One problem with this subject is that most environmental activists have, like Johannes, absolutely no sense of scale or proportion when discussing this issue.

The tritium leak was below the safe levels set by the government. Imagine if every industry had to declare legally harmless leaks for everything they worked with.

Some numbers:

The USEPA drinking water standard for tritium is 20,000 pCi/L. Again, that's for drinking water.

The LLD (Lower Limit of Detection) for tritium is 200 pCi/L

The highest level of tritium found in the groundwater at Braidwood was about 1,040 pCi/L (report here).

The half-life of tritium is about 12 years.

A scientist comments here. He makes the point that coal-fired plants are not required to report the higher amounts of radioactive debris in their exhaust.

This controversy was totally nuts in the first place, and maybe Obama just had that pointed out to him by some reasonable person at some point.