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.
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)?
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...
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.
"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.
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.
Probably. Actually it may be either bad science or bad journalism.
AFAIK the annoyance no 1 contaminant in nuclear waste is radiactive Rutenium. Whatever you do it always ends up in both your "pure" fraction and your "waste" in significant quantities and has a spectrum of isotopes which while not very long lived, have a halftime long enough just to be a major annoyance. So if someone in the arctic has discovered something that absorbs it in quantity and tried to explain his discovery to a Russian journalist over one of those standard "beyond the arctic circle" cocktails known as "Vupej, poliarnikom budesh" the resulting article on the morning after would have been something like this.
So it may be not the bullshit detector going off the scale. It may be the alcohol one when applied to an illiterate journalist.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
It may be that a new mineral has been found with strong absorbtive powers for heavy cations. Zeolytes are used currently in the application.
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.
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.
There is no filter that selectively absorbs radioactive minerals, because radioactivity is a nuclear phenomenon, and filters are chemically active.
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.
No, you had to hit the sink, after falling off the toilet.
-- Cheers!