Vast New Tomb Now Covers The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Site (slashdot.org) 173
The final stage of the Chernobyl clean-up took over 20 years to build -- and will seal up the site for the next 100 years. Slashdot reader MrKaos writes:
30 years and seven months since the explosion...the project known as the 'Shelter Implementation Plan' has been rolled into place, sealing the crippled Chernobyl reactor. More than 10,000 people were involved in the project, which includes an advanced ventilation systems and remote controlled robotic cranes to dismantle the existing Soviet-built structure and reactor. This sarcophagus -- or New Safe Confinement -- is taller than the Statue of Liberty and larger than Wembley stadium.
Over one million people worked on the initial clean-up, the BBC reports, calling this new sarcophagus "the largest object people have ever moved," and its installation was apparently pretty surreal. "World leaders jostle with global executives and anonymous men dressed in full camouflage as platters of shrimp, foie gras and cheesecake are passed around by white-gloved staff...just 330 feet away from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history."
Over one million people worked on the initial clean-up, the BBC reports, calling this new sarcophagus "the largest object people have ever moved," and its installation was apparently pretty surreal. "World leaders jostle with global executives and anonymous men dressed in full camouflage as platters of shrimp, foie gras and cheesecake are passed around by white-gloved staff...just 330 feet away from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history."
Documentary (Score:4, Interesting)
The BBS did an excellent documentary on this last week, well worth watching:
https://thepiratebay.org/torre... [thepiratebay.org]
Re:Documentary (Score:5, Informative)
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Instead of futzing around with a 1.26 GiB torrent, you can just watch it on YouTube:
Horses for courses. I just clicked a magnet link and two minutes later I had a copy I could watch at leisure.
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PS: And ... what did you think of the documentary?
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But with the torrent you can keep it, forever. You don't have to stream it every time you want to watch it. Really if everyone got that torrent, they'd save the world bandwidth.
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Agreed; streaming is more appropriate for content that you're only going to want to watch a single time. (i.e. 99% of what's out there)
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You also get an increased chance of getting warning letters and/or a summons in the mailbox.
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Instead of futzing around with a 1.26 GiB torrent, you can just watch it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Appreciated, alas, the YouTube video has a lot of audio deadtime. Someone blundered the upload or something. It's not watchable.
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TBBS
Kicking the can down the road.. (Score:2)
Isn;t this really just making a bigger headache for the people that have to deal with this in 100 years time?
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Isn;t this really just making a bigger headache for the people that have to deal with this in 100 years time?
That's the good thing about radioactive stuff. You can kick the can down the road, and when you catch up to it you can just pick it up and throw it in the bin.
Re:Kicking the can down the road.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kicking the can down the road.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn;t this really just making a bigger headache for the people that have to deal with this in 100 years time?
No.
The original sarcophagus is falling apart. It was built by people who could only stay in the zone for a few minutes at a time and has no welds, bolts, or anything else. It's basically just a big pile of heavy stuff on top of the reactor.
Something has to be done. Now.
This new dome has plenty of space inside it and lots of cranes and robots built-in to dismantle the old stuff. When it's finished work a few years from now there will be easy access to the reactor, lots of space, and many years left over to think about what to do next.
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Yeah that, and also the fact that there's a bunch of cranes and robots inside the dome, remotely operated so a to disassemble and clean up the site.
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Chernobyl is in Ukraine. Russia is the country which created this mess.
Since we're being pedantic, the country that created the mess was USSR, of which Russia and Ukraine were both part.
Re: Kicking the can down the road.. (Score:2)
And not in the occupied part. Pripyat is up river from Kiev.
Camouflage (Score:3)
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They were camouflaged as plates of shrimp? WTF? I doubt that will keep you safe from radiation.
Normally that'd be true... But this radiation is really, really dumb.
Sources (Score:3)
It would nice if there were some primary sources in this post.....
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Hell, *any* topical link other than to the Slashdot submission would be great...
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Hell, *any* topical link other than to the Slashdot submission would be great...
Gee Richard, that's a little nasty.
I trust this meets your expectations. [slashdot.org]
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Hell, be thankful that the source can be reached via only one level of redirection, and the editor didn't simply create an infinite loop. Almost makes you miss Timothy, doesn't it?
No.
Re:Sources (Score:5, Informative)
This is Slashdot, you have to hope that one of the comments will take pity on you and give you a link:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170101-a-new-tomb-for-the-most-dangerous-disaster-site-in-the-world [bbc.com]
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It's almost as if you missed the links to the TV documentary posted further up.
Re:Sources (Score:5, Informative)
It would nice if there were some primary sources in this post.....
Apologies, I've had food poisoning all week and not enough energy to filter out what I thought were the best primary sources, many of which are pdfs that I'm still getting through myself. Here are the ones that cover the salient details:
I would link to the Ukraine body of law that governs all this this however I don't speak the language.
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It would nice if there were some primary sources in this post.....
If I had mod points today, I'd give you all of them.
Explosion (Score:3, Informative)
It sounds impressive. There was an "explosion" of water to steam, then the reactor fire.
Many people think the reactor exploded like a bomb. There's also many people who think that happened at Three Mile Island. It seems the media tends to exaggerate, and even lie for effect.
Not that it matters much, it's just most people accept what they read. People are still telling me Russians hacked voting machines. And that the Speaker's Mace and Paul Ryan's logo is Nazi symbology. Even people who are normally intelligent. The internet has made things worse in some ways.
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IIRC Chernobyl was uncontained, unlike .. well all American reactors. I think there's still one uncontained reactor running in Souther America.
Re:Explosion (Score:4, Informative)
Well the opinion seems to be that Chernobyl went prompt critical, which is more or less what bombs do. Except of course without the implosion it didn't explode in the same way exactly.
Plus steam explosions are a real thing. The SL1 reactor also had a steam explosion due to a prompt criticality event. That causes the 12 ton reactor vessel to jump 3 meters in the air where it literally hit the ceiling of the containment vessel.
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Reactors outside the Soviet Union never
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Many people think the reactor exploded like a bomb.
I think most people understand that there wasn't a nuclear bomb like explosion, but they also understand that there was an explosion and it throw a large amount of dangerous material into the atmosphere where it was carried by winds over to Europe and various other places.
That's most people's primary experience of it - news reports on how the fallout was being blow over where they live.
Wembley Stadium???? (Score:2)
This is Slashdot, FFS. You have to use proper units of measure. How big is it in Olympic Sized Swimming Pools?
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Where are the Nuclear power fans now? (Score:2, Insightful)
One failed reactor =
25 years of cleanup effort
$235b cost (which of course - tax payers all around Europe are shouldering)
thousands of lives lost
ecological repercussions for centuries to come in the region
Stop nuclear power now before we have more accidents like these.
Re:Where are the Nuclear power fans now? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, it was one reactor that would not have ever been built anywhere but in the Soviet Union (no containment dome) run by people dumber than a animated TV show (The Simpsons).
Of course, nobody suspected that the oh-so-smart Japanese would site emergency generators where they could get flooded when the containment wall was overrun (just like their consulting geologists told them it would).
If engineers ran the world, things would be more boring but quite a bit safer. Instead we get the Soviet Union, the Universal Kleptocracy and, god help us, Donald.
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The only people dumber than the ones who built this reactor are the ones who want to build thousands of untested reactors all around the world. Tell me, do you have a ready-made list of excuses when design and construction flaws are exposed, and will you have a fall-back position?
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Oops, ignore that. Replied to the wrong post.
Re:Where are the Nuclear power fans now? (Score:4, Insightful)
We lose more than 235bn a year from people skiving from work (and that's in GBP, not USD!).
We lose more than 235bn a year.
"Abolishing open borders 'could cost Germany â235 bn'"
"20 global banks have paid $235bn in fines since the 2008 financial crisis"
"Brexit risks losing the UK £235bn in trade"
Those are JUST the search results for that exact number. In the grand scheme of things, worldwide, one $235bn accident every 30 years is really chickenfeed. Especially against the entire energy market and its ramifications.
Big numbers are only scary when they are bigger numbers than anything else. And they are made more scary when, like your 235bn and some of those above, they are basically made up to sound scarier.
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This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kW
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Thank you, your insights are very interesting however I think you mean those are the cost's incurred so far. It would also be interesting to map in energetic costs as well.
This is the cost to *ESTABLISH* cleaning up Chernobyl, now the work begins. We have n
Re:Where are the Nuclear power fans now? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people has coal-fired, gas-fired, oil-fired power stations killed?
Just because it's not in one nice incident all wrapped in a nice little sarcophagus for you, it doesn't mean it was casualty-free.
Again, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, nuclear is safer, cleaner, less impact on the environment, cheaper, and even cheaper to clean up if it does go wrong than almost ANYTHING else.
Even solar has a human cost, you just don't see it because people aren't lying on the floor outside every solar power plant.
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Where are the Nuclear power fans now?
Admiring this map [tmrow.co], showing the huge advantage of predominantly nuclear powered nations such as France wrt CO2 emissions.
Stop nuclear power now before we have more accidents like these.
No. Stop indulging hysterical thinking.
Re:Where are the Nuclear power fans now? (Score:2)
Actually nuclear power in the west is as good as dead. Hardly anything new is being built and huge costs for decommissioning coming up . Now in the east, you know, like china, there is construction going on. That is, where there is a lot of cooling water, meaning in highly populated areas, sometimes unstable geography. That could become interesting. I'm not enthusiastic either.
At Banqiao. "thousands" means "49"? (Score:3)
> thousands of lives lost
You have a typo there. I think you meant to type "49" (38 directly, 11 from cancer). At the time, it was thought that many more people might die 20 years later from cancer (rather than 25 years later from old age, car accidents, etc) but evidence indicates that hasn't happened much - cancer rates haven't increased as much as was feared. One claim that "6,000 workers will die from cancer due to radiation" was debunked when it was pointed out that there haven't even been 6,000 T
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Stop nuclear power now before we have more accidents like these.
I agree. Nothing is more dangerous than nuclear power... except everything else. No, that's not even true, with no nuclear power we'd die from thirst, starvation, or freezing.
Nuclear power historically has the lowest number of deaths to energy produced, and that is including the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as the deaths from mining the uranium. Solar power and wind are more dangerous than nuclear power by at least an order of magnitude, but we don't hear about the occasional slip-n-fall
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Stop nuclear power now before we have more accidents like these.
I agree. Nothing is more dangerous than nuclear power... >Nuclear power historically has the lowest number of deaths to energy produced
I think your approach to nuclear power is to have it at any cost. Transposing idealistic notions about NP onto reality and politicizing it doesn't really respect NP for either its potential or its dangerous nature.
Perhaps the metric is wrong for Nuclear Power. Perhaps the metric we should be using for NP is total failed births per GWh or lives destroyed per ton of radioisotope maybe we could use communities obliterated per GWh. I've never heard of a case where people are evacuated for 30 years because a
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We are at the beginning of nuclear power's impact on the human species so perhaps we need new ways to look at nuclear power in order to understand how it is affecting us, we've just started acknowledging carbon as an externality imposed on our generation, so why not radioactive effluents on future generations?
We don't consider the radioactive waste an issue for future generations for many reasons. First, the size of the problem is actually very small. The energy used in a single American's life could come from a lump of uranium or thorium the size of a beer can. That's not just electricity but also heating, transportation, all energy. If allowed to be recycled then the size of the problem is even smaller. If the fuel is burned in a way that the valuable isotopes can be extracted before they decay away then
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We are at the beginning of nuclear power's impact on the human species so perhaps we need new ways to look at nuclear power in order to understand how it is affecting us, we've just started acknowledging carbon as an externality imposed on our generation, so why not radioactive effluents on future generations?
We don't consider the radioactive waste an issue for future generations for many reasons. First, the size of the problem is actually very small.
You're right, it's just small enough to fit in a freight train that wraps all the way around the equator... and a bit more, maybe a third more. [nationalgeographic.com]
We need to find a way to put nuclear reactors in everyone's backyard, I propose we put the big nuclear reactors right in the middle of cities, every city, lets call it the IMBY movement to force people into accepting nuclear power for their own good. We need purplies to hold down hippies and fart right in their smug faces after a chilli bacon and chipoltle pizza s
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The only people dumber than the ones who built this reactor are the ones who want to build thousands of untested reactors all around the world. Tell me, do you have a ready-made list of excuses when design and construction flaws are exposed, and will you have a fall-back position?
Dumb people can't build reactors.
There will never be "thousands" of reactors.
"untested" is a completely false supposition and makes your scare-mongering look even stupider.
You don't know the first thing about this stuff do you? Does your mommy know you are at the computer?
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Wild Life (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems there is nothing worse than a Homo sapiens for the nature.
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OTOH hand, moderately radioactive wildlife isn't something to be causally ignored.
Godzilla, Spiderman... the list goes on.
We have been warned.
Re:Wild Life (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure it's all that strange. Keep in mind that wildlife will still likely thrive even with high birth defect rates, early deaths by cancer, and other unpleasant side-effects from living in higher-than-normal radiation. We would find such a situation appalling among humans, but nature is a bit more brutally pragmatic about such things. Human populations obviously have a much more detrimental effect on populations than radiation.
On the plus side, this gives us a great model for what a post-apocalyptic world should look like 30 years after the bombs fall, or whatever other disaster strikes. It's sort of eerie. I've never like the Fallout aesthetic that implies nothing grows in an irradiated region, even if I understand *why* they did it.
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But as we know, the many studies done in the Chernobyl area show that wildlife is thriving, and not showing genetic damage or birth defects beyond normal rates.
Oh, well, I didn't actually know. I was under the impression that scientists were debating this point. (?) Maybe I just read old articles, or I could very well be misinformed. In any case, consider my statement as more hypothetical than anything.
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A pictorial documentary which I saw in the last year or so studied the plant life within the exclusion zone. They're hanging dosimeters on tree trunks to see what their dosages are over time. It appears that in some places the natural cycle of composting and regrowth has halted. Organisms are no longer decomposing biomass, so it piles up much longer than is natural. The ecology is being starved of nutrients, so remaining growth is slowed. There are dead forested areas persistently standing instead of crumbl
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AC: Ya know, I am actually capable of critical thinking, and if all they showed was a cherrypicked patch or two of brown grass, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it. You seem to know about the article, or a similar one to that which I'm talking about. Please post a link to it, and we can compare. Regardless, the article I read was more substantial than you mockingly retort. Ultimately, we'll only know for sure if it was credible, if we each became polyglot nuclear scientists and ecologists, and team up tog
WMDs in Iraq (Score:3)
From the article:
>Shortly after the accident, Hans Blix was flown to Chernobyl. Blix would later become better known for chairing the United Nations commission responsible for disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the 2003 war.
Wait what, the WMDs that didn't exist? The mustard gas that American sold Iraq and relabelling it as WMD? Why even include that bullshit BBC? You just want to keep that narrative going however you can?
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The BBC's statement is completely factual:
Blix would later become better known for chairing the United Nations commission responsible for disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction
Blix did chair that commission. The fact that Iraq didn't have the WMDs or whatever is irrelevant, there was still a UN commission set up to disarm Iraq and Blix chaired it.
Old news? (Score:2)
documentary on Chernobyl (Score:2)
Here's a good documentary on the disaster. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com... [topdocumentaryfilms.com]
The upshot is that 10's of thousands died fighting the fire and containing and the death toll continues to mount. Score one for safe and clean nuclear energy.
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10's of thousands died fighting the fire
Yea, 49 is a big number.
Score one for safe and clean nuclear energy.
Because everyone runs their power plants like cold war Soviet technocrats?
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1) 49 is a big number if you are one of them
2) Fire fighting, containment, and cleanup exposed some 500k workers to the site. And the actual death toll is probably underestimated: http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
If you watch the documentary there are a number of people who worked on the project who were in bad health. Which could be radiation, heavy metal poisoning, or a host of many other nasty things found in industrial sites e.g. PCBs, Dioxin, asbestos, etc.
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2) Fire fighting, containment, and cleanup exposed some 500k workers to the site. And the actual death toll is probably underestimated:
And the answer is:
Weâ(TM)ll probably never know.
Hooray for stories that don't actually say or mean anything.
If you watch the documentary there are a number of people who worked on the project who were in bad health.
It's been 27 years. Of course there's people in bad health.
Which could be radiation, heavy metal poisoning, or a host of many other nasty things found in industrial sites e.g. PCBs, Dioxin, asbestos, etc.
Sounds real definitive.
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I'd say it's fair to count the thousands who died and will still die as a result of this wholly unnecessary disaster.
Let's not be pedantic about the far lower number attributed directly to just death by radiation, thanks.
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I'd say it's fair to count the thousands who died and will still die as a result of this wholly unnecessary disaster.
Unless, of course, they're not going to die as a result of this disaster. Then I suppose it's not "fair".
Let's not be pedantic about the far lower number attributed directly to just death by radiation, thanks.
No, let's be pedantic for good reason. We need to remember that the "tens of thousands" is a number pulled out of someone's ass. It has no connection to reality.
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Buddy, you and I are *so* not on the same page here.
I would not call this a tomb (Score:2)
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They had worldwide experts for design, and the parts of the structure were built and pre-assembled in Italy.
The only part in the Ukraine (I'm sure with many international experts onhand) was the final assembly and moving it into place.
Rather incredible effort to me, the international partners, international construction, and the largest thing ever moved. Oh, and there was a war in the Ukraine during all of this.
Yes, I read the article...
This'll be great (Score:2)
Re:100 years? (Score:5, Funny)
What happens then?
Cthulhu awakens.
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What happens then?
Cthulhu awakens.
I'm pretty sure Cthulhu has already awakened and he has an orange comb-over.
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I'm pretty sure Cthulhu has already awakened and he has an orange comb-over.
Four years of this. Hooray.
(Translation: Jesus Christ. Shut up.)
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Most of the high level stuff will have decayed significantly by then. Send workers in, chop up what's left, seal it up in drums and throw it in an abandoned salt mine.
Or, technology might be available to recycle it into new nuclear fuel.
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So plutonium is not "high level stuff"?
Re:100 years? (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much only Pu-238 and Pu-241 are alarmingly dangerous, and any that is there will remain alarmingly dangerous for between hundreds and thousands of years. Isotopes like Pu-237, Pu-243, Pu-245, and Pu-246 have mostly all decayed by now, while Isotopes like Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-242, and Pu-244 all have such long half-lives that while "dangerous", are not alarmingly so to varying degrees (you could safely handle Pu-244.)
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The deadly dose of Plutonium for a 80kg human is something like 60 micrograms. I guess to get the exact number you can google for it.
So much to your idea of safety.
Re:100 years? (Score:4, Informative)
Because of alpha decay. Best not to eat or breathe it. But washing your hands, wearing a mask and not having lunch on the worksite would keep you all safe and happy. Plutonium in non critical amounts is easy to work around. The rest of the stuff, not so much.
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The deadly dose of Plutonium...
Which isotope?
Why is it that the fear-monger guy is the least specific, the least informative?
...for a 80kg human is something like 60 micrograms.
its something like you didnt even bother to look it up, because if you had, it wouldnt be "something like" .. you would have a solid number instead of a vague guess that you can back away from later.
Re:100 years? (Score:4, Informative)
The deadly dose of Plutonium...
Which isotope?
Plutonium 239. As an oxide it is an inhalant, plutonium chloride and nitrate is organically bound easily in the blood and bones because they are iron analogues. These are the main concerns for bio-accumulation of nuclear industry effluents persistent in the environment for 24,000 years and why I'm optimistic that NSC is going to help control the release of any more of these effluents into the environment.
...for a 80kg human is something like 60 micrograms.
you would have a solid number instead of a vague guess that you can back away from later.
In 1944 , Robert Stone, the head of the Plutonium Project Health Division, made the earliest estimate of a permissible burden for plutonium by scaling the radium standard on the basis of the radiological differences between radium and plutonium. Those included the difference in their radioactivities and that of their daughters and the difference in the average energy of their alpha particles. The result indicated that, gram for gram, plutonium was a factor of 50 less toxic than radium, and the standard was set to 5 micrograms.
In July 1945, Wright Langham insisted that the 5-microgram standard be reduced by a factor of 5 on the basis of animal experiments that showed that plutonium was distributed in the bone differently, and more dangerously, than radium. Thus, the maximum permissible body burden for plutonium was set at 1 microgram.
Following those experiments, discussions at the Chalk River Conferences in Ontario, Canada, (1949 to 1953) led to further reductions in the plutonium standard to 0.65 micrograms, or 40 nanocuries, for a maximum permissible body burden. Since then, no further changes have been made.
Considering that the experiments were part of the Manhattan project and some of the subjects involved were not informed some of the specific results may still be classified.
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So plutonium is not "high level stuff"?
Sure is, though nuclear power plants use uranium for fuel. The fuel rods do contain trace amounts of plutonium and other radioactive elements, but not much.
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With plutonium the whole difference is whether you inhale it or not. Probably ingestion counts as well. Inside of you it it's extremely dangerous, outside of you it's relatively harmless.
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I don't know what you want to say.
In 100 years you die to the plutonium in the same way you die today.
Some micrograms inhaled or otherwise get into your system are deadly.
And FYI: the exact same situation you will have in 10k years. Or 20k or 30k or 90k years.
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Actually the reactor grade fuel is made up of a pretty complex mix of plutonium. The worst radiating particles die off much quicker than the more stable particles. The fuel will be much weaker though still harmful after 100 years. As to how much it takes to kill you that also varies. It's definitely something to avoid though.
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No, 200 micro grams would likely be needed to cause cancer. Far more would be needed to kill you
No it is not far more needed.
Plutonium travels into the bone marrow, where it causes Leukemia and other blood related illnesses.
The odds of dying by cancer caused by plutonium are much lower than your odds of dying in a fireball generated by a plutonium bomb (think several orders of magnitude difference).
That is pretty bollocks. The way how Plutonium "kills" is well researched in animal experiments. A 30kg dog di
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Definitely NOT a SALT mine. (Score:2)
Most of the high level stuff will have decayed significantly by then. Send workers in, chop up what's left,
Fine so far.
seal it up in drums and throw it in an abandoned salt mine.
Definitely not a salt mine. The US used to consider that (or salt domes). Then they figured something out:
The heat (and even a little builds up) causes water to migrate through the salt to the heat source. Then you've got hot stuff sitting in saturated salt solution. This has lots of opportunity for exciting failure mechanisms.
O
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What happens then?
The 'corium' will be extracted robotically for use as fuel in a new generation of full-burnup reactors.
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I refuse to accept the we will be as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. We've already learnt that nuclear power plants are a stupid idea. Why would we build more?
That KIND of nuclear plants are not a good idea.
There are significantly safer and more efficient designs now. A trend that's likely to continue.
Also, if you don't drink a quart of vodka before your shift and then go play with the pretty dials and lights, all reactors new generation and old generation are much safer.
We could easily have fission and fusion reactors safe enough for every street corner in the future.
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That KIND of nuclear plants are not a good idea.
There are significantly safer and more efficient designs now. A trend that's likely to continue.
We know they are free of design flaws because their proponents tell us so, and because they are almost tested. Anyway, we can always test it in production. That kind of thinking never got anyone in trouble.
We also know they will have no construction flaws because human nature precludes such a thing happening, and the idea that once it is in operation someone will cut costs and create an unsafe environment is laughable. No one would ever do that with an untested nuclear reactor, or even a tested one.
Also, if you don't drink a quart of vodka before your shift and then go play with the pretty dials and lights, all reactors new generation and old generation are much safer.
Is th
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I refuse to accept the we will be as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. We've already learnt that nuclear power plants are a stupid idea. Why would we build more?
Because we aren't as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. I note here the spectacle of people claiming that reliably burying nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years is going to be better than burning that waste in a reactor.
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What happens then?
The robotic arms, mutated from a century of radiation, break out of the tomb and begin their ravaging trek towards a major city.
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What happens then?
Hopefully thanks to progress made in physics we have a way to disable radioactivity.
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What happens then?
You mean after the nuclear war? We'll all find shelter inside the sarcophagus where the radioactivity will be lower.