Are Nuclear Power Plant “Treated” Effluents Hazardous?

The state of Ukraine’s power sector calls forth great alarm. And perhaps this is why the necessity of urgent extraordinary measures is being discussed. But how can this be done within this country’s single economic mechanism? At the expense of whom and what? For this reason we must raise another problem, equally important for the security of this country.

Experts estimate that, to provide our planet’s whole population with good-quality water by 2025, we have to double our annual investments in this sphere. And the level which Ukraine has achieved or, to be more exact, to which it has fallen, will require even more.

The existing circulating and close-circuit water-supply systems, the man-made reproduction of water resources for the industry, cannot under our conditions do without discharging waste into outside water basins.

Aeration is a word evoking negative associations and repeated with alarm by the residents of Nikopol and the adjacent populated areas for a decade because the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and other enterprises have been dumping effluents into the Kakhovka Reservoir, a few kilometers away from the city water intake.

The nuclear “aerators” kept these discharges secret as long as they could, for the project report had been approved and coordinated by the USSR nuclear energy committee and executive structures. While Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection was being established and we were trying to find out why and with whose permission this was being done, fishermen found that the nets they had set were so stained with effluents that they ripped apart while being lifted.

Judging by the period of this aeration (nine months a year), this is the so-called once-through water-management system. In addition to the coolant, all kinds of contaminated water are dumped to the coolant pond (a separated part of the Kakhovka reservoir): from the sump tanks keeping the uranium rods withdrawn from reactors, laboratories, laundries washing the personnel’s radiation-contaminated clothes, apartment houses, etc. A basic contribution to the overall pattern of wastewater radioactivity is also made by tritium, which is formed in water- cooled reactors.

When the epoch of total secrecy came to end, the nuclear agency had to change tactics and try to prove that this is a harmless, worldwide, and permissible routine procedure. As usual, only half the truth was disclosed for explanation: salt content is on the rise in the coolant pond, the steam generator condensing tubes gather sediments that could impair station safety, and the river receives the same salts that were taken out of it together with water, only in a slightly greater quantity. It was admitted that this causes thermal pollution, but this was put across as beneficial for river and littoral wildlife. Discharge into the surface waters allegedly prevent the accumulation in one place of a great amount of low-level liquid radioactive and other wastes.

This primitive strategy was adopted by the nuclear agency, for the waste-dilution principle was and still is valid in other industries as a method of water management. However, radioactive wastes from the Mayak Combine in Cheliabinsk oblast (Russia) contaminated the Techa River basin, and the great Yenisei carries the radioactive pollution to the ocean. This approach to the rivers of Siberia as part of nuclear power plant management and development also determined a similar approach to the great rivers of the USSR’s European part, such as the Volga, Dnipro, and Don. It was officially allowed to discharge and aerate wastes. If so, should we stoop in this case to considering the conditions and problems of water supply for the natives?

This is why the designs of all Ukrainian nuclear power plants deliberately allow aeration or natural trickle-down of the polluted water from the coolant ponds to below ground. At that time, the problems of potable water were of little interest, for water had no price. Even now the price of water does not reflect its true value.

How is this “water management” being regulated?

Every country has its own laws on water use.

The Russian Federation’s water code, enacted in 1995, does not regulate the problems of water use at nuclear power facilities. Ukraine’s water code contains a chapter on Industrial Polluted Wastewater Holding Tanks and Technological Reservoirs (Article 74). It stipulates that wastewater is to be discharged from the holding tanks to surface waters in compliance with approved procedure and that special-purpose reservoirs, the coolant ponds of thermal and nuclear stations, should be used according to the standards and rules laid down in technical designs.

This periodic and impulsive water disposal should be regulated by a separate document. Ukraine has drawn up several versions (never adopted) of the Rules and Guidelines for Periodic Water Disposal into Water Basins. It was envisioned that this document would replace the provision. Permission for Special Water Management in the Water Code.

The officially allowed discharge and dilution of wastewater in surface waters is considered today as one alternative in water management. The permit for special water management usually defines the amount of waste and the specific pollutants permissible to release. In this case, the reference point is the background concentration of the polluting and natural components of a water body. In other words, how much and what kind of pollutants can be dumped more are defined. Also identified is the amount of temporarily allowed discharges. Attempts are being made to find the time when discharges become harmless.

In 1992-1993, when Verkhovna Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers were considering the Nikopol residents’ demands to stop aeration, there was a proposal to transfer the problem of periodic water disposal to the Ministry for Emergencies in order not to impair the drinking water supply. But the Rules and Guidelines mentioned were never adopted. The nuclear power people cannot meet Water Code requirements, there are no funds to working out a new potable water law, the cost of the potable water consumed is rising, but its quality remains unchanged. Where can we find a way out, and are we looking for it the right place?

This article is a cautious attempt to outline the water management problems of the nuclear power industry and an attempt to shed light on some little-studied factors which also testify to the necessity of scrapping nuclear power generation. The cost our society pays for this is a closely guarded secret.

Cooperation between the nuclear power people and those who intended to divert and transform rivers (it was planned to fence the Dnipro off the Black Sea and feed it with Danube water) continues in a new form, hidden, and, hence, equally dangerous for society. Experts are already discussing the prospect of the continuous pumping of water between the Dnipro chain of reservoirs. We should know this and take the initiators to task if we are to build a civil society and think about the future and also if we want to leave after ourselves rivers rather than “surface water objects” serving the industrial Moloch.

What we need is national-level supervision over water management. And it is time that non-governmental ecological organizations demanded the right to participate in the consideration of licenses to manage nuclear power facilities.