Nuclear Energy Activist Toolkit #41
The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) and the Mothers Against Tennessee River Radiation (MATRR) conducted a workshop last November in Chattanooga, TN on the radioactivity monitoring they perform around the Browns Ferry and Sequoyah nuclear plants. Garry Morgan periodically goes to a variety of locations around these plants and uses a radiation detector to measure radioactivity levels.
This spring, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sponsored a workshop in Washington, DC during which participants built radiation detectors from kits and learned how to measure radioactivity levels in their communities and upload the data into a global tracking system.
As evidenced by these workshops, there’s increased interest in routine releases of radioactivity from nuclear power plants following the March 2011 accident at Fukushima.
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Bottom Line
Federal regulations require that radioactivity not be released from nuclear power plants except via controlled and monitored pathways. Federal regulations further require plant owners to track all releases and report the amounts of radioactivity released via these pathways to the NRC each year. The NRC makes these reports publicly available and has created a webpage to make it easier for the public to access them.
The reports are HITJAAC (high in technical jargon and acronym content). But they remain primary sources of information on the amounts and types of radioactivity routinely being released from U.S. nuclear power plants.
Read more at Routine Releases of Radioactivity from Nuclear Reactors
