or we could use one of each element allowing a chain reaction to be started by the elements that are self sustaining and give the ones that aren't immediately fissionable a spark.
Japanese N-Plant Explosion
- Thread starter ULTRA
- Start date
You're going to have to be more specific about the 'problematic research' you referred to at one stage. Are you talking about the volunteer studies done during the 90's or something else?
If we consider the BEIR report, for example, then at a Pu-239 concentration of 1.75 ng/kg of soil, then you would need to inhale 571kg of the soil to raise your risk of cancer by 1 in 1300, or, to put it another way, in a sufficiently large popultation, you could expect one death due to cancer for every 742,300 kg of soil inhaled by the population as a whole. Or, to put it another way, if every man woman and child in Tokyo were to Huff 100g of this soil, then you could expect to see 2 cancer deaths - over and above the 16,000 odd malignant cancer related deaths that you would ordinarily expect to see.
To put this in perspective.
A normal day in Sydney registers 20 micrograms/cubic meter of particulates.
If all those particulates are dirt, at this level, you would have to inhale 5,000,000 cubic meters of air to inhale this much dirt.
At 7.5l/min, this would take 1,268 years.
So, under normal environmental conditions, at those concentrations, according to the data we have available to us, we would expect 2 deaths from 13,000,000 people inhaling normal levels of atmospheric dust for 1200 years.
Yeaaah I don't understand what your saying.
? More whooshing, obviously, as no point to that comment is visible except a desire to misrepresent my first post on this thread. You would never gutter yourself like that on purpose, right?trippy said:
In consideration a nod to Quadraphonics behooves me: I do seem to generate responses quit a bit lower and more contemptible than their norm, from some posters here.
So now the stuff with shorter half lives (several days, say) doesn't count as "released"?adoucette said:
What's the cutoff?
Noting, btw, the assumption of dispersion and dissipation (unmeasured) - made explicit here by you.
I believe I have been repeatedly noting that for some time now - the lack of mention. Also, the lack of apparent monitoring outside the assumptions.adoucette said:
I was surprised to find the major radiation release was from the noble gases. I don't recall hearing that in the news.
Are you claiming that we have no evidence of reactor problems in Soviet submarines?electric said:
So they're foolproof - we have the experts solemn assurances. They can't imagine how anything could go wrong this time, they learned their lessons from all those other times, therefore we are safe.electric said:
When hazardous stuff from the Monticello plant was transported by rail past my house, a few years ago during a time of terrorist concern, the casks were not fastened down on the flatbed cars. They didn't need to be, because - according to the experts in charge - they would be moving too slowly for violent accident,
and they weighed 500 pounds and therefore could not be stolen or moved from the cars without heavy moving equipment.
No joke. The guy in charge said that, for attribution, in public interview.
If anyone were advocating replacing the current reactors with better designs, they would have my support.electric said:
I don't think I'm the one who sounds hysterical and panicked, here. I'm seeing much more panic in the immediate onslaught of fase reassurances about Fukushima, the namecalling and derision and playground level bullying directed at even the most reasonable of cautionary voices advocating prudence (or even asserting commonplace facts of the wrong kind), the major media manipulations and continual pressure to stay on industry friendly message visible across the TV and radio and press spectrum.electric said:
4 posts from Page 4, one from Page 3, 1 from page 1.
Given that it's been 24hrs since I made the post, I'm not sure I can recall where I was going with that train of thought. But no, seemingly unlike you, I don't generally go out of my way to cherry pick posts or media releases in order to try and argue a false flag or a straw man.
Really? Because I can find references to it dating back to at least March 16.
For example, 'The Register' (or someone writing for it) posited that the brief surges in radiation that coincided with the explosions was mostly due to shortlived radioisotopes of noble gasses such as Argon (actually, they cited MIT experts as saying that) and suggested that a surge in radiation that resulted in the evacuation of workers (but was not associated with an explosion) was the result of a breach of the supression chamber at #2 reactor.
Actually, the isotopes in question have halflives on the order of minutes or hours, not days.
Depends on what measurement of radiation you are using as we have three different ones which have different uses.
The Becquerel measures radioactivity (decays per second).
The Gray measures the absorbed dose (energy absorbed)
The Sievert measures the biological effects. (adjusted for type of radiation)
If you want to count it in Becquerels you will get just the decays per second and it doesn't matter how long the radiation lasted or what it's impact to a human is, or indeed if there was any at all.
So you can always tell if someone is trying to play the HYPE game and wants to use Curies as their measurement of the amount of radiation released.
But the more relevant measurement to us is the Sievert, because now we have a consistent way of measuring the actual impact on us and in this manner we track the radioactive elements that actually have a biological impact on us and when measured this way the noble gasses don't even make the list.
So, yes counting of it is to an extent determined by half life, as some isotopes have half lives measured in seconds, thus they don't get far enough to get measured. Any isotope lasting several days would be counted though, indeed Iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days and it is counted (and in one of their reports, TEPCO reported on the concentration of I-132 which has a HL of 2.3 hours).
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110322e4.pdf
No, claiming the lead cooled reactors are fundamentally safer than the water cooled reactors. Most soviet submarines were water cooled and were built far crappier than the USA navy's reactors; many serious problems were had, which is one reason why the soviet's explored lead cooled reactors as a means of getting around shoddy construction and operation, it was a failure, as a shoddy molten lead reactor freezes up, rending them inert and useless.
Safe is a relative term: as is nuclear power is statistically safer than coal power in deathtolls and environmental damage, but if you wanted nuclear power to be even safer then lead is the next logical step. The problems at Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc, would not have been possible if the reactors were lead cooled. We would have less risks with lead cooled reactors even if it was in the middle of a city without major contaminate structures than with a water cooled reactor, and certainly both would be safer in said city than a coal power plant on average.
Hey do you still live in the area? I could come over.
What kind of casks were these? These are what nuclear waste casks usually look like, oh and they usually weigh a lot more then 500 pounds, try more like 50 tons!
I wasn't saying you were hysterical, I was speaking of your ilk in general. Asking for better safety from nuclear power is fair and rational and nuclear power could provide if funded and regulated properly. On the other hand asking for nuclear power to be abolished is not: it's unfair and irrational to the point of hypocrisy if you aren't asking for power sources like coal to be abolished first.
My ilk sound like me. By definition.electric said:
The people displaying the most desperation in the wake of Fukushima are the ones clutching at every straw they can find or (increasingly) invent, to minimize the scope and deflect the implications for the nuclear industry of this latest mess. And although they have good reason to panic, it is unfortunate to see them adopt tactics and rhetoric so unworthy of the issue.
Depends on you terms of analysis. No coal plant is capable of taking out entire river drainages for thousands of years, or tying up resources during disaster as in Fukushima.electric said:
So? Different problems (notice all three of those were different from each other) are anticipated from different designs - with some common threads (waste, weapons, bad accident).electric said:
Dunno. I was quoting the expert in charge of ensuring safe transport through my town - a memorable event, that media campaign of expert reassurance. We also heard long explanations of how the casks couldn't possibly blow up like a bomb.electric said:
Example: The radioactive xenon released lasted at least a couple of days (to 1/8, say, at a 9 hour half life) and may have formed plumes or rained out in concentration. Sufficiently dense monitoring for such exposure at the requisite ranges (couple of hundred miles) was not done.adoucette said:
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Obviously he wasn't an expert or your memory is faulty. You can look up Waste Casks and quickly see that the rail versions don't include a 500 lb model.
NOPE, Xenon is a gas and doesn't rain out and they modeled and monitored the Xenon-133 both locally and as it spread across the entire planet. (easy to find if you are actually interested)
Arthur
Xenon concentration and dispersion are affected by air density and other rain - influenced factors - sorry about the "rain out" term, but rainstorms and such can in theory concentrate the gas in layers and clouds.adoucette said:
The supposed monitoring and modeling assumed dispersion and dissipation.
The memory is thoroughly grounded - the public discussion was detailed, about crush strength and accident possibilities etc, and a couple of us were thinking about throwing one off into the weeds at this one curve back of our street, where the curve was sharp enough to hide one of the flatcars, and woods were thick to the tracks, just to make the point.adoucette said:
The newspaper reporter may have lost a decimal point - but the things were nowhere near as big as the pictures Wiki turns up for me, on keywords, in modern day.
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And that only matters if it can concentrate the gas at ground level.
Got any sources that indicate that it can do so?
And Xenon 133 is something we can detect at INCREDIBLY low concentrations. One of the sources I read said they could detect .1 gram even if it was evenly distributed in the entire atmosphere.
Arthur
TEPCO has for the first time published their roadmap for restoration.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11041707-e.html
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110417e14.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110417e15.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11041707-e.html
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110417e14.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110417e15.pdf
It doesn't look that way to me:
http://www.weatheronline.co.nz/weather/news/fukushima?LANG=nz&VAR=nilujapan133&HH=24
It looks to me like they're asusming that some turbulent mixing will occur, and that the Xenon-133 will be carried by the wind, and that it will behave as any other plume - in fact, if you pay close attention, you can even see slugs of increased activity in the plume.
Oh and note that, while I'm not certain when that page was put up, precisely, note that it has information going back to at least 16/4
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None at all. Do you infer safety from that?adoucette said:
Two dimensional ("whole column"), extrapolated and projected (estimates, not measurements), and not fine grained enough to allow secure total exposure estimates for individuals (dispersion and dissipation presumed).trippy said:
"Any other plume" of similar stuff only, we of course interpret. Not the most common of circumstances.
Safety cannot be inferred, in other words. Estimated individual exposures will carry error bars covering orders of magnitude.
But much improved over TMI, Chernobyl, etc, in which estimations of plumes were simply averaged over the entire landscape - and safety inferred.
No, actually.
The data that is presented to the public is in 2d, total column exposure, however, FLEXPART is capable of performing 3d dispersion modeling - including boundary layers.
This is wrong on two levels.
The first level:
It's wrong because the behaviour of a plume of (for example) effluent in water is governed by the same physics as a plume of smoke in the air. The physics that governs the behaviour of the plume is the same in both cases, even in terms of apperance both plumes will have obvious similarities. The main difference is in things like timescales, even then, they're not always that different.
The second level:
It's wrong on another level because Hospitals use Xe-133 for medical imaging. I say that this statement demonstrates that yours is wrong because it suggests that the 3D behaviour of Xe-133 plumes resulting from discharges to the air have been well studied to determine things such as stack location.
Did you look at the link I provided? Finer grids are available:
Incidentally, AFAIK, this modelling is performed based on measurements (both of activity and conditions), as well as predictions.
I'd try and find a finer grid still, but there's just so much bollocks floating around the internet in relation to this that, so to speak, it's hard to see the wood for the trees.
I lack data about the latest onsite readings, but I, personally infer relative saftey from the fact that the lowest dose used in medical imaging for a 70kg patient is 74 MBq, and the highest dose is 1110 MBq, combined with the fact that the decay radiation is of relativelyt low energy (30keV - 100keV). I also infer saftey from the fact that, aside from it's anesthetic properties at high doses, Xenon is physiologicaly inert (at the levels used for imaging, and at the levels show in any of the modeling), and that 'Gas that enters the circulation from a single breath is returned to the lungs and exhaled after a single pass through the peripheral circulation' which suggests that once you're removed from the source of the exposure, it very quickly 'purges' from the body (as opposed to, for example, remainingh in the body and accumulating in the bones).
Cool. But we don't have good 3d modeling, 2d backed by sufficient measurement, or adequate fineness of scale on any dimension, in hand at the moment.trippy said:
They have trouble predicting details of smoke in the air, as well. "The same physics" is not the point.trippy said:
In the first place, the physics involved is not well handled yet, in any circumstances. Modeling of turbulence in fluids and gases at this scale yields only qualitative and estimated predictions at best. We are talking about the weather - weather predictions are announced in probabilities, and made at fairly large scale only. In the second, the behavior of a noble gas plume in air differs from smoke, effluent plumes in liquids, etc. Note, say, the failure to rain out noted above. The lack of chemical reactions and "stickiness", the relative weight, the slight differences in physical factors so radically amplified by turbulence etc, lead to even qualitatively different behaviors over time.
You jumped from from medical imaging to large scale atmospheric release. Besides: even if so, and I doubt it, how much good does "well studied" do us, in predicting the weather?trippy said:
Not fine enough for much confidence in exposure estimations.trippy said:
It's OK - that would be way too much to expect. But then false reassurances should not be broadcast and insisted upon.
Just because you, personally, haven't found any, and I don't have the time to find it for you, does not prove it hasn't been done. I seem to recall you also saying that this whole thing with Noble gasses, and their release was both surprising to you, and you hadn't seen it mentioned in the media - even though I have been able to find mainstream media articles discussing the release of radiosotopes of Group 18 elements, and their detection in the US as far back as mid march (some of which I have linked to previously.
You can, however, predict to an arbitrary degree of certainty where it's going to do. The same physics is precisely the point.
You're missing the point.
No, we're not actually talking about the same thing as weather forecasting here. The question, in essence boils down to "If I release a large number of small balloons from a source this shape in that location at some rate consistent with these measurements and those locations... Where are they going to end up, and how many are going to end up there?"
Again, you're stumbling over irrelevancies.
For one thing, this is a strawman argument. I didn't say it would behave exactly the same as plume of smoke in air, or for that matter, the same as a plume a of effluent in water, I didn't even imply it. What I actually said was that the physics of a plume of effluent in water was the same as the plume of smoke in air - give or take. The point being that two seemingly very different systems are by in large, very similar in their behaviour. By analogy, however, modeling a plume of argon in the atmosphere would be more like modeling a plume of tracer dye in water, which again, is going to show broad similarities to the plume of smoke, or the plume of effluent, but will have characterstics that are different as well.
I made no such jump.
I simply pointed out that the dispersion of Xenon-133 in the atmosphere was something that specifically has been modeled.
There you go again with this nonsense about weather forecasting. We know what the weather's been doing, we've got the satelite measurements to prove that. That's the point that you seem to be missing in all of this. At 2011-04-18 03:00 UTC, the date 2011-04-18 00:00 UTC was in the past. Likewise, at 2011-04-18 09:00 UTC, 2011-04-18 00:00 UTC was still in the past.
We're not trying to guess what the weather is going to do next here (although there are forecasts on the sight that I linked to) what those maps say is "Based on these measurements of windspeed, humidity, and temperature, where did this thing that was at this location at this time with these characteristics end up being". This is something that can be verified by observational evidence as well.
Yeah, somehow I knew that was what you would say. I still lack the time, and motivation to spoonfeed you.
Actualy, now there's a point - what do you base this assertion off? Do you know what scale the grid was that was used to generate that map?
Expecting you to look at the link I provided would be too much to expect? What precisely are you trying to say here.
Neither should over inflated hype, and yet it has been - the last being Prof/Dr Chris Busby, who has been saying since March that Fukushima Daiichi is still capable of undergoing a nuclear explosion, and has recieved airtime on the BBC, but still seems to be pushing this message (some of the panic mongering that I believe I may have alluded to earlier in the trhead).
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Just to contradict myself, it seems it wasn't that hard to find after all.
Here's one that displays the information at least by prefecture (I can't get it to work on my workstation at work).
Screen grab (from another source).
Here's a google earth API (or a link to one) that displays radiation measurements in real time from a variety of sources, both official and unofficial.
http://community.pachube.com/node/611#3d
Screen grab:
There's no shortage of real information out there.