Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste

Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"

Comments

Selective Nit-pickery

[ackthpt]

I'd expect this from The Mirror, Sun or News Of The World

The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say.

More than 1,700 copies have been sent to groups including schools and councils. But the move has fuelled criticism that the committee is pursuing public consultation at the expense of expert advice.

I think this could be an issue of overreation. The public is being involved. Maybe the government plans all along to just ditch the input, but if it all comes a cropper then they do have the minor leg to stand on that they did consult with the public, so the public ought to just shaddup about their NIMBYism*.

Interesting that the House of Lords has a Science and Technology Select Committee which is highly critical of the project. Ironically it's the Lords which are often derrided for membership qualified by title and/or heredity that are no stranger to bombast.

* Not In My Back Yard

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[ackthpt]

The public is the LAST group you want involved with decisions like this.

And in the USA the public has been the roadblock to decisions on matters of this sort. You might like to see what a total mess Hanford in eastern Washington became while waiting for another site to open up to take in waste. Hanford was only intended for so much capacity for so much time.

Depleted Uranium -- a few facts

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

"Depleted uranium (DU) is the highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process... Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium, and has a half life of 4.5 billion years.

Uranium is toxic, sure. It's a heavy metal, and heavy metals are toxic. Consider lead as another example.

"Highly toxic and radioactive" implies both highly toxic and highly radioactive. That is absolutely not the case. While uranium, like any heavy metal, is toxic if ingested, it's not only not highly radioactive, it's bordering on inert. Because almost all the U-235, the active isotope, is gone, it's far less radioactive than uranium in its unrefined form.

Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. The more radioactive an element is, the shorter its half-life is. For those who don't remember the definition, half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in a substance to undergo radioactive decay. Therefore, something that is emitting radiation at a high rate -- that is, undergoing a lot of atomic decay -- is necessarily going to have a short half-life; something with a long half-life is mostly sitting there, and once in a while a nucleus decays. In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years. As radioactive materials go, that's pushing pretty close to not radioactive at all. In fact, depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding to block gamma rays!

Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper. Substantial amounts of air. Try it yourself sometime: get your hands on an alpha source (your local antique shop can probably supply you with a piece of red Fiesta Ware pottery) and a Geiger counter (surplus stores often have them). Put the Geiger counter's tube by the Fiesta Ware, listen to the nice clicking. Now put a sheet of notebook paper between them. The clicking stops.

Thirty members of Rokke's cleanup team have already died, and he has 5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation in his body, resulting in damage to his lungs and kidneys, brain lesions, skin postules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia.

He'd have had to be eating the depleted uranium to get anywhere close to that level of exposure. At which point, he'd be dead from heavy metal poisoning already, so any radiation wouldn't be an issue. Remember, something doesn't become radioactive from being exposed to alpha particles. You need slow neutrons for that, and U-238 is not a good slow neutron source. Enough slow neutrons to make a human being radioactive will also make him dead. Enough depleted uranium in the body to produce measurable radioactivity will kill him just like a large amount of lead, mercury, or other heavy metal.

As for "5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation" ... well, let's look at some numbers. Assuming we're talking exposure limits here, the recommended annual limit for nuclear workers is 20 mSv. 5,000 times that would be 100 Sv, which is 10x the amount that will cause death within days or weeks. So if this guy really had 5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation exposure, he'd be dead. Even assuming the writer was exaggerating by an order of magnitude, his symptoms wouldn't be fibromyalgia or painful wheezing -- they'd be vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, bleeding from every available orifice, massive bruising at the slightest touch, etc. A picture of the guy shows him with hair, no bruises, and not bleeding from anywhere apparent.

Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.