Watch for this headline: “Nuclear Free Vermont Pickets Supermarket; Radioactive Food Discovered In Produce Section.” And it wouldn't be a joke.
Food contains radioactivity. One ordinary banana contains radioactivity equivalent to 40 liters of water with the EPA's maximum allowable concentration of tritium: 0.00000002 curies of tritium per liter.
That number appears tiny when written in terms of the basic radiation unit, curies. However, science and the media report tritium concentrations in picocuries. A picocurie is a trillionth of a curie. A liter of tritiated water containing 20,000 picocuries has 20 billionths of a curie.
The effect on humans is measured in rem (roentgen equivalent man). To eliminate zeros, scientists use the unit millirem, one thousandth of a rem.
Normal background radiation in this country gives the average American 350 millirems a year. The radiation that America's 104 nuclear plants release adds one more millirem. Drinking tritiated water for a year - two liters a day at 20,000 picocuries per liter - will expose the drinker to 4 additional millirems of radiation a year.
One bitewing dental X-ray or one plane flight from Boston to California and partway back produces 4 millirems. The EPA deliberately allows only the amount of radiation in water whose effect will be indistinguishable from background radiation or minor lifestyle choices, such as a trip to the dentist.
In short, no one - at least, no one who eats an occasional banana - needs to be concerned over the amount of tritium in the water that leaked from Vermont Yankee.
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For committed anti-nuclear activists, however, no nuclear plant will ever be safe enough. The activists continually attempt to pump up a crisis over completely insignificant water leaks to further their political agenda: to shut down every nuclear reactor everywhere, and thus free mankind from the scourge of cheap, safe, reliable nuclear electricity.
For those who know the science, tritiated water leaks are not a crisis, but a minor problem. Quite a few nuclear plants have had tritiated water leaks. The picocuries of radiation emitted show up promptly on monitoring instruments, and the plant operators find the leak and fix it.
A nuclear reactor is designed on the expectation that earthquakes happen, that plumbing sometimes leaks, and that people sometimes make mistakes.
The plant's hardware, control system, training, administration, security, and management are all designed to identify problems and mistakes, and to get them fixed.
The regulations on emitted radioactivity protect the public with a huge margin of safety.
Of course, this information won't change the minds of those who are impervious to science. But you can understand it.