Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you aware that our whole planet is warmed by the decay of thorium and other heavy elements below the crust? Geothermal energy is nuclear energy. To respond to your question, Earth would get over it, and humanity would survive even 507 meltdowns. Fukushima was an exceptional case on a 40-year-old design, so we wouldn't have 507 Fukishimas (keep in mind how many people died from the giant tsunami that caused the Fu…
I'm no expert, but I suspect there's a big difference between the planet's naturally occurring radiation and the high volume of unstable particles spewing out from the Fukishima meltdown everyday.
Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
31–40 of 126 posts
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on, do you think the fissible material from a bomb just vanishes? It is just hurled across a bigger area due to the fact that a bomb explodes. Exactly what level of physics education do you have?
I have no physics education, I'm using common sense. They don't design bombs like they do core reactors. Bombs are intended to explode immediately, reactors are intended to help produce power for a very long time. But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the…
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#33"Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant’s Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."
One of the things this 'foot' proved was that the supposition that a meltdown would have a core melt through the ground and down into the center of the earth, aka the "China Syndrome" was false. The reason was of course that once the core became molten it begins to mix with the materials around it, that causes it to become diluted until it drops below criticality and then it ceases to be a threat. All western reactors (and all of those in Japan) have a pool of borosilicate sand underneath the reactor as just such a final safeguard. Should the core melt through to that, it turns the sand to borosilicate glass which kills neutrons and stops the reaction. Leaving behind a solid, cooling glass chunk. Not contaminating any groundwater and generally not going any further afield. It remains to be seen if any of Fukishima's core material made it as far as the sand underneath those reactors.
The 'foot' at Chernobyl isn't going anywhere, and in a couple of decades will be safe enough to chop up and dispose of more permanently. Unlike radioactive dust in the plant which was getting carried out of the containment building. I expect that within my kids lifetime people to be living once again in the surrounding area.
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#34> a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power. A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...
Ditch both.
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#35So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively: > When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had. the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from…
Total activity decrease in realistic "atomic waste" is not at all exponential.
Try a simple example:
Take a mixture of two isotopes. The one isotope has a half-life of 1 year and there's so much of it, that the activity is 10 decays/second. There's also a second isotope in the mix, with a half-life of 100 years, but there's 100 times as much of it, so that in total, you also get 10 decays/second.
After 10 years, the first isotope will be down to 2^-10, so only 1/1000th is left, it will be hardly measurable. But the second one will have decayed only 1/10th of a half-time, almost everything is still there: You are now down to half of the original activity.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA...
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#36Seems silly to me to just leave it sitting there for decades if its internal heat is being generated by how the isotopes are in close proximity to each other. Or I might be misunderstanding why it's generating its own heat. Could they contain and cool down the waste by slicing off chunks of the mass and containing each chunk in lead-lined boxes? Essentially re-processing the lump into crude 'control rod' sized chunks…
I think the main issue is that no one wants to get anywhere remotely near it.
Is there too much radiation in the room for robots with radiation-shielded electronics to operate?
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#37So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively: > When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had. the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from…
It's due to the decay products of U-238 (and their decay products) all producing radiation that adds up to more than the original's.
I never would have guessed that.
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Fukushima accident was a rare event, dumped a small amount of waste compared to ongoing industrial operations, and the most worrying part of the waste that it dumped decays on the timescale of decades, and not millenia. I don't have stats about what gets directly into the oceans, but when we mine gold, copper, and other ores, we create entire ponds called "tailings ponds" full of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and al…
like gold and copper, nuclear fuel is also mined. the nuclear industry produces large volumes of finely pulverised long lived low-level radioactive wastes in the form of uranium tailings. Unlike arsenic and cynaide, the hazard posed by uranium is not onyl checmical, but also radioactive. Whereas these chemical pollutants can be neutralised by the right chemical reaction, the radioactive hazard of uranium mining waste…
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pacific ocean isn't really noticing any effects. Water is great at stopping radiation. In fact, open pool reactors like this one ( http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_... ) are serviced by scuba divers. The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the…
Enjoy your fish! I for one am taking heed of the warning signs from the thousands of dead animals washing up on the shores of the west coast - not to mention the alarming drop in the number of sea-urchins, starfish, shellfish, and other species who simply cannot be found.
"A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
...compared to the mind-boggling amount of commercial waste we dump into the environment in a completely unmonitored, uncontrolled, unlimited way the radioactive contamination of the Pacific is absolutely insignificant.Maybe it will even help the ecological systems there a tiny little bit because (even if only few...) people might back down on seafood from the over-fished areas there.
Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
#40A disturbing thought is that Fukishima is an even more dire situation. The Pacific ocean will never be the same. Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.
The pacific ocean isn't really noticing any effects. Water is great at stopping radiation. In fact, open pool reactors like this one ( http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_... ) are serviced by scuba divers. The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the…
http://www.isoe-network.net/index.php/component/docman/doc_d...
[A diver not briefed on avoiding unknown objects picked up a highly activated bolt laying on the pool floor and received a substantial amount of radioactive dose.]