Slashdot Mirror
Radiation Absorbing Mineral Found In the Arctic
An anonymous reader writes "A mineral has recently been found that exhibits the astounding property of being able to remove radiation from water-based solutions. 'After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.' Also, the article notes that although only grams of the material have been found, tons of it are needed; they are confident they could artificially reproduce it."
I thought radiation levels around 3 Mile Island never got more than twice background? Aernt there are plenty of normal places around the word (i.e. not uranium mines/dumps) where the levels are naturally higher?
Well, this sounds like a mineral based water filter. It removes the radioactive isotopes from water, not the radiation itself. So anything that can remove these typically heavy ions will work. I'm surprised this is new.
Once again a Slashdot editor is fooled by pseudo-science.
WOW!! Could they use this mineral on spacecraft to absorb radiation in space to make it safe for long-distance space travelers??? That is just what we need!
My bullshit detector is going off. Yours should be too.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Of course this could find immediate applications in protecting our fresh water sources from radiation poisoning (accident or intentional). More importantly however, the long term benefit will be in figuring out how exactly the underlying process works and attempting to emulate or even improve it. The thought of being able to actively remove radiation from exposed material (not just liquids) is very exciting.
bad science or bad reporting.
Should never have made it onto slashdot.
I followed the article. Seems to contain no substantial information whatever. Who writes this shit?
Anyone know more about this story (assuming there is more to know)?
I can see it now... the President holds a conference praising the development of eco-friendly nukes that wipe out entire populations of men, women, and children, but that leave the surviving ecosystem safe from continued exposure. Red is the new Green!
and are there any ZPM's left?
In Russia radiation absorbs minerals from you!
Insert Generic Sig Here:
... radiation neutralizes you!
a russian convenience store.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Google returns only three hits for "Kolsky Research Institute" - all connected with this story.
As nice as it would be to believe that this is true, it sounds like pseudoscience to me. Absorbing any radioactive substance from water just does not sound plausible, given that absorption would be a micro-level physical process, or a chemical one, acting on a nuclear-level phenomenon.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Isn't it the same as lead?
In Soviet Russia. . .um. . . crap. I got nothing.
Sorry. I'm new here.
The article is very light on details. To remove "radiactivity" from water, you really need to remove radiactive substances from the water. So this mineral is what, like a filter that removes any and all molecular impurities from water, leaving only H2O molecules?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Maybe I'm too clinical but sounds too good to be true to me. The article itself has no information in it really. I'm not a nuclear physicist by any means but I've never heard of anything like this.
You cannot 'remove' radiation from water; the reason water might be radioactive is that it contains contaminants that themselves are radioactive. But ordinary water - containing just 1H and 16O - is completely stable.
This highlights a common misconception about radioactive contamination. Things that are initially inert only become radioactive either by contamination or by transmutation; they are not 'infected' by radioactivity.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Lots of questions still need to be asked.
... or the rain will never come. Someone get that fire a'burnin, somebody beat the drum...
How can anyone take this article seriously? Leaving aside the whole issue of non-existent Three Mile Island "water contamination", the whole thing smacks of Cold War "Oh, that was invented by Russian, but it was bigger and better!" propaganda. I feel like I'm watching an old episode of Star Trek, with Checkov saying "Scotch? It was invented by little old lady from Leningrad"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
OK, NOW they can build that nuclear plant in my back yard!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It's like... magic!
I need more detail to believe this. Radioactivity (in radioactive materials) is caused by the decay of unstable atoms into smaller ones, with a release of energy and high speed particles (aka radiation). Radiation isn't a chemical that you can just remove. Lots of things can absorb radiation, but the radioactive material just produces more. To quickly remove the radioactivity you would have to (1) remove the unstable isotopes, or (2) break them down into more stable forms, or (3) change something so that they do not break down using science fiction techniques. Since 3 is probably impossible for humans today, and 2 would cause a sudden large release of energy, the most probable way to do it is (1).
Unless they are talking about a chemical that precipitates the specific elements or isotopes that are responsible for the radioactivity (in which case why is this a new discovery?), I would suspect a hoax, or at least a gross mischaracterization of the discovery.
Beyond the uber-poster being completely clueless about Chernobyl and the rather minor and harmless incident at Three Mile Island (unless you count bad PR), a mineral that can somehow absorb radiation sounds hard to believe. How much radiation is the mineral alleged to absorb per unit of mass? What are you supposed to do with a now very high radioactively concentrated mineral? This sounds like more nationalistic chest pounding out of an increasingly hostile bear, from one of the sillier Russian tabloids.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I know the mineral - it's LEAD! Yes, just grind it up into a fine powder and sprinkle it into your radioactive brew: even the glowing-est cup of water will be safe to drink again.
Does it absorb bullshit stories as well?
I guess this beats the old saw dust or kitty litter tricks.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
H16O? That is no ordinary water you have there.
Kolsky's Radiation-Reducing Arctic Snake Oil! Cures what ails you, one dollar!
"They've found a new mineral which absorbs radiation... It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste."
The article linked in the Slashdot story does not say that radioactive minerals are being absorbed, a chemical impossibility. It says radiation is absorbed, which is impossible in physics, in the way that that the article states.
I know that this will probably be moderated down by those who use games to avoid dealing with reality. However, it seems useful to say that life is too complicated to play games; it is necessary to learn everything you can every day.
Slashdot editors have, according to them, spent a lot of time playing games, and they are often fooled by junk pretending to be science. I'm guessing that there is a connection between their game playing and their ignorance of the real world.
Just let the hovel of the world's most dangerous "leader" absorb the radiation.
PatRIOTically,
K. Trout
Me thinks maybe something smells funny. Is it me? Nope, just this story
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Usually, calling something a "disaster" implies that someone or something was negatively effected. The Three Mile Island "disaster" resulted in no impact to anyone or anything aside from causing electricity bills to rise.
Brett
Jim: Hey Earl, we got that new mineral, what are we ganna do with it?
Earl: How bout we put some in that cup of radioactive water?
Jim: Wow, how about that! It's not radioactive anymore! *starts to hand earl the water*
Earl: Ha ha, nice try Jim, I've fallen for that one before!
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
Of course - there is always the possibility that radioactive isotopes can be filtered out from water, but each isotope has a different chemical signature so it's not easy to find a wonder-material that catches all. And that without contaminating the water with other chemicals that may be poisonous instead.
For radiation shielding Lead and Barium sulfate are two common materials. Depleted uranium isn't that bad when it comes to shielding, but it's harder to get. Then there is also the question of if it's Alpha, Beta or Gamma radiation. Each is shielded in a different way, but the absorption shield may generate secondary radiation when absorbing the primary radiation.
Neutrons are a special case since they have a tendency to penetrate most materials relatively easy and magnetic fields can't be used to deflect them either...
Cosmic radiation is actually a mix of various types of radiation, Helium nuclei, protons, electrons etc., all with high energy so the counter-measures have to cope with a mix of radiation.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Since the article is a bit short on detauils, we can reverse-engineer to get the info... Let's see ... absorbs things....
Aha ! Charcoal! Activated carbon!!
But darn, you might recall since WWI the technology has been around to char things like peach pits until they're pure carbon, for use in gas masks. Only about 90 years too late to patent this.
Ah, but the Russian holy water I bought over the intarwebs is stronger than this hellish mineral! The damn yankees might have used these devil powers to win the cold war and trigger the Chernobyl disaster, but my holy water has cleansed me through my soul. And now I will wash clean this mineral from my Web pages, before they can bewitch me.
Just look: My holy water has already brought their mineral webserver to its knees!
--
make install -not war
Is this really the end of Radioactive Man? Find out soon!
Full Tilt
...it can only remove it from polywater.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is probably a zeolite, and as Gogogoch suggests, can filter radioactive particles from water. So, incidentally, can sand, as my father's post-nuclear-war survival guide (he was a B-52 pilot) can attest.
The classic way to decontaminate drinking water from a stream was to dig a hole in the sand a foot away from the water line and let the sand filter it.
Wikipedia entry on zeolites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite
It may be that a new mineral has been found with strong absorbtive powers for heavy cations. Zeolytes are used currently in the application.
I believe that northern Iran (no joke intended) has the highest background radiation found any where in the world. It is many times the US acceptible limit. People have lived there just fine for thousands of years. Preemptive Reply: That is untill their nuclear labs are taken out, then it will change location.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It removes the radioactive isotopes from water, not the radiation itself.
Yeah, and what kind of radioactive material? Strontium and Cesium? Beta emitters? How about I-131? Or is it just heavy nucleotides? What about radioisotopes that happen to be toxic besides being radioactive?
I'll be happy to run the dosimetry for anyone who wants to experiment but you won't catch me drinking any radiation snake oil the Russians cook up...that doesn't start with a vat of potato peelings anyway.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Are they ill tempered gators? You know I asked specifically for *sharks.*
It's not too much to expect, is it? That when you make a simple request your employees follow through on it?
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am John, your evertrusting pal in merchandise ! Tonight, I want to show you something you really want to buy: sodium-bicarbonate ! It's the tell you sell of the future, the best buys that ever came to be ! And you, my fellow CEO's, can buy it now ! It shields your from radioactivity and nukluar power ! So, you wanna buy it, punk ?
It's not unreasonable to think that a substance may be able to extract dissolved heavy metals from water (crown ethers are widely known to be able to pull this off). I'm not sure if this extraction technique would be better suited to clean-up than conventional means (ion exchange/distillation), but I'd assume that it must have the potential to be easier/cleaner/ceaper/more selective or they wouldn't be touting its potential.
Without Global Warming(tm) all these brave Russian Researchers would have found would have been snow and ice.
Simply put, without the hundreds of kazillions of tons of C02 that have been released into the atmosphere (since we all got lazy and started using machines) this miracle would have been lost to man.
So stop, take your hand off your pointing device and give that monitor a pat. Without that monitor, and the hundreds of thousands of monitors just like it, there wouldn't have been a need for that far off power plant spewing soot into the atmosphere.
This is an exciting discovery we can all take credit for.
And with 'ten new minerals are discovered in the Arctic Circle' every year this is just the beginning. Where do I invest?
I agree, and am glad to see you are getting some points. This is clearly crapola, but no doubt within a few months we'll start seeing radiation-absorbing bracelets so that your brain doesn't explode while using cell phones and the like.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This element has been discovered countless times before. It's common name is "Bullshitium" and it's used in turning lead to gold, eating up radiation, and can be used in pollution-less power plants.
There is only one way to "absorb" radiation, and everything does it already. Step outside and you're absorbing radiation.
Now, if there are radioactive particulates suspended in your water, you can filter those out with any sufficiently fine-grained filter. This is the most common form of radioactive water pollution.
Following that you have Tritium Oxide (HTO), which is a water-like substance made with H-3 isotopes (T). It's basically impossible to separate HTO from H20. It reacts no differently than plain old H or H-2(D), it just happens to have a few extra neutrons, and be a beta emmitter.
The tendency to emit radiation is completely irrelevant in terms of chemical reactions (unless you're using it as a catalyst); if your radioactive isotope is slutty with its electrons, then you can maybe dump something reactive into the solution for it to bind itself to, but in this case that's not going to happen...If it was easy to break H2 (or HT in this case) off of O, we'd all be driving Hydrogen cars.
So in short, either you can filter it out, or there is crap that you can do about it, because emmitting radiation isn't a property that can be used to bind anything...That's like saying you've found a mineral that will bind to a lightbulb.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's Cosmo DNA! (From Star Blazers!)
Don't have to take that trip to Iscandar anymore.
Uh, so what?
Absorb radiation? If they did that, then they would quite likely become radioactive themselves (e.g., concrete and iron will absorb radiation, sure -- that doesn't mean they are harmless afterwards if exposed to plenty of it, depending upon the type of radiation. For example, irradiate them with neutrons and you'll get newly radioactive isotopes derived from the elements in those original materials).
Absorb dissolved metals and other elements chemically? Big flipping deal! Plenty of materials will do that, including ordinary charcoal filters. All you need to know is the chemistry of the relevant elements in order to do it. Heck, even ordinary reverse osmosis systems for domestic well water are designed to efficiently remove uranium, although the health reasons for doing that have more to do with the chemical effects of the uranium than its relatively mild radioactivity (chemically, in the body, it's a lot like lead).
This "news article" sounds like a load of hype.
"The article linked in the Slashdot story does not say that radioactive minerals are being absorbed, a chemical impossibility."
Err, why is it chemically impossible to filter (absorb) radioactive minerals out of water? You can filter out all sorts of other minerals.
Yep. Thanks for point that out. Pure water is VERY HARD to make radioactive. You would need to bombard it with enough neutrons to breed a large amount of tritium. If you did that you sure wouldn't want to get ride of that water since it would be worth a lot of money.
Water can become contaminated with readioive material. There are lots of ways to filter out the contamination but they tend to be expensive because it isn;t just a few gallons of water water you have to deal with but a lake, aquifer, or river.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A great deal of Reagan speeches, done for GE radio and written in his own hand, have been found and published to general acclaim. Like his policies or not, the idea that Reagan just delivered somebody else's lines is just flat out not true. The man had a good brain and used it.
D2O, isn't radioactive, but HTO (Tritium Oxide) is a beta emitter. Tritium is H-3 (Deuterium is H-2); hydrogen with 2 extra neutrons. Half life of about 12 years. It's used to boost the yield on nukes, so it does get made a bit.
Oxygen has 2 isotopes, but I don't think either of them are radioactive, or otherwise very interesting.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While some people use games as pure escapism, some people use games as a form of entertainment, which is quite different than avoiding reality.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't read except for manuals and science texts, doesn't watch tv or movies except for documentaries, doesn't listen to music except as background noise for something else, etc., then kudos to you. It's very commendable, but to expect everyone else to do the same is unrealistic. Most people simply can't and don't work that way.
If however you do engage in recreational activity sometimes, and just think that games are somehow less worthy of attention than whatever your favourite passtime is, then you're dead wrong.
This isn't to say that there aren't people out there who could benefit from a lot less time with video games, but to lump everyone who plays games in that category is really an unfair generalization.
If the editors don't get corrected for their scientific illiteracy, the situation will never improve!
A fine idea, until it filters/absorbs enough radioactivity and goes critical!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's bullshit. You can't "absorb" radiation...It doesn't even make sense. You can filter radioactive isotopes out of air or water(1), using a filter of some kind. It doesn't make the filter radioactive(2) and it doesn't make the isotopes filtered out un-radioactive.
1) Assuming that the air/water are not themselves radioactive isotopes (e.g. HT, HTO).
2) The filter can become radioactive if it's bombarded with enough crap to change its atoms to radioactive isotopes. This is pretty unlikely, and would involve a front seat on some seriously high energy reactions...It is not something that would happen just from filtration.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
>>this will probably be moderated down by those who use games to avoid dealing with reality.
I thought that was the point of video games... Oh wait. You mean word games. Nevermind.
There's a lot of poor reporting in the article, from the way it treats "radioactivity" as a singular item that can be dealt with in absolute terms ("After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe.") to the dubious claim that "every year ten new minerals are discovered in the Arctic Circle." (Probably an average, but it sounds contrived when worded that way)
I almost expected the article to finish with something like "Radiation is a concern because it can cause mutations, similar to the way it gave Bruce Banner superhuman strength and green skin."
Now they're going to expose the naquadah to too much radiation and turn it into naquadria and kill us all! Have they learned nothing from Daniel Jackson!?
It was supposed to say, 'Ten half-lives after coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe.'
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
two separate commenters have complained about "H16O", when, using their mis-interpertation of what you wrote, it would be HO16. So even if they were right, they'd be wrong.
It's not even commendable. It's so far outside the norm that it should be classified in the next edition of the DSM as an antisocial disorder.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Even if his speechwriter wrote the lines for him, Regan still said them. It's not like we attribute the line "Khaaaaaaan!" to Jack B. Sowards, instead we attribute it to Kirk or William Shatner.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
he man had a good brain and used it.
Given the fact that he was one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric you'd care to name, and that he was a drooling vegetable while his administration was committing various acts of treason, including major funding, arming, and training of terrorists (you know, the ones we're now at "war" with) as well as cocaine dealing, you might want to replace that with a sane statement.
Every year ten new minerals are discovered in the Arctic Circle, and one third of all worldwide mineral discoveries are on the Kolsky Peninsula.
At the rate they're discovering new minerals, this sort of discovery is inevitable....I wouldn't ever take a shower if I were you, you might slip and hit your head against the tub...
I just died that way!
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
I thought it said found in the attic.
Compared to all risks I endure, I can dance in front of a very bad shooter, if he has a 0,01% chance of hitting me fatally. Or if I do russian roulette with a 100-shot pistol with just one bullet.
So, there's no problem if I do any of this, right?
When I see people like it makes me hope you're trolling or being just a pawn for evil minds... I certainly hope that we humans can't reach such a low level in stupidity... but then again that would justify the existence of those Darwin awards...
The undamaged plant next to it was shut down as a precaution. The power the two plants generated was replaced by burning coal. Using the Office of Technology Assessment figures for premature deaths from coal burning, the accident itself killed 50 people every year from air pollution and coal mining, another 50 per year from the shutdown of the other reactor.
Coal has gotten cleaner over time, so you can't just multiply by the number of years since the accident, but it's still many hundreds of people dead.
So they found evidence for unbotainium.
You - show me your papers! And take off your shoes!
This message brought to you by the axis of neoconservatism. All hail the supreme leader!
Actually, alpha and beta do tend to be easy to absorb - from high school physics you normally learn that alpha can be stopped by paper, and beta by a thin layer of aluminium. Gamma, I'll grant you :)
You are basicaly correct. The radioactive ions are sequestered by Zeolite. Zeolite is a general term describing a broad class of minerals. Read all about it at wikipedia-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite
Some minor Google browsing and WikiSource seem to indicate the Reagan wrote his own Inaugural Address, which is where that quote is from. I'd say the burden of proof lies on you to show us that Peggy Noonan wrote this speech as she did some of his others.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
[Reagan] was one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric ...
Yes, but he played national doddering grandfather so well; how could anyone not love him?
One of my all-time favorite cartoons was just after the 1988 election, showing a smiling Ronald Reagan walking in the door and shouting out "Nancy! I got the part!!!"
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In Soviet Russia, mystery Arctic minerals absorb YOU!
The grandparent post said "A great deal of Reagan speeches, done for GE radio and written in his own hand, have been found and published to general acclaim.".
Which is true, and a specific rebuttal to what its parent claimed. In response, you ranted emotionally. ("one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric you'd care to name"... You can say that while keeping a straight face?)
The funny thing is your ending comment about making a sane statement. Hey, disagree with Reagan all you want, there are plenty of valid criticisms, but keep a brain in your head while you do it. Science isn't the only field that needs to be approached rationally to discern the truth.
Remember reading that book in Junior High (we called it that back then, not "Middle School"). Anyway, one of the characters was a dude who developed an environment suit that filtered radioactive air and water. But the "rooskies" started a war before he could mass produce it...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
"Gather round children. For the legend, of El Chupanibre
-He creeps and crawls in the midnight hush
Silent as low-flow toilet flush-
-Watch your step, 'cause sooner or later
He'll eat you whole, and half your alligator-"
"Crocodile."
"Whatever."
The article says, "After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe." What does it mean by "radioactive water"? Is that D2O or T2O, or water that's contains other radionuclides? Then too, what does "coming into contact" mean? If enough time passes after the contact starts, the radioactive material will eventually decay on its own, in the same sense that "all bleeding stops". The water might taste funny, though.
Alot of "Russian News" that makes it to the US seems to be of same quality as the old Weekly World News headlines.
There is no filter that selectively absorbs radioactive minerals, because radioactivity is a nuclear phenomenon, and filters are chemically active.
"This isn't to say that there aren't people out there who could benefit from a lot less time with video games..."
Yes. That's all I was saying. Don't become an adult without having taken the time to learn about the world. Given that, going fishing or playing games or other pasttimes is fine.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi03.htm
7:45 a.m. By now there are at least 20, perhaps as many as 60, operators, supervisors, and other persons in the control room. Although none is yet ready to believe that the core had been uncovered, radiation levels in the power plant buildings are so high that Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require the declaration of a general emergency. While state and federal officials are being informed of elevated radiation levels, unbeknown to all, a molten mass of metal and fuel--some twenty tons in all--is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel. The bottom of the reactor vessel is steel, five inches (13 cm) thick. But even that thickness of steel would not be expected to hold up for more than a few hours against such heat.
Note that the information presented here comes *after* they discovered the true magnitude of the molten blob years later. It took INEEL a good while to chisel out twenty tons of highly radioactive material with a remote-controlled jackhammer.
From the rather tame Kemeny report
e. There is no indication that any core material made contact with the steel pressure vessel at a temperature above the melting point of steel (2,800F).
Well, they later discovered that twenty tons of material well above that temperature was puddling in that vicinity at an alarming rate: perhaps no longer than episode in the series 24.
The story of TMI is not what was actually released, but how clueless they all were for a long time afterward about how close it came to dumping a Chernobyl-unit of molten goo into the Pennsylvania water table.
Concerning Chernobyl:
All remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read "off scale". Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h), while the true levels were 5,600 times higher in some areas.
Because of the fallacious low readings, the reactor crew chief Alexander Akimov assumed that the reactor was intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building was ignored, and the readings of another dosimeter brought in by 4:30 a.m. were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, trying to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most of them, including Akimov, died from radiation exposure within three weeks.
I suspect he took one look at that reading and thought to himself, "if that reading is correct, my goose is cooked". The Soviet Union never established much of a track record in encouraging the self-preservation of men poured into the breech. Typically, your reward for survival was being shot.
Back in America, the debate centers around 0.5 cancers in the aftermath, rather than the one or two hour window between what actually happened and the China syndrome. I wonder if they made an explicit political calculation: let's rush through publication of the Kemeny report before we learn anything more frightening we'd be obligated to disclose. Under the Bush administration, those obligations have mostly been terminated. They could probably write the accident report today for a future accident that hasn't even happened yet.
I for one welcome our new radioactive, reptilian overlords.
Good so far.
*ducks*
But that's pushing it. Ducks are birds, and birds are the last remnant dinosaurs, and dinosaurs and reptiles are related, but that doesn't mean ducks are reptiles.
Infuriate left and right
How do you know 'crocs' is short for 'crocodiles' there, which alligators are not? Could it be short for 'crocodilians', which crocodiles, alligators, caimans, gharials, and false gharials are?
/. is that if you're going to delve into pedantry that you must get it right. Now that I'm pedantically correcting a pedant, there's a good chance someone will reply in kind to this post for any shortcomings herein. What better example could be set than that, though, of how this works?
It seems you have made an assumption and have been bitten by taking ambiguous wording to have a specific meaning the person using it may not have intended. If you respond that "everyone knows" that "crocs" means "crocodiles" and that "noone ever" uses it to mean "crocodilians", you probably now need to provide a citation to be taken seriously. For this to be part of your argument without citation, I think you needed to state such before the counterargument was made.
The ritual here at
YHAP. YHL. HAND. (You Have Attempted Pedantry. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day.)
BTW, I have mod points, but writing this post was more fun than modding any of the replies for this story.
Or, we could modify the main deflector array to bombard it with tetrion particles - it wouldn't take much.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
hmmmm.... They just discovered this new mineral but already know it can clean all radioactivity from water? Yeah right..... Do you know how much testing would be required to determine that all types of radiation are magically gone when this mineral is added? This seems even more suspect in that they claim to have found only an extremely small quantity of it.
:)
My guess is that scientists have determined that this mineral is effective at cleaning one specific type of radioactive material from water, or that it somehow absorbs a specific em frequency (maybe in the gamma or X bands). Then, some fresh out of the junior college journalist didn't do his homework and just reported that this crap cleans all radiation without understanding that not all radiation is the same nor caused by the same process.
My guess is we will either never hear of this stuff again, or we get some revolutionary radiation cleaning device for a specific type of radiation/radioactive material. But, we will not see some all inclusive radiation cleaning system.
Maybe they just found a rock with a high concentration of lead.
That should be "Ten half-lives after coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becames 99.9% safer."
The Mayak plant outside of Chelyabinsk produced two or three contaminated water related accidents, one of which caused Lake Karachay to dry up and become extremely radioactive. The dust from the bottom of the lakebed still spreads sometimes through strong winds in the area.
Giant Clams (Tridacna gigas, T. derasa, T. maxima, etc) specifically remove heavy metals like uranium and gold from seawater and lay it down in their shells.
They are also onanistic hermaphrodites, but that has nothing to do with this story...
Ah, well that I wholly agree with. Your Subject heading of "life is too complicated for games" probably gave some people, including myself, the wrong idea.
In Soviet Russia, goose cooks you!
Mod parent up.
/. editors may be fooled occasionally. Trying to link this to playing games, however, ruins what credibility you have. How in the world can you say that playing Halo would make you more likely to be fooled by pseudo-science? I mean, where in Halo is there a grunt selling radiation absorbing compounds discovered by the Russians in the Arctic? Where in any game is that?
/. editors in your last sentence, despite the fact that you're the one making the hard to accept claim, not them. Your entire argument is based on a Confused Cause and Effect, or, more accurately, an assumed cause and effect in which neither is conclusively shown to be a cause or effect of anything. You fallaciously use division, saying that since some /. editors are fooled by fake science, and that some play games, then they all must be confused and play games. Your argument also commits the fallacy of hasty generalization, as not every /. editor has been fooled and, from what I've seen, the sample of those who are fooled is quite small. You try to use Misleading vividness to make it seem like fake science tops /. all the time, when it's more of a rarity in actuality. You also try to poison the well by making the /. editors seem out of touch with reality, which backfires a little because the well you're poisoning happens to be one that I, and a large number of /. readers, draw from, the well of gaming.
I agree that
Honestly how can you even try to make a comparison like this and retain any shred of dignity? 'Group x plays games. Group x has, on occasion, been fooled by realistic looking articles on pseudo-science that also happen to fool pretty much everyone else who reads them, including the non-game playing media. Therefore it can be conclusively stated that playing games is what makes Group x unable to discern reality from fake articles.'
To the GP: I found a number of fallacies in your argument beyond it's absurdity, don't want to be arguing ad absurdom. For instance you use an Ad Hominem attack on gamers, trying to use it to generate sympathy and silence your opponents in an appeal to pity. You also proceed to Straw Man their arguments, turning the 'Games are a useful diversion' into 'Games help us avoid reality' which is something I've never heard any gamer claim. You fallaciously place the burden of proof on the
The worst part, however, is that your entire argument (I keep saying that don't I?) is based on ignoring a common cause and assuming Post Hoc, that there is not possible connection between pseudo-science and games (like, perhaps, that both are entertaining to nerds?) beyond the one you present and that since gaming precedes the false science it must be the cause.
Honestly I could go on but I think that over a quarter of the list of 42 fallacies I found in a Google search is plenty to show that you're argument is, while not necessarily wrong, certainly baseless and fallacious and therefore should not be modded up, but rather ignored as it is clearly not a logical argument.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Source? My source (the guy who designed TMI and several other reactors and was team lead for the post-incident investigation) says they found no such thing. They found rubble at the bottom of the reactor. Not a hole "well on its way to China".
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
All I can say is Spiderman is fucked in the next film!
1. Claim the Arctic for the Motherland.
2. Discover Magical Radiation-Absorbing Mineral there.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
This material probably has the capability to remove positively charged ions from solutions. It may have a negatively charged cage structure that draws positive ions in and traps them. So it could probably remove the 2+ charged Cesium and Strontium. It could remove toxic isotopes, as long as they have a positive charge, so probably not the negatively charged iodine-131. Many isotopes that are toxic, are so mainly because they form ions with a positive charge. These positively charged ions can poison you by deforming proteins into ineffective shapes. There are already substances out there, that are very efficient in removing ions from a solution, such as deionizing resin, so even if this substance can remove radioactive particles, there are other things out there that can do the same or better.
And at this point I get the joke, feel like a retard, but nevertheless hit the Submit button. Cheers!
Silicate chemistry is not as complex as organic chemistry. Most compounds are known. It is not likely that an entirely new naturally mineral has been found. I notice the article says nothing about its chemical composition.
Good god! Slashdot, why do you do this?
an ill wind that blows no good
I say that they need to get this stuff over to Yucca Mountain as soon as possible....
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
This could be a cold mine (pun). Maybe use have ram scoop engines hover over the arctic like hydrogen powered Fusion blowtorches to melt that ice. Think of it, we could both clear the land, refine the mineral in one go.
Are you thinking of Budd Dwyer?
The article referenced in GP was in the journal "Science" (American Association for Advancedment of Science, AAAS) a well known and prestigious peer-reviewed journal.
Unfortunately, I do not recall exactly what year the article appeared in.
I read the article, and was actually quite frightened and pissed off about how little was said about it.
To paraphrase one of the guys in the summary; "we cannot figure out how this DIDNT spill molten core onto the floor, through the concrete floor, and into the bedrock below".
Go look it up yourself. Either way, there is NOTHING that is an exaggeration in the GP, if anything, it's understated. Your guy is full of shit, he didn't design anything and if he did, he sucks as a designer. What's his name, I am sure we can look HIM up. In other words; "Source?" yourself.
Um. 1980
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Everytime I complain about ACs getting 0 -- this is what I mean.
Now, BTW, something can be funny AND informative, or insightful but offtopic. And scores should mention what is being evaluated: I can laugh a lot with a useless comment, or one single line can solve half of my problems even if it's a troll.
Taco! Do something! No, no medal this time.
Now go back and reconcile the facts with the claim "Let's just say the radioactive blob was well on its way to China."
Last time I checked, China was on the other side of the exterior containment barriers. Perhaps you are thinking of some other China?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Actually I saw the report and the pictures of TMI while an undergrad at the U of Idaho. The bottom of the reactor was full of scrap iron (Ok fancy scrap alloys if you want to be picky.) The melted fuel was not at the bottom: It was higher in the reactor vessel.
The point everyone forgot is that heat rises. And the second point is that unlike water and ice, molten metal is less dense than the unmelted metal. Once the water boiled out, the fission stopped, and the decay heat wasn't enough to chew through all the non-fuel containing structure, which was sagging to the bottom of the fuel zone. So remains of the reactor stayed in the vessel.
Now, in Chernobyl, the graphite did not boil off, the reactor kept going well after it started to come apart, and, well, the heat still went up, carrying the reactor with it. That "Elephant's foot" was a portion of the melt that did go down, but in the end it stopped while still inside the building.
SL-1 went prompt-critical, blew it's control rods UP into the roof, and did not melt down either. Windscale also went up, not down.
Meltdowns probably do need to be designed against, but they look much less likely to occur than originally thought.
I am old enough to remeber the TMI excitement, the media worry AT THE TIME was a "china syndome" event ( I belive the movie came afterwards ). I cannot remeber any "blob" ( the movie came first ) but it was certainly a concern in the media. However the original concern seems to have morphed over the years into a fruitless hunt for side-effects from the vapour release.
In the 50's & 60's atmospheric tests spread airborne plutonium across the planet that turned up in alarming concentrations in childeren's bones (CSIRO-Australia first discovered this in the glands of sheep and came under enormous political pressure from the US, UK and Oz governments to burry the findings). This is one reason why the Australian & NZ public were so fervently against the French Pacific tests in the 70's. The puff of steam from TMI was in the media because of "what could have happened", not what did happen.
Chernobyl was detected across the northern hemisphere triggering a ban on dairy products in the UK, ect. That is what scared the shit out of people when talking about reactors, not TMI. The problem I have with the sudden resurgence of interest in reators around the world (apart from the current politics that is tearing up treaties in an attempt to control the market on fuel) is that they still want great big central plants, far too little attention is paid to the pebble bed idea.
However when you weigh the risks from pollution and GHG, large modern reators with strict oversight (re: modern day France and other EU countries) are a signifigantly lower risk to health, environment and infrastructure than coal fired plants. But "the public" is not a logical beast, consider the fact that a random individual is far more likely to be murdered by their spouse than by a terrorist.
My source - CSIRO and the foggy memory of a distant but interested observer.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Either way, there is NOTHING that is an exaggeration in the GP, if anything, it's understated.
Maybe he didn't "exaggerate", but he did use a lot of words to say essentially: "Yeah, you're right, but it almost did."
He didn't exaggerate, but he certainly sensationalized. Amd spun it in such a way as to distract from the fact that he was confirming the GP's post.
TMI and Chernobyl revealed classes of nuclear disasters that the industry had said were not supposed to occur. There were so many safeguards and so much redundancy that meltdowns simply couldn't happen. Well, they did. The reactor designs (two very different designs in these cases) both implied that meltdown and release of radioactive gas, water vapor, (and in the case of a full meltdown the radioactive elements used as fuel) was inevitable if the redundant cooling systems failed.
The human cost of Chernobyl was quite a bit higher than people realize. Given that both of these disasters were far smaller than they could have been, that cost should be sobering.
Chernobyl Legacy, a photo essay by Paul Fusco
New reactor designs might make the risk/reward trade off for fission power more reasonable. (See: New use for nuclear waste) However, the designs from the sixties and seventies that are running today really ought not be near cities or in areas where it would suck to have to fence off a couple hundred square miles for a few centuries after a disaster.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
yeah, those were the days... picnic blanket spread on the ground in the shadow of the sign with the universal symbol for "Don't feed the gators" which was a guy with one arm, and the other arm, off, and in a gator's mouth...
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
God made me an atheist. Who are you to question his wisdom?
(Love your tagline.. best religious-argument comeback ever!! Stealing for future use.)
(Not my sig; I am somebody else.)
When Christians try to push their particular cult on me, I hit them with something similar. If God didn't make me, then I am none of his business, and therefore none of yours either. If God did make me, then he either made me with free will, in which case he must implicitly approve of my atheism, or he made me without free will, in which case my atheism is his choice.
The water contained dissolved chemicals, which were partially composed of radioactive metals.
*ALL THE RADIOACTIVITY IN THE WATER WAS DUE TO RADIOACTIVE METALS*
The "miracle mineral" selectively binds to atoms of metals.
*IN THIS ONE SPECIFIC SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES*, the "miracle mineral" grabs all the radioactive material (i.e. metals) out of the water solution. The claim about removing *ALL* radiation *IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES* is 100% bullshit.
Actually, the "miracle mineral" could be quite useful for filtering metal-contaminated water (regardless of whether the metal is radioactive or not), but that's about it.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
What the Russian scientists dont realize is that its not a mineral but leftover radiation shielding from the alien craft that crashed at Tunguska. No wonder they keep finding wierd minerals (more than 10 new ones a year) out there. The crash debris from an interstellar craft would have all kinds of novel materials and alloys.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Another source of radioactive contamination in nuke plants is the radioactive isotope cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 is not a fission by-product, but rather an activated corrosion product. All the valves in all the plumbing of nuclear power plants have a metal alloy called Stellite, which contains non-radioactive cobalt-59. As the valves open and shut during normal operation, and also due to corrosion, some of the metal ends up in the water stream. As the metal shavings and ions pass by the core, the cobalt-59 gets activated to cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of approximately 7 years, and it accumulates as the plant is running.
There is filtration in place that removes the cobalt ions (and other metallic ions), it is the same type of ion exchange resin that is used in water filtration plants for demineralization. No filtration is perfect, some ions do pass through the filter, especially as the ion exchange resin becomes saturated. The resin doesn't neutralize the radiation or otherise shield it, it just "fixes" the ions in one location for easy removal. As the resin traps the radioactive ions, it becomes more and more radioactive, and when a certain level of radiation determined by plant operating procedures is reached, the resin tanks are flushed into large shielded casks for transport to a radwaste processing facility.
The nuke plant I worked at used a synthetic bead resin that looked like tiny plastic spheres, but there are naturally occurring minerals that have ion exchange properties; bentonite and zeolite are two that come to mind.
Perhaps it is a more efficient naturally occurring ion exchange resin that the Russians have discovered.
Now if we could only get the mercury out of our oceans and fish!
The point everyone forgot is that heat rises.
Minor correction, hot air rises not heat. "Heat" just moves from hotter to colder.
Another nutball science 'story' from Russia Today. You should invest ALL your money in this story if you believe it. I have a special material that turns water into gasoline. Put it in your car tank
Not that hard - at the site I work at, we produce a lot of tritiated water in the high active cooling system. It's considered a problem, not a valuble asset - tritiated water takes a long time to cool down compared to most of the common activated metals (years opposed to days/weeks), so it's never changed, and we try to avoid opening any of those systems. Luckily it's only a beta emitter, so it can't hurt you while it's in a pipe (betas cannot penetrate metal).
FYI, If you get a spill on you (or somehow in you, never happened but I imagine it could happen in case of inhalation of a steam leak or something), the recommended antidote is to go home and drink a lot of beer - seriously. It's a good diuretic and contains a lot of water. What you are trying to do is turn over the water in your body to purge any tritiated water that may be in you. Also, probably help calm you down from worrying about the radiation.
Zeolite minerals are already used to remove radiation from waste water produced by the nuclear reprocessing industry. Zeolites are natural molecular sieves, their cage like atomic structure efficiently traps specific chemical elements e.g. plutonium, americurium, iodine etc. So this is not a false claim, just exaggerated, there are lots of minerals with this property. I suppose this is someone looking for grant money...its that time of year again.
I don't think too many moderately informed people care what the National Academies of Science says about radiation any more than they care what GWB says about Saddam Hussein's WMD's.
You may call it radiation -- we call it ... life!
The article has no by-line. That's one of the first signs it's bogus. The article provides no verifiable details. There is no "Kolsky Research Institute" according to Google, although there is a mineralogist Yakov Pakhomovsky who works at the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Science, Apatity, Russia. Perhaps some enterprising /.er will contact him and see if he can verify the quote and/or the find.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
So, you can sprinkle carbon or boron dust into water to the same effect; it'll pull about 95% of the radioactive material by chemical bonding each time (meaning you filter it five times and it's okay.) What the problem was with Chernobyl wasn't that we had no way to clean up radiation; it was that the plant blew up, and before we knew it, there was a bunch of this stuff floating through the air. How exactly does this unspoken mystery element accomplish the pulling crap out of several cubic miles of atmosphere?
Until I have a chemical formula for his great noodly appendage, I'm playing the desktop cold fusion card.
Bunk.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
No, you got it right. I was a Navy nuke at INEL, navalreactors and the (then) classified training we got on the TMI and SL1 accidents were as you stated.
The problem is there isn't really good evidence that such radiation is dangerous at all. These figures like the "0.5 cases of cancer" all assume the Linear No Threshold model - that is, that any amount of radiation is bad, and extrapolate a straight line from the last "good" data to (0,0). This has never been conclusively proven, given the extremely low cancer rates that would be expected at such low exposure limits.
IMHO (and I am not a medical professional) there is good reason to believe that, for most types of cancer, the curve at low-to-moderate doses should be essentially the Nth power of exposure. N would vary depending on the type of cancer but would typically be small and tend to be even. It could be inferred from the slope of incidence of the cancer type with age during adulthood, and cancer types subject to incidence mechanisims that would break the model would be indicated when the incidence graph is not essentially straight-line.
(Lung cancer seemed to be a good fit, with N=6, in data I saw a couple decades ago during the "radon pollution" flap. The radon risk assessments were based on extrapolating from lung cancer rates in uranium miners using the linear assumption and the ratio of radon in houses versus mines. A linear function would imply some small risk, while a 6th power function would mean the "radon in the basement threat" was a bunch of hooey.)
The reasoning:
- Most cancers (especially radiation-induced cancers) appear to be the result of the accumulation of a particular set of some integer number of mutation in single cell, which becomes the initial cell of the new cancer.
- A particular subset (N) of these are necessary to escape the growth regulation (and any anti-tumor mechanisms that would quickly and completely destroy the modified cell or its progeny.)
- Before the accumulation of all of this set of mutations in a single cell, it participates in cell growth and reproduction in the normal (very limited) fashion. After they accumulate it begins reproducing uncontrollably, expanding into a precancerous lesion (a long-lived lump with many cells available to accumulate the remaining mutations necessary for full-blown cancer). Thus the accumulation of all of the N mutations of the subset in a single cell is the critical deterinant of the rate of cancer incidence from induced mutation.
- The N mutations of the set are independent events.
- The probability of each being induced by low-level ionizing radiation is directly proportional to the amount of radiation exposure.
- Thus the probability of the complete critical subset being accumulated in a single cell (i.e. the critical event for radiation-induced cancer) rises with the Nth power of the radiation exposure.
- Cell reproduction may be limited by different genetic mechanisms for different tissue types, resulting in a different set of mutation targets and thus potentially different values of N for different types of cancer.
Of course this is a bit simplistic. For instance:
- At radiation levels in the range that can modify the production of inducable protective enzymes the assumption that the individual mutations are directly proportional to radiation fails.
- Mutations that affect the effectiveness of DNA reapir and protection mechanisms violate the assumption that the mutation rates are independent.
- It doesn't adequately model some cancer types (such as two-part cancers where two distinct mutated cell populations produce each other's growth factors.)
However these seem to be minor factors:
- Inducable enzymes would not be induced for low-level exposure and would be saturated for long-term high-level exposure. They'd bend the curve over some middle level and lower its slope above that bend, but wouldn't affect the slope at the low end. (Of course this totally breaks attempts to extrapolate from high to low exposure levels.)
- Protective/repair enzymes should be unaffected in the bulk of the potential target cells, so their loss would not be part of the critical set of N mutations.
- The bulk of cancers seem to be single mutated clones.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The china in my mother's cupboard was closer, and wasn't threatened.
Anyway, a hole through the center of the Earth from New Jersey comes out WSW of Australia.
Here's your sig.
another reason to mine the arctic and plant the national flag(s). Why can't this shit show up in a desert somewhere?
No tact, no class, no facts, all insults.
Thanks for illustrating the quality of Reagan's present enemies. I won't bother rebutting the flaming conspiracy theories you hint at unless you want to embarass yourself by spelling them out.
I won't bother rebutting the flaming conspiracy theories you hint at unless you want to embarass yourself by spelling them out.
Ummmm... most of that is covered under the heading of "Iran Contra". You might want to look at the major actual documented real life actions of his administration and demonstrate some basic knowledge of historical events before you start whining about "conspiracy theories". I mean, seriously, Sparky, you do know that they were actually caught red handed conspiring against this nation, don't you? Feel free to go look it up.
Which is true, and a specific rebuttal to what its parent claimed. In response, you ranted emotionally. ("one of the worst presidents we've ever had by any metric you'd care to name"... You can say that while keeping a straight face?)
Yet you were entirely unable to come up with any metric to refute my simple statement of fact. That's really pretty telling about your complete lack of knowledge of the issue. Perhaps you should keep quiet while people who actually pay attention are speaking?
Hey, disagree with Reagan all you want, there are plenty of valid criticisms, but keep a brain in your head while you do it.
Yes, there are a mass of valid criticisms. There really are no valid positive results of the Reagan presidency.
If you're so convinced there are actually any, then name them so I can destroy your feeble attempt at an argument.