Environmental Control of
Airborne and Liquid Discharges
From Nuclear Power Plants
Karl M. Mason, Director
Bureau of Environmental Health
Pennsylvania Department of Health
Harrisburg, Pa.
The operation of a nuclear power reactor poses environmental
health problems due to the radioactive waste materials resulting from
the fission process and the activation of corrosion products present in
the primary coolant. While practically all of the hazardous material
is either contained "on site" or shipped for off-site disposal, it is
necessary to dispose of certain low level wastes by releasing them to
the environment as airborne discharges to the atmosphere or as liquid
discharges to a stream.
The first commercial power reactor in the country, the Shipping-
port Atomic Power Station, is located on the left bank of the Ohio
River about 25 miles below Pittsburgh. It is designed to produce
electrical energy by a conventional turbine-generator unit. The first
core has a rating of 60 megawatts net electrical output, and later cores
will have ratings up to 100 megawatts net electrical output. The
primary system consists of the nuclear reactor and its associated components which supply steam for the turbine. This portion of the plant
is comparable to the furnace and boiler of a conventional power plant.
Since the function of a reactor is to produce heat, and heat production is a function of the rate of the nuclear reaction, the production
of larger amounts of heat necessitates a greater number of fissions, and,
consequently, a larger quantity of fission products is formed. The
removal of larger quantities of heat from the core requires the circulation
of larger volumes of coolant and results in the activation of more corrosion products.
The radioactive wastes from the primary system can be classified
into eight categories: reactor plant effluents, service building wastes,
fuel canal water wastes, spent ion exchange resins, solid wastes, incinerator ash wastes, gaseous wastes, and boiler water. The three
principal sources of radioactivity in the liquid wastes are:   the activa-
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