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Radiation Absorbing Mineral Found In the Arctic

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the the-power-of-suck dept.

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."

8 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different,


    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?
  2. Filtered water by Gogogoch · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)?

  4. Three Mile Island disaster? by Matt+Edd · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not to say that it wasn't a bad thing but calling it a disaster seems like FUD to me. From wikipedia...

    The scientific community is largely agreed on the effects of the Three Mile Island accident. The consensus is that no member of the public was injured by the accident. "The average radiation dose to people living within ten miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year.
  5. What is the "Kolsky Research Institute"? by johndiii · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...
  6. Learn every day; life is too complicated for games by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  7. Re:Bullshit by arivanov · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/
  8. No way to selectively absorb radioactive minerals. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is no filter that selectively absorbs radioactive minerals, because radioactivity is a nuclear phenomenon, and filters are chemically active.