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Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution From Nuclear Fuel Rods
New submitter Required Snark writes "UC Davis researchers have found a mechanism where the sodium in sea water can cause uranium nano-particles to be released from nuclear reactor fuel rods. Normally the uranium oxide compounds composing the rods are very resistant to leaching into water. This could have serious consequences for the Fukushima disaster, since sea water was used for emergency cooling."
Uranium release from the UO2 fuel? So what? Uranium is harmless, it's hardly radioactive at all, it's abundant throughout nature, and it's naturally present in seawater. Surely any such analysis of the radiochemistry consequences of adding seawater to the BWR's coolant should focus on the fission products and their radiochemical mobility and transport, not on harmless, insignificant, uranium.
what happened to the millions of tonnes of seawater which was pumped in to cool exposed radioactive rods and evaporated into high flying atmosphere streams ?
Well, if it evaporated, then it certainly didn't take any uranium with it.
And if it flooded into the sea, it carried some dilute amount of uranium with it. Uranium is mostly harmless. TFA says it will settle onto the sea floor.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"that should be why the sea life around the place is dying."
For some reason I bothered to click your link to a google search. So where was the substantial article supporting your point? I saw a blog or two, an article from the examiner and some youtube nuclear experts.
While this is something that needs to be researched over the coming decades making poorly informed assumptions doesn't help anyone.
That and, oh, I don't know, the tsunami washed about 100,000 people's lives in to the sea? When you dump that much crap in to the ocean all at once of course it's going to seriously destabilize the ecosystem. All you need to do is knock out 2-3 trophic species (particularly photosynthesizing species) for a couple of weeks and the food scarcity travels up the food chain like a shockwave. It probably didn't help that the food scarcity event happened right as most species were coming out of hibernation mode and entering a feeding/reproduction cycle.
This kind of dead zone due to agricultural runoff has been well researched and described in the past, and there's no known radiation in those areas.
Stop scaremongering.
moox. for a new generation.
My money is on the exfoliation of a huge strip of coastal land followed by massive runoff as the culprit. There's still 20 million tons of debris floating. Imagine how much more either dissolved or sank.
https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+tsunami+ocean+debris&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=23L&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=g38jT9K2II74gAf_tvzxCA&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1343&bih=891
Nuclear submarine reactors aren't cooled with seawater.
Closed loop system. Never exposed to outside water sources.
Their existence, while not sufficient, would go a long way. To quote the article: "there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant."
Why is the existence not sufficient? The radioactivity in Uranium ores, that is indeed problematic in the (comparably) extremely high concentrations that can be found in sub-surface mines, is *not* caused by the Uranium itself. This is exactly the paradox that made Marie Curie investigate what does make this stuff so radioactive. Because the Uranium sure wasn't enough. And the answer turned out to answer to names like radium, radon, polonium, lead-214, lead-210 and a bunch of other elements and isotopes building up over tens of thousands to millions of years or so, with the decay of Uranium to Radium being the crucial step that is just not going to occur in Fukushima Daiichi in historical time periods.
Under normal operating conditions. If the boat sinks all bets are off.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Uranium certainly isn't harmless as many people who inhaled or ingested it have found out. While it is mostly harmless outside your body because the skin blocks alpha radiation the problems begin when it gets inside and settles in your lungs or accumulates in your bones and organs. It will sit there for decades and case damage to bone, liver, kidney, and reproductive tissues.
Uranium is a toxic metal and has been shown to produce birth defects and immune system damage in animals. Although it is hard to pin any particular cases of cancer on uranium there are very well known and understood health problems stemming from exposure to it and its decay products like radon. Obviously any creature living in the sea is at risk, as is anyone who eats them or drinks the water.
Wikipedia has plenty of references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Human_exposure
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