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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."
It's gradually diluting itself to harmless concentrations as it spreads over the rest of the world.
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.
"Uranium in nuclear fuel rods is in a chemical form that is “pretty insoluble” in water, Navrotsky said, unless the uranium is oxidized to uranium-VI — a process that can be facilitated when radiation converts water into peroxide, a powerful oxidizing agent"
So the real issue is when you first use a supply of emergency bleach to hold out until your supply of emergency seawater arrives, or god forbid you forget to tell the overnight cleaning crew not to open up the reactor and give a good bleaching?
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
There was a nuclear disaster right next to them, so obviously they'll die, especially because the uranium won't settle instantly. But that kind of news disproves absolutely nothing about what he said. The long term effects won't be know (obviously) for a long long time.
"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
I remember when the Fukushima event was still making headlines people were freaking out because radiation was making it's way to the U.S. I was a little worried myself, but since I work for an air purification company one of the data-crunchers there was able to explain now negligible the impact actually was.
If it's the same for this seawater issue, then no big deal, I guess. Still, I can't help but be a little disturbed at the idea of radioactive particles from a power plant being spread into the ocean. I wonder how nuclear subs handle this sort of thing.
--Erik
Precisely. As an aside, the Uranium and Thorium present in seawater can be extracted for use in nuclear reactors. Not that we would run out of land-based resources for many thousands of years, but it is interesting that nuclear fuel is so energy dense that this is even economically viable. It could also be economically recovered from coal ash, and there is no shortage of that either.
Yes, just as I could marry rich supermodel twins on the day I turn 90 while legally keeping another three wives. Possible, but incredibly difficult to do and entirely pointless. In other words your "can" doesn't match what is in the dictionary but instead has a definition of "somebody somewhere thought one step might be possible so I'm building an enormous fucking house of cards on it and pretending it's a solid pyramid".
Going from that to pretending that anybody has even roughly worked out costs, and then suggesting it's "economically viable" is an incredible audacious lie. If you are an adult you should be ashamed of what you have written to try to trick people into thinking your pet cause is magic instead of reality. As for the ash thing, if you've actually fallen for that one instead of just trying another even more incredibly stupid lie try googling for Alex Gabbard to find that was yet another one of his works of fiction. If terrorists could easily build nuclear bombs out of coal then one would have been used by now.
Here's a clue people - if we don't have a process devised that is in any way similar to what is going to be attempted there is no way to work out costs within an order of magnitude let alone work out if something is "economically viable". That's why private funding for leading edge technologies of any kind usually sucks because nobody knows how much things will cost and how much can be gained. "How much will it cost" is a question that can only really be answered reliably after a prototype or pilot plant.
This could actually be a potential problem for the spread of contamination. Haven't seen Burn's paper yet, but the general theory seems sound.
Water radiolysis yield these common products
H2O ---> e-(aq), H*, H2, *OH, H2O2, HO2, H+
with it's primary products being the H* and *OH radicals which then react with each other to form H2 and H2O2. So peroxide is easily produced.
In the Fukishima accident, they were concerned with spent fuel rods (extremely radioactive with several trans-uranic elements) in the uncovered spent fuel bays.It's known the cladding (Zirc-4 I believe) melted exposing the fuel to the sea water itself. With no roof on the pools, it's entirely conceivable that spread of nano-radioactive particles is possible.
There are many Uranium mines already in operation and a lot of accessable Thorium deposits. Getting the stuff from seawater is a hell of a lot more difficult and will be far more energy intensive and then you've still got the same sort of material that you get from digging up and gravity separating the ore.
The "Uranium is running out" problem was a 1960s thing, partly real due to some reactor designs of the time being very fussy about the isotopes in the fuel, and partly political/military to provide an excuse to build expensive Plutonium fast breeders. Also many other Uranium deposits have been found and exploited since then.
If nothing else we'll get a hell of a lot of Uranium as a side product from mining Copper in a few places so it makes no sense at all to go after the tiny concentrations in seawater.
You mean minute quantities in addition to the 4.5 billion tons of Uranium already in the oceans? Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?
Nuclear submarine reactors aren't cooled with seawater.
Sure, uranium could leach into the ocean. But at what concentration? And at what expected half life?
Uranium has a long half life, so the risk is tolerable. Estimates have been that more uranium is in sea water than will ever be mined. Good reason for some people to stay put of the water, More space for the rest of us to play, I guess.
I'm always surprised at the number of people who think that long lived isotopes are more dangerous than short lived ones.
Closed loop system. Never exposed to outside water sources.
Uranium is harmless, it's hardly radioactive at all, it's abundant throughout nature
U-238 yes, U-235 no. And nuclear fuel rods are enriched with a fair amount of the latter.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that artificially high local concentrations may have different effects than natural background levels?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
"Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution" sounds like the opposite of "Uranium Could Cause Sea Water Pollution". Bad, bad sea water, polluting our uranium!
The poison in this case would be completely benign (as in "less radioactive than background radiation from the sky") less than 6 hours after introduction to the Pacific. Any claims to the contrary are absolute media lunacy run amok for the sake of advertising dollars. In effect, yes, the poison is becoming less poisonous, but the rate at which it is doing so is not only measurable, but has already been measured. If you want citations, you'll have to go to the trouble of looking them up yourself. This should prove a useful exercise for someone who couldn't bother to do such research before posting.
Do you honestly have any fucking idea how big the Pacific is, or how big the planet as a whole is? Not trolling here, just honest questions. Do you know anything at all about ocean currents or dilution rates expressed not in parts per million, but parts per quintillion over time spans measured not in years or even months, but in days? How about decay rates? How about statistically significant exposure thresholds for even remote potential for damage to cellular structures? For fuck's sake, do you have any idea whatsoever about anything you're commenting on, or was your post just for "the lulz?" You are part of the problem, and congratulations on feeding Yet Another Media Earnings Frenzy Over Absolutely Nothing At All. Yes I know what I'm talking about, and no I don't give a flying fuck about being modded down here. Take it or leave it. My advice to you is simply this: find something else to do with your spare time aside from feeding the beast of rampant stupidity. I recommend a formal education beyond the community college level on the aforementioned topics for starters. Have a nice day.
Under normal operating conditions. If the boat sinks all bets are off.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Steam can and does carry particulates even though the water vapor itself is benign. An exploding nuclear reactor is not a distillery.
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
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They weren't right next to the ocean. They were about 8 meters above the previous highest recorded tsunami level in that area, so assumed to be safe from flooding. I mean, what are you going to do? The largest recorded tsunami was 524 metershigh. Are you going to require every nuclear plant to be relocated at least 525 meters above sea level because of this "obvious design flaw"?
The not-so-obvious design flaw was that the generators were all in the same location. So although they had multiple generators for redundancy in case some failed, that redundancy was made useless by a common failure mode. You want them in different locations, different makes, with different parts and connectors, and running off of different fuel tanks.
It's gradually diluting itself to harmless concentrations as it spreads over the rest of the world.
No, it's becoming more and more potentized as a homeopathic remedy.
All that's true, but occasionally we (I was a submariner back in the late 1980s-early 1990s) will intentionally discharge a small amount of primary coolant into the ocean, e.g. to correct a chemistry imbalance.
It does not contain fuel or fission products, but it is somewhat radioactive (e.g. activated corrosion products), and some of the radioactivity is moderately long-lived (e.g. Co-60, half-life=5.27 yrs.)
Again, even a small part of the ocean is really big compared to amount of stuff discharged.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.