A recent sampling of water from Biscayne Bay found levels of Tritium, a rare hydrogen isotope linked to nuclear power production to be 215 times higher than normal.
The Florida Power & Light’s (FPL) Turkey Point nuclear power plant is located near Miami in Southeast Miami-Dade county. It is surrounded by approximately 5,900 acres of canals that serve as a heat exchange system for the power plant’s reactors.
According to a study released Monday by Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, water samples collected in December and January found tritium levels to be elevated in ocean water. The Miami Herald reports that while the report didn’t address any risks associated with the high levels of tritium, the radioactive isotope is typically used as a “tracer” and helps in monitoring leaks or spills at power plants.
Even though the FPL nuclear power plant has been at its location for four decades, South Miami mayor Philip Stoddard says “You would have to work hard to find a worse place to put a nuclear plant, right between two national parks and subject to hurricanes and storm surge.”
Turkey Point went online in the 1970s and supplies power to over one million homes in South Florida. A few years ago, FPL decided to overhaul the reactors at Turkey Point so they could produce more power, and critics say this resulted in the cooling canals running too hot and salty, according to Fusion.
This prompted a study that monitored the temperature and salinity levels in the approximately 5,900 acres of cooling canals between 2014 and early 2015, led by David A. Chin, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Miami. The study was completed on February 11 and posted for public comment.
The study found that not only were groundwater monitoring wells showing increased temperatures down to 30 feet below the ground level, but there was also increased salinity in the groundwater aquifer, that had been increasing at a rate of five percent a decade. It was also found that the impact of the increased salinity was being seen several miles inland.
By being used as a tracer, tritium levels in the groundwater could be traced, and the increased levels of the radioactive tracer were easily followed in the study with the finding that the cooling canal’s wastewater had leached four miles inland through the groundwater. “They (FPL) argued the canals were a closed system, but that’s not how water works in South Florida,” Stoddard says.
“How much damage is that cooling canal system causing the bay is a question to be answered,” said Everglades Law Center attorney Julie Dick, even though she has yet to read the report. “There are a lot more unknowns than known’s and it just shows how much more attention we need to be paying to that cooling canal system.”
As it turns out, about two weeks ago, a federal judge ordered FPL to “fix the canals” because they were contaminating groundwater and potentially endangering the quality of drinking water in the region. As Stoddard has pointed out, there are only two solutions to the problem. FPL can replace the canals with cooling towers or shut the whole thing down.
