Koch brothers, and is said to be among the top contenders for support from their extensive donor network during this election cycle. But, if he’s unable to make inroads in Texas’ donor world, it could hurt his chances at the presidency—if only because his most formidable opponents will have the state’s deep reserve of money behind them.

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Scott Walker Has a Texas-Sized Fundraising Problem

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Rick Perry Is on the Payroll of His Super-PAC’s Biggest Sugar Daddy

by DelphiaHopwood Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rick Perry’s fundraising for his second presidential campaign is off to a tepid start. Last week, his campaign announced a $1.07 million haul since Perry officially declared his candidacy at the beginning of June. Though he entered the race later than some of the other GOP candidates, that’s far lower than the amounts raised by some of his rivals including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson.

Things were a bit better for Perry on the super PAC front, where a trio of interlocking groups supporting his campaign claimed $16.8 million in donations, according to CNN. The largest donor to this outside spending effort is the billionaire owner of a Texas pipeline company that also happens to write Rick Perry’s paycheck.

As Mother Jones reported last month, Perry is still sitting on the corporate board of Energy Transfer Partners, even after making his presidential campaign official. Perry had joined the board of the oil and natural gas pipeline company in early February, shortly after leaving the Texas governor’s office. Politicians typically step down from such jobs before launching a presidential bid to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, but Perry’s kept his board spot while hitting the campaign trail. While the company isn’t willing to disclose his salary for the board spot, past Securities and Exchange Commission records show that the job has recently come with about $50,000 in compensation.

But Energy Transfer Partners’ CEO Kelcy Warren is putting far more money into Perry’s presidential ambitions. According to CNN, Warren accounts for $6 million of Perry’s super PAC donations to date. Warren—worth $6.7 billion according to Forbes—chipped in just $250,000 to the pro-Perry super PAC in 2012, but he is clearly more invested in Perry’s second campaign. In addition to ponying up the most money for the super PAC’s, Warren is working for the official campaign as its finance chairman.

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Rick Perry Is on the Payroll of His Super-PAC’s Biggest Sugar Daddy

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Rick Perry Reluctantly Accepts Gays in the Military

by CelindaWedge Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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A month before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, then-Texas governor Rick Perry tried to save his flailing presidential campaign by tacking hard to the religious right. At the center of his effort was an ad he released in December 2011 titled “Strong,” which opens with Perry looking at the camera and stating, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

The Rick Perry of the 2016 campaign is sporting a new look, between the Buddy Holly frames, the speeches demanding that his party reconcile itself with its history and appeal to African Americans, and the denouncements of Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants. And on gay rights, while he’s still far from marching in a pride parade—last month he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide—Perry is singing a different tune on President Obama’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. As flagged by Bloomberg Politics, Perry appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week, and when George Stephanopoulos asked if he stood by that ad, Perry sounded as though he still disliked the policy but was resigned to the fact that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell wouldn’t be restored. “I have no reason to think that is going to be able to be done,” Perry said. “I think—you know, that clearly has already—you know, the horse is out of the barn.”

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Rick Perry Reluctantly Accepts Gays in the Military

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Rick Perry Indictment Highlights the Hack Gap Once Again

by Houston68Q Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Simon Maloy finds five pundits arguing that last week’s indictment of Rick Perry was flimsy and obviously politically motivated:

Who are these five pundits downplaying the case against Texas’ Republican governor? In order: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, MSNBC host Ari Melber, political scientist and American Prospect contributor Scott Lemieux, the Center for American Progress’ Ian Millhiser, and the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis. Five guys who work/write for big-name liberal publications or organizations. This, friends, is the Hack Gap in action.

Ah yes, the hack gap. Where would we be without it? For the most part, it doesn’t show up on the policy side, where liberals and conservatives both feature a range of thinkers who bicker internally over lots of things. It mostly shows up on the process side. Is the legal reasoning on subject X sound? Is it appropriate to attack candidate Y in a particular way? Is program Z working well or poorly? How unanimously should we pretend that a mediocre speech/poll/debate performance is really a world-historical victory for our guy?

Both sides have hacks who are willing to take their party’s side on these things no matter how ridiculous their arguments are. But Republicans sure have a lot more of them. We’ve seen this most recently with Obamacare. Obviously liberals have been more positive in their assessments of how it’s doing, but they’ve also been perfectly willing to acknowledge its problems, ranging from the website rollout debacle to the problems of narrow networks to the reality of rate shock for at least some buyers. Conservatives, conversely, have been all but unanimous in their insistence that every single aspect of the program is a flat-out failure. Even as Obamacare’s initial problems were fixed and it became clear that, in fact, the program was working reasonably well, conservatives never changed their tune. They barely even acknowledged the good news, and when they did it was only to set up lengthy explanations of why it could be safely ignored. To this day, virtually no conservative pundits have made any concessions to reality. Obamacare is a failure on every possible front, and that’s that.

Liberals just don’t have quite this level of hackish discipline. Even on a subject as near and dear to the Democratic heart as Social Security, you could find some liberals who supported a version of privatization back when George Bush was hawking the idea in 2005. It’s pretty hard to imagine any conservatives doing the opposite.

Is this changing? Are liberals starting to close the gap? Possibly. The liberal narrative on events in Ferguson has stayed pretty firm even as bits and pieces of contradictory evidence have surfaced along the way. The fact that Michael Brown had robbed a convenience store; that he wasn’t running away when he was shot; and that a lighter policing touch didn’t stop the looting and violence—none of those things have changed the liberal storyline much. And maybe they shouldn’t, since they don’t really affect the deeper issues. A cop still pumped six rounds into an unarmed teenager; the militarized response to the subsequent protests remains disgraceful; and the obvious fear of Ferguson’s black community toward its white police force is palpable. Maybe it’s best to keep the focus there, where it belongs.

Still, a bit of honest acknowledgment that the story has taken a few confusing turns wouldn’t hurt. Just as having a few liberal voices defending Rick Perry doesn’t hurt. Keep it honest, folks.

POSTSCRIPT: And what do I think of the Perry indictment? I’m not sure. When I first saw the headlines on Friday I was shocked, but then I read the stories and realized this was all about something Perry had done very publicly. That seemed like a bit of a yawner, and it was getting late, so I just skipped commenting on it. By Monday, it hardly seemed worth rehashing, especially since I didn’t have a very good sense of the law involved.

So….I still don’t know. The special prosecutor who brought the indictment seems like a fairly straight shooter, so there might be something there. Overall, though, I guess it mostly seems like a pretty political use of prosecutorial power.

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Rick Perry Indictment Highlights the Hack Gap Once Again

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Millennials are the new oil barons? Wait, what happened to all of our green inclinations?

by BiancaConnah Posted on May 21, 2014

Millennials are the new oil barons? Wait, what happened to all of our green inclinations?

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This just in from Bloomberg Businessweek: “Millennials Spurning Silicon Valley for Dallas Oil Patch.”

Oh, millennials – they sure love to keep everyone guessing! One day they’re shunning cars and rebelling against sprawl en masse, and the next they’re moving down to the great state of Texas to start their own oil companies.

If that seems contradictory to you, it might be because it’s a bit ridiculous to assume that millions of people who happen to have been born within the same tenuous 20-year period can be categorized by any defining set of characteristics. And yet, here we are for the trillionth time.

The Bloomberg story explores an alleged trend of millennials taking over the gas industry, quoting a handful of people ranging in age from 27 to 38 who have launched their own oil ventures. (Does 38 even fall into the already overstretched definition of ‘millennial’?) Allow me to sum it up: Some people in early- to mid-adulthood are starting businesses in an industry that is, at the moment, undeniably lucrative. Stop the presses!

Let’s examine why someone might want to start a business in the oil industry. Here’s an idea: It makes a lot of money, and that’s a significant motivating factor for many, many people. Energy barons across the country are not fighting tooth and nail for laxer regulations, lower taxes, and a handy-dandy pipeline running across the continent for their health. In 2013, the top five oil companies – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell – brought in $93 billion in profits. Here’s a snippet from the Bloomberg story:

“I’ve never seen an industry do what the oil and gas industry has done in the last 10 years,” T. Boone Pickens, the 85-year-old billionaire oilman, said in an April 25 phone interview from his Dallas office. “Ten years ago I could not have made this statement that you have picked the right career.”

And so with Pickens’ blessing, young entrepreneurs have flocked to the Texas oil fields. Who are these traitors who have turned on what has been widely lauded – including on this very website – as the greener, more conscientious generation? Well, they include Gov. Rick Perry’s 30-year-old son. Hmm.

As someone born in 1989, I’m fairly sure – although who knows, seriously – that I am a millennial, and I can’t keep up with what we’re supposed to be into. Why don’t we leave it at this: If you are a young person interested in starting an oil company because you want to make a lot of money, fine. You do you. We clearly don’t have much in common, so I continue to be mystified as to why we’re being lumped into the same group.

But obviously, I hope that my cohort of green-minded young people wins out over our counterparts chasing a very different kind of green. And Perry, Jr. — that bang you just heard was the sound of shots being fired, my friend.

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Millennials are the new oil barons? Wait, what happened to all of our green inclinations?

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Nuclear plant leak patched up near Lake Erie

by ColemanPermewan Posted on January 23, 2014

Nuclear plant leak patched up near Lake Erie

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A valve leak was discovered Monday at Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Ohio, causing the release of radioactive tritium into groundwater near Lake Erie. Fortunately, it was patched up by Wednesday, according to plant owner FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. It’s not known when the leak sprung nor how much tritium it released.

Here’s more from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Engineering crews have repaired the reactor coolant leak at the Perry nuclear power plant that deposited an unknown amount of radioactive tritium in groundwater near the leak. …

Samples of water taken from a monitoring point in the under-drain system outside of the building revealed tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of a little over 12 years. No heavier and more dangerous nuclear isotopes were found.

Other groundwater monitoring stations throughout the plant property showed no tritium, [FirstEnergy spokeswoman Jennifer] Young said.

The valve was repaired using a clamp and some sealant, and company officials say they are confident it will hold until next year, when a replacement is scheduled.

Tritium atoms are nothing like heavy uranium or plutonium atoms — they are among the tiniest and lightest molecules in the universe. But they can still be absorbed into animal tissue easily and cause cancer.


Source
Perry nuclear power plant tritium leak fixed, The Plain Dealer
Perry nuclear plant leak fixed, WKSU

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Nuclear plant leak patched up near Lake Erie

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