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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."
The mineral absorbs "radioactive substances", not the radiation itself.
While radiation poisoning can occur due to exposure to radiation and transmutation of the isotopes in the exposed substance, that particular effect is relatively minor.
The larger concern is that in the process of running a neuclear power plant, tiny flakes of the radioactive power rod detach and mix with flakes from other parts in the machinery thus forming a radioative dust. Since dust is so easily transfered, if I touch the dust and then I touch a book and then you touch the book, you may get a small amount of this radioactive dust on you. I didn't really make the book radioactive as much as I put dust that was radioactive on it. (Radiation suits don't actaully protect from direct radiation, they just make sure you don't track radioactive dust through the rest of the station.)
My guess is that this mineral is just filtering out heavy radioactive metals (i.e. taking the radioactive part of the dust out of the dust).
Wow - flash back to 1974. Dad was working on the Crystal River project, and one day he brought us out there to feed the gator in the cooling water canal. Marshmallows, if I remember correctly.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Well, no. It sounds like another Russian ploy to convince the world that it owns the Arctic Circle. Ten new minerals a year are found there! Go Russia!
Everyone knows that the Arctic is useful only for its oil fields, but that doesn't mean you can't pretend to be interested in the Arctic for other reasons--like world-saving minerals only your scientists can find.
I'm a cynic.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
There are places on earth where background is one hundred times the global average, and people aren't dropping like flies there. A tiny rise in background is a fairly minor issue - significantly smaller than pretty much any accident which could happen in any other business - but because it's from "radiation", it's endlessly repeated as proof of how dangerous these power plants are.
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.
Oh get off trying to misunderstand him. The point is that if you can see ionizing radiation, your probably in for it. The exception would be Cherenkov radiation--which might not kill you if the setup is right.
Consider the graph they show for the different low-dose models:
http://www.pnas.org/content/vol100/issue24/images/ large/pq2235592003.jpeg
The data points they're extrapolating to are a country mile from where the interesting biology may be going on, as demonstrated by the vast variety of curves which produce reasonable fits to the data.
I've came into medical physics from a different field, and some of the methods they consider acceptable trouble me a bit, at times. I wouldn't disagree that a linear extrapolation is a reasonable guideline, but that is for a rather broad definition of reasonable, and I would certainly say it's got a long way to go before its proven by the standards of most branches of science.
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.