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
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!
In Russia radiation absorbs minerals from you!
Insert Generic Sig Here:
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
There is no filter that selectively absorbs radioactive minerals, because radioactivity is a nuclear phenomenon, and filters are chemically active.
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.
"(Score:0, Insightful)"...
Only on Slashdot...
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
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.