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The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.

That said, this was uranium ore, which is typically only about 0.1% uranium. Uranium and its decay products have a radioactivity of 12,356 Bq (decays per second) per gram, so you'd expect ore to be about 12.4 Bq per gram.

In contrast, potassium chloride is commonly used as a salt substitute in low-sodium salt products. It's about 0.0118% naturally-occurring K-40, which is radioactive (beta radiation even). That gives potassium a radioactivity of about 0.032 Bq/mg = 32 Bq per gram

So the exposure visitors got from these buckets of uranium ore was probably less than you get walking past the water softener bags in the supermarket. In fact, looking at the table on page 2 of the potassium chloride link, you'd expect baked potatoes, milk, orange juice, bananas, hamburgers, and roast chicken to be more radioactive (gram per gram) than these buckets of uranium ore.

Might be of interest, came across this in reddit/r/ontario yesterday. Live data on Canada's province of Ontario power generation by industry. Note about 74% nuclear and ~1% wind and solar which should pick up through the day: http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-... This one isn't as pretty but gives more detail by plannt: https://cns-snc.ca/media/ontar... After all these years of wind and solar installations, the small amount being produced by those technologies would make me think we need more nuclear.

LOL an Ontario Conservative shill on Slashdot, whodathunkit!

Not sure if you don't read, or just like spouting ideology but pretty much everything you said is in error, other than the fact that you posted some op ed pieces of conservative based newspapers about Ontario people mad about energy bills. I'll concede that the Liberals "green" direction of a few years ago hasn't produced the results they wanted, and it likely has resulted in slightly higher energy costs. You could also say that (subtracting the "green" bit) about just about just about every political party in Ontario for the last 20 years, Conservatives included. That privatization stuff that Harris and his Conservatives did for the only reason to try and make their budget look balanced was BS. At least the "green" plan actually had some positive environmental benefits if not anything else!

OK, so exactly what did you get wrong? Let's start!

First:
"The FIT Program is open to projects with a rated electricity generating capacity greater than 10 kilowatts (kW) and generally up to 500 kW." is located right in the website your cited if you actually took 5 seconds to read it. Do you know what 10-500KW is? This is the home generation, typical solar, basically when someone puts a couple PV panels on their roof and calls it a day. The FIT program is not for a 20MW solar farm, or a 200MW wind farm, which is where the actual generation occurs, and the those Liberal subsidies kick in. So you are not even talking about the correct thing.

Second:
"Most conservative estimate is that it will raise the cost of goods across all sectors by 20%". I think the emphasis here is "Conservative", in political party spin. I note you cite nothing here, and I can only assume you made up that value off the top of your head. It's nice and round, and ridiculous. For one, "across all sectors" is obviously false, as not all sectors produce pollution, or consume a lot of energy. Not going to bother looking it up, feel free to actually cite something.

Third:
In Ontario "green energy" accounts for under 1% of total generation". Also a totally made up number. I know for a fact, so I did look it up:
In summary, not including Hydro, Wind/Solar/Bio probably make up about 18% of total generation... a far cry from 1%
https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/o...

Anyway I'm sure you consider these all to be Liberal lies or something, but for anyone else reading, do the 30 seconds of google searches when you see these kinds of made up numbers and nonsense in posts...

Ontario has also gone completely coal free. They still have a few gas plants, but we're on the path to getting rid of those as well.

The breakdown is as follows

57.4% Nuclear
27.4% Hydro Electric
8.1% Gas
5.1% Wind
1.3% Biofuel
0.7% Solar

Values on that page are apparently updated in real time based on current load on the system.

Renewable don't do that.

That's true, but the article isn't saying we have to shift to renewables.

What did Ontario shift to between 2003 and 2014? I'm betting some other form of fossil fuel.

From what I understand, they're mostly nuclear. (Seriously, it took me five minutes to find that on Google, you could have done it).

Canada had TWO major nuclear incidents at Chalk River with the NRX reactors, in 1952 and 58. Most the the information has been removed off the web over the past few years, but you can still read about the 1952 partial meltdown here at:
http://media.cns-snc.ca/history/nrx.html

    My son had to do a high school project a few years about about the 1952 incident, and modern history books have virtually nothing on the accident. An old early 1960's history book from the stacks at the public library and that report on the web were about the only sources of information he could find.

      As a fellow Canadian, I am not so sure we can be that arrogant in our attitudes. Also, if Canada, supposedly one of the more open and free democracies in the world (whatever that is supposed to mean anymore) can downplay and/or suppress information about it's major nuclear accidents, how many other "incidents" do you think might have happened around the world and we've never heard about?

      Sad thing is, compared to fossil fuels, what real choice do we have? Realistically, conservation, wind and solar (green power) sources just aren't cutting it. I'm not talking about home use, trying running a major manufacturing plant or oil refinery on wind or solar power.
   

Some people have proposed doing something similar to that.

If you eat Potassium Chloride, you get nutrition. If you inject it, you die.

Either way, you get radioactive.

Fission very well could be, but half-vast fission we've been saddled with as a result of the Carter administration's (the one president who should've known better, btw, what with his degree in nuclear engineering) machinations.

Except the nuclear power industry had about 20 years to reduce cost before Carter came along. Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said the "energy too cheap to meter" quote in 1955 not 1975.

Falcon

http://www.cns-snc.ca/branches/Toronto/energy/wind _vs_nuclear.doc

The figures in this analysis are a bit dated, but it still demonstrates that wind power cannot replace nuclear or conventional power.

In addition to the sheer space required, the fact is, you need to have enough conventional/nuclear power available on standby due to fluctuations in the wind. Until we come up with a feasable way to store the power generated in peak wind times, wind power is simply pointless.

I did a project on wind-power a few years ago. I went into it with high expectations. Those expectations were shattered when I actually looked at the numbers.

A heavy water plant is not a nuclear reactor. Nothing in a heavy water plant is radioactive. Or, for most processes, even toxic. Here's a tutorial on heavy water plants. They're not very complicated or especially large. This is the easy step in the process.

The next step is a nuclear reactor fueled with natural uranium and moderated with heavy water, which can be used, with difficulty, to produce plutonium. This is the route Pakistan took. Here's Pakistan's heavy water plant and its companion nuclear reactor. Israel's Dimona reactor is also of this type. So this is the standard route to nuclear weapons for small countries. This step is much harder and riskier, but the technology is half a century old.

There are other approaches. The United States initially used water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors fueled with natural uranium for plutonium production, as did Russia. Britain used air-cooled graphite-moderated reactors. (Bad idea. The Windscale reactor had a fire in 1957, releasing a considerable amount of radioactive material.) Once both countries had uranium-enrichment capability, newer reactors mostly used low-grade enriched uranium. Both the US and the USSR got so good at plutonium production that both now have tons (literally) of the stuff in storage, in addition to the weapons using it. A nuclear weapon requires about 5Kg.

Fast breeders aren't the only kind of breeder. Some thermal reactor types achieve breeding ratios very close to 1 with the Th-U cycle. As an example, CANDU reactors work well with this cycle, and have excellent neutron economy, Recent advances in heavy water production will help reduce the cost of CANDU plants.

And if you use nuclear power as your primary means of generating electricity, you can make enough hydrogen that 12% efficiency from an IC engine is just fine.

Why, it'll be Too Cheap to Meter!

Being an industrous information-digger, I quickly found this detailed description of the accident:

AIR QUALITY EFFECTS
Air flowing through the calandria tubes provided one of the means of cooling the fuel rods. From the one fuel rod which was air-cooled alone, it was estimated that the fission products from an estimated 30 kg of uranium were released to the cooling air and then discharged through the stack. The wind was from the west at about 4 m/s. Staff at a neighbouring building called the control room to report that their radioactivitvy detectors were off- scale. An electrician who was up a pole adjacent to the reactor stack and who was wearing radiation monitoring film received a dose of 350 millirems. The emergency siren to stay indoors was sounded at 15h17. Extensive monitoring was undertaken downwind all that weekend, and radioactivity was detected up to 400 m on either side of the plume centreline. Traces of activity in buildings were cleaned up the following week.

http://www.cns-snc.ca/history/nrx.html

That's true, if you don't install a Nuclear Power Plant to assist in the extraction...

Of course, this begs the question -- why not just develop clean nuclear power in the first place, instead of fixating on developing more economical extraction processes? Vitrification of nuclear waste for long term storage is probably superior to suffocation, freezing or frying to death after destroying our environment. Unless you're ecologically minded, evidently...

Could it be that the public has bought into the anti-nuclear fear campaign, and would rather strangle to death on carbon dioxide, monoxide etc., than breath clean air and drink clean water?

You can buy pure heavy water for about $300 per Kg. Making tritium from that is simple. The AC is delusional, you don't need to make it atom-by-atom. Just put some heavy water need a reactor for a couple of days and you're all set!

As I source I give you this link Heavy Water: A Manufacturers Guide for the Hydrogen Century.

As for his "ideal" proton-proton reaction. First of all it's not in the slighest bit ideal. A Deuterium-Deuterium reaction is the ideal one. You can't make a proton-proton reaction anyway - you need neutrons. And guess what you do with the neutrons? You attach them to protons and make: you guessed it, deuterium!

The only thing the sun does, which we would not do in a lab is convert protons to neutrons by adding electrons. That's the only thing that you are not going to see mass produced in a lab. The sun does not do proton-proton fusion, you can't do that. What the sun does it take protons convert half ot them to neutrons, and hook them up with protons to make deuterium. Then it does deuterium-deuterium fusion.

Chernobyl was a graphite fire - the fire is probably what is being described.

There is a visible phenomenon - Cerenkov radiation - a beautiful blue glow produced when fast moving particles strike water (speed of light in a transparent medium is a function of refractive index -- if particles have to "slow down", that energy has to go somewhere - it gets shot out in a cone of radiation).

If you're seeing Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of a reactor pool, it's beautiful. If you're seeing it because the neutron flux through your eyeballs is enough that your vitreous humor is glowing blue, it's probably less than beautiful, given that if you know what you're seeing, you realize that your lifespan is probably best measured in hours/weeks, rather than years.

Given that the only probable reports of seeing Cerenkov radiation from within the eyeball have been criticality incidents at very close range (1946, Tickling the dragon's tail"> and 1999 Japan, Tokaimura), I'm skeptical that the people on top of the building were seeing Cerenkov radiation from within their eyeballs.

Chernobyl wasn't just a graphite fire, however, it was also a steam explosion. It's plausible (I don't have the numbers) that the neutron flux being spewed from the building was high enough to make condensing steam in the nearby air glow blue.

From the account provided, there's insufficient data to sway me one way or the other -- were witnesses seeing light from the burning graphite and related fire, or were they seeing Cerenkov light released when you dump a massive neutron flux into a tower of condensing steam. The simpler hypothesis is that it was merely light from the intense fire.

If I had to choose, I'd go with fire, but a single picture from the rooftop, or an eyewitness reporting blue in the fire would be enough to convince me that the shining was the blue light of Cerenkov radiation brought on by the dumping of insane numbers of neutrons into condensing droplets of water as the steam condensed.

Aside to Elena: Thank you again for documenting this.