Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution From Nuclear Fuel Rods

Posted by timothy on from the small-drop-big-bucket dept.

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."

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re: by AWeishaupt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Haha "This could have serious consequences" wow by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:oh yeah. by Hadlock · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.