Similar incident was reported last October. News in Finland's national broadcasting: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/radiation_safety_watchdog_...
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Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#82Poland has the highest reading - something going awry at Chernobyl or somebody testing low yield nukes? I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. I understand the level is low but there is still non-zero probability of somebody going ill from it.
> I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. Edit: I know this is harsh, but the OP should realize their post is somewhere on the anti-vaxxer-Facebook-post-scale. It's somewhere around a millipost, but it registers on the scale. What should the news flash say? "Run from the nearest banana, person, airplane, or mountain." I'm really disappointed at you…
>What should the news flash say? "Run from the nearest banana, person, airplane, or mountain." //
The news story should say "slightly elevated background radiation levels detected across Europe" and have an spokesman from the nuclear industry and a doctor quoted saying it's about as harmful as walking past a banana.
The fact we can't trust the media to report on something without inciting chaos is pretty awful.
Your position appears to be: we can't let the press report on interesting environmental anomalies because it could cause a panic. Meh.
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any more info about the authorized iodine-131 releases? Was there a single underlying event?
Many installations in Europe and neighboring countries are allowed to reject iodine-131 in the air. From Nuclear power plants (nuclear power stations, nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, etc.) to medical field (isotope reactors, nuclear medicine, waste incinerators, etc.). source : http://www.criirad.org/balises/CRIIRAD_170214%20_I131_Europe... (french)
> Many installations in Europe and neighboring countries are allowed to reject iodine-131 in the air.
Given the very short half-life of 131I being just 8 days and the daughter isotope 131Xe being stable this is a really weird policy.
There's no good reason to force nuclear installations to keep 131I in storage for, say, 80 days to dilute its activity down to 0.1%. Heck there's no good reason to release it it all.
The decay product is a noble gas, so you even get the separation chemistry for free. Iodine is a halogen so just let it react with some alkaline (pass it through some caustic solution) upon which is forms ionic bonds and turns into saline solution. As soon as the 131I decays into 131Xe it will recombine with an electron and gas out.
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thus, then you could be seen the remain survivor Iodine released from an earlier episode, that for some reason went unnoticed (or undisclosed) before. You could expect to have 25% still at 16 days (I said expect because this is a game of probabilities still).
True, but if it's been detected at this level of activity, why wouldn't it have been detected before now at a higher level of activity than this? There are privately operated and often networked sensors all over Europe.
Exact. This is the right question here.
Maybe we do not have sensors in the right places that could detect them.
I'll suggest to place some sensors in regular airlines and see what happens for example.
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many installations in Europe and neighboring countries are allowed to reject iodine-131 in the air. From Nuclear power plants (nuclear power stations, nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, etc.) to medical field (isotope reactors, nuclear medicine, waste incinerators, etc.). source : http://www.criirad.org/balises/CRIIRAD_170214%20_I131_Europe... (french)
> Many installations in Europe and neighboring countries are allowed to reject iodine-131 in the air. Given the very short half-life of 131I being just 8 days and the daughter isotope 131Xe being stable this is a really weird policy. There's no good reason to force nuclear installations to keep 131I in storage for, say, 80 days to dilute its activity down to 0.1%. Heck there's no good reason to release it it all. The…
The term to google for is "Avogadro’s number"
A mole of some chemical is a cardinal number and its a gross simplification but a "handful of stuff" has about ten to the twenty forth molecules or atoms. All to less than one sig fig. The exact number doesn't matter because enough half lives to dilute that much stuff to being statistically unlikely to contain less than 1 molecule is very large indeed. So at some point, where the radioactive activity is lower than say, a banana, or the ore it was dug out of, or a granite countertop, you just dump it. It takes a lot of half lives to take a banana down to zero radioactivity...
Probably the accident is somebody dumped the wrong bucket. You're supposed to dump bucket #32525 which has been aging for 100 half lives but accidentally bucket #64256 got dumped which was fresh. Or they reused buckets and markings (whoops there's two buckets labeled #15415)
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ISRN appears to be a French government agency. They are claiming to have detected non-natural levels of radioactive iodine across Europe. The implication is that someone, somewhere had a nuclear accident and did not report it.
There was a recent incident in late Jan - explosion at nuclear power plant Flamanville in France: https://www.wsj.com/articles/explosion-at-edf-nuclear-power-...
That plant is a PWR, the water/steam in the turbine loop never contacts the fun stuff in the reactor core, there's a heat exchanger in between.
Hydrogen cooled turbogenerators are a thing, although I don't know if this plant used them, probably did. Nice and cool, high efficiency. The press release claims an alternator cooling fan overheated or whatever and that caused symptoms that sound like a hydrogen cooled turbogenerator having a nice leak and subsequent fire. Doesn't mention a steam leak. So that's like one more heat exchanger away from the fun stuff.
Explosions and fires and fire fighting can cause disruption and raise dust in theory, but the isotope detected has a very short half life so this wasn't a leak from a decade ago getting washed into the environment by a fire hose.
Its not seeming very likely.
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good that the equipment is so sensitive that we can detect this sort of thing. I suspect they'll take maps of the readings and eventually trace it back to the source.
The (much higher) concentration detected in Poland, IMHO definitely points east . The readings in Spain are baffling, though.
Spain might indicate that it happened in the water/sea off the coast?
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#88Poland has the highest reading - something going awry at Chernobyl or somebody testing low yield nukes? I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. I understand the level is low but there is still non-zero probability of somebody going ill from it.
Poland has the highest reading I wondered so as well, but the second-highest was from Spain, and I struggle to form a consistent picture from that.
Spain might indicate that it happened in the water/sea off the coast?
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. Edit: I know this is harsh, but the OP should realize their post is somewhere on the anti-vaxxer-Facebook-post-scale. It's somewhere around a millipost, but it registers on the scale. What should the news flash say? "Run from the nearest banana, person, airplane, or mountain." I'm really disappointed at you…
>What should the news flash say? "Run from the nearest banana, person, airplane, or mountain." // The news story should say "slightly elevated background radiation levels detected across Europe" and have an spokesman from the nuclear industry and a doctor quoted saying it's about as harmful as walking past a banana. The fact we can't trust the media to report on something without inciting chaos is pretty awful. Your…
I think the way the information was published was appropriate. The OP was openly criticizing the fact that the information went through through the normal review and publishing process instead of some urgent channel that would have given some non-negligible number of members of the general public the opportunity to take potassium iodide tablets.
My position is that it's detrimental to society to pressure the media into prominently covering non-issues that sound scary on the surface, without first taking the tiniest amount of effort to attempt to asses the level of danger. Such people should expect to be called out.
People are generally over-concerned about scary-sounding things of little to no danger, and vastly vastly under-concerned about mundane lifestyle issues that statistically pose the greatest threat to their health and lives. Those who openly criticize the media for lack of urgency in coverage without first checking if there's any actual danger of note should be made aware that they're contributing to the problem.
Re: Detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe in January 2017
#90Poland has the highest reading - something going awry at Chernobyl or somebody testing low yield nukes? I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. I understand the level is low but there is still non-zero probability of somebody going ill from it.
> I am also really disappointed this wasn't anywhere in the news, at least people could have taken some iodine. Edit: I know this is harsh, but the OP should realize their post is somewhere on the anti-vaxxer-Facebook-post-scale. It's somewhere around a millipost, but it registers on the scale. What should the news flash say? "Run from the nearest banana, person, airplane, or mountain." I'm really disappointed at you…
Other sources indicate something that might be related - arrival of a "sniffer" WC-135 plane from Florida to UK that detects and monitors radioactive events. So there might be something going on (or not).
Anyway, why is it so bad to be concerned about health impact of even negligible radioactive release (are you sure newborns/sick do have the same threshold?) as an ordinary citizen, given the massive dishonesty of governments in the past in cases like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Why can't we just read in the newspapers within 2-3 days "we detected a minuscule amount of radiation, probably related to bad weather" or something, rather than keep a lid on it? Don't we deserve better? Or do we have to be handled like kindergarteners with somebody else deciding what is good for us to know?
And please stop with the banana examples, it's getting tiring. You 100% know there are various radioactive elements emitting different types of radiation, some way more dangerous than the others. Iodine by itself is just a first indicator but it's not the only element that gets released; some of the others are way more dangerous and we deserve to know. Not to mention there is a very different outcome if you just get some element on your skin or if it gets incorporated (cumulatively!) into your bones, organs or gets stuck in your lungs.