11 ms·

French institute suspects nuclear accident in Russia or Kazakhstan in September

259 points by kawera 9y ago

jmnicolas 9y ago
Why do they warn us 2 weeks after the fact ? Should I up my iodine intake or it's useless against ruthenium ? edit : according to this article it started sept 29 : https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-radioactivity-europe.html https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-radioactivity-e...
- GeneralMayhem 9y ago
  From TFA: >The IRSN said that the concentrations of ruthenium 106 in the air that have been recorded in Europe were of no consequence for human health and the environment. I presume that if it had been serious they (a) would have been able to detect it more quickly, since more serious means more of it, and (b) would have immediately announced it more widely rather than doing a full investigation first.
  - jmnicolas 9y ago
    Yeah and they said the same thing for Chernobyl. My mother got cancer.
    - perlgeek 9y ago
      We've learned a lot since Chernobyl. We are still far from knowing everything about danger from radioactive fallout, but there has been a lot of research since then.
    - Arnt 9y ago
      Chernobyl was bigger. A lot bigger. Locating that source was not a challenge.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      My grandmother got cancer too. Heck, so did my other grandmother. Of course, neither of them were ever anywhere near Chernobyl...
    - JeanMarcS 9y ago
      For people downvoting the parent, this is a "joke" in France (and based on his pseudo I guess he might be french). When the Chernobyl accident happened, french authorities told the population that the radioactive cloud haven't cross the french skies. But evidences quickly showed that it did over the France borders countries. So we say here that it never happened because the cloud was blocked at the border. It's now an historical reference of government lying to our face without second thoughts.
      - pm90 9y ago
        Ah, thanks for clarifying that. If I may ask: aren't there mechanisms that prevent the French State from lying so blatantly to its citizenry? How was this ultimately found out?
        JeanMarcS 9y ago
        When thyroid cancers started increasing in south east France, what was a rumor (imagine a cloud consciously avoiding France...) begins to be a proof that leaded to an investigation. More infos (in English) here https://www.expatica.com/fr/news/country-news/France-hid-info-on-effects-of-Chernobyl-cloud_134486.html https://www.expatica.com/fr/news/country-news/France-hid-inf... I'm afraid I don't know how it ended (I wasn't in France at that time) Edit : it seems the case was dismissed (as it is often in France when government is implicated...) https://amp.rfi.fr/en/asia-pacific/20110907-french-court-dismisses-chernobyl-nuclear-fallout-case-after-10-years https://amp.rfi.fr/en/asia-pacific/20110907-french-court-dis...
- jmnicolas 9y ago
  To answer my own question about iodine : > KI (potassium iodide) cannot protect the body from radioactive elements other than radioactive iodine—if radioactive iodine is not present, taking KI is not protective and could cause harm. Source : https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp
- lbruder 9y ago
  Taking iodine would be useless after two weeks. On the contrary, that would make future problems with your thyroid more probable, so don't do that. Iodine shouldn't be taken at all if you're more than ~45 years old (as a remedy for radiation problems) as the side effects would be statistically worse than a slowly developing cancer.
  - jobu 9y ago
    > Iodine shouldn't be taken at all if you're more than ~45 years old (as a remedy for radiation problems) as the side effects would be statistically worse than a slowly developing cancer. What side effects do you mean? The only one I'm aware of is the Wolff–Chaikoff effect, but for most people that's only temporary as they adapt to the excess iodine. Right now there's actually an issue with iodine deficiency in the US because of the trendy use of pink Himalayan salt, various sea salts, or Kosher salt that are all non-iodized.
    - djrogers 9y ago
      > Right now there's actually an issue with iodine deficiency in the US because of the trendy use of pink Himalayan salt, various sea salts, or Kosher salt that are all non-iodized. Citation please? I find this very hard to believe for a number of reasons. 1) Most salt intake in the US is through packaged and prepared foods, not table salt. 2) The American Thyroid Association disagrees with you - "In the United States, iodine status has remained generally adequate in the last 2 decades" 3) There are many commonly consumed foods in the US that contain iodine other than iodized table salt [1]https://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/ https://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  There are other sources from the beginning of October reporting the problem: http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171004-Detection-ruthenium-106-in-the-air-in-Europe.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171004-Detection... Must be a slow news day...
- cjslep 9y ago
  Unfortunately, the media and governments do a very poor job of outlining the whys of radiation, and leave it a very scary boogeyman for concerned citizens. Iodine pills don't magically protect people from radiation. Taking them doesn't do anything to prevent nuclear decay from happening, doesn't grant people superpowers to stand in a radioactive environment, and doesn't let you lick fuel rods without consequence. In fact, taking them is to leverage the chemical benefits of diffusion. Before I dive right into it, let me mention that a few forms of radioactive decay don't impact humans well. Alpha decays bounce off your clothing and skin, and can only travel a few cm in air. Beta decays bounce off your skin, or only make it so far into the already-dead skin cells, and don't travel very far in air either [0]. Gammas (sunlight) are a different matter, as are neutrons (from nuclear reactors). Hence, the sunscreen and the giant concrete containment units. This all changes if you inhale/ingest radioactive isotopes, and alphas suddenly become the most deadly (ask Alexander Litvinenko) and betas are up there too. Iodine 129 is a beta emitter, a pile of which will continue emitting radiation long after this generation of human beings are ash and dust. Eating this stuff is like eating glass. Back to the iodine pills: You take this pill because $GOV says so, and it saturates your body (thyroid) with a stable isotope of iodine. It's like taking a half-empty biological sandbox, and filling the rest of it up with sand. The inner child that lives within us can continue playing safely as this iodine doesn't decay. It means no new iodine 129 will be able to be retained in your body, your body is already full of the stable stuff, so such a person will still ingest iodine 129, but won't retain it in their body for a long period of time. However, failing to take an iodine pill beforehand will mean the sandbox is half-empty when a nuclear fission accident releases iodine 129. This means that sandbox will become (over time) quarter-sand and quarter-glass and still half empty, due to the laws of diffusion. No inner child wants to play in that box. And that means iodine 129 is sticking around inside the body, and in particular the thyroid (which is an organ more sensitive to radiation than others, for reasons I don't know since I'm an engineer not a doctor). So, how does this stack up against ruthenium? Your body doesn't use ruthenium in any significant way. It'll just pass it right back out. You can think of it as your body being permanently on the ruthenium pill. Yes, ruthenium 106 is a beta emitter exactly like iodine 129, but with a much shorter half-life of around a year. It decays to Rhodium 106, another beta emitter, which within a minute is already burned out into stable palladium 106. So on the whole, the human body is going to have an extremely tough time concentrating this stuff to dangerous levels inside of it. So overall, your risk is not zero, but if you want to offset it I recommend not taking an airplane the next time you otherwise would, as flying up at cruising altitude in the atmosphere usually exposes you to more radiation than ruthenium 106 scattered around the earth ever will. I highly recommend playing with [1] for nuclide information and decay chains. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo [1] https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html
- doe88 9y ago
  > Why do they warn us 2 weeks after the fact ? Agreed, concealing these informations for so long is deeply troubling. I'm not againt the nuclear at all, but given the potential risks, the transparency ought to be maximal, and again and again we are observing a lot of opacity.
  - seszett 9y ago
    It wasn't concealed at all, it hit the news in France in beginning of October. Maybe it wasn't picked up by foreign media then. The news here is the results of the investigation, showing the probable origin of the contamination after weather analysis.
    - doe88 9y ago
      You're absolutely right, I stand corrected, they seem to have released some information as early as 10/4/17. http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20171004_Detection-ruthenium-106-en-europe.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        April? No, for all those outside USA the date of the article is 4/10/17, ie 4 October 2017.
        averagewall 9y ago
        That's still ambiguous. Safest to use ISO format 2017-10-04. Nobody will be confused and it's the national standard for some countries. I never realised how obscure the US date format is [1]. Nobody should be using that on the internet except for specially local sites. It makes no sense to just about anybody. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
        officemonkey 9y ago
ajnin 9y ago
Article on the IRSN website (in French) with a map of likely release locations : http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20171109_Detection-Ruthenium-106-en-france-et-en-europe-resultat-des-investigations-de-l-IRSN.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...
- Xophmeister 9y ago
  There's an English synopsis on their website, with the same map: http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection-of-Ruthenium-106-in-France-and-in-Europe-Results-of-IRSN-investigations.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection...
goptimize 9y ago
It would be sufficient for media to launch shitstorm again.
phkahler 9y ago
How can I detect nuclear fallout at home? It would be interesting to log levels daily and then compare to incidents like this. In particular I'd like to monitor the effect if/when North Korea does an atmospheric test.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Get a second hand (army surplus is a good source) Geiger counter with an instrumentation output. You may have to do some conversion if your current computer does not do RS232.
  - officemonkey 9y ago
    The problem is differentiation from background. A release from NK or Russia, by the time it hits your Geiger counter, will likely be so low that it will be lost in the noise of background radiation. And local sources (such as radon gas) would mask anything but significant nearby events. The reason why France identified the release is because their detectors can determine different radioisotopes. It's a little like the difference between a photovoltaic cell and a camera. Your Geiger counter can tell when the "light's on" (presence of radiation) but it takes a different instrument to determine that it's Ruthenium 106.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      GGP spoke about general levels, not specific elements, and yes, you are 100% right, a Geiger counter is a pretty blunt instrument.
      - officemonkey 9y ago
        Even after Chernobyl and Fukushima, outside of the impacted area, there really wasn't any detectable increase in background. You're much more likely to get an increase in background going into your basement (because of Radon daughters) than from an nuclear release halfway around the planet.
  - 9y ago
koliber 9y ago
I remember reading something similar about a year ago. Did anything come of those reports?
- yk 9y ago
  Last year was a release at a Norwegian research reactor. First of all, that was an impressive feat of analytical chemistry, that they could detect a fairly insignificant leak all over Europe. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-for-Norwegian-research-reactor-2510165.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-for...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- asclepi 9y ago
  I think you're referring to the detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe back in January 2017? This made some headlines worldwide and was also covered on HN. http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20170213_Detection-of-radioactive-iodine-at-trace-levels-in-Europe-in-January-2017.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20170213_Detection... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676570 As far as I know, that case was never solved, and media coverage died quickly.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I wonder if the source of the accident is really aware of the accident? Without knowing a lot of the details, is this something that could happen if a naive, or lazy, employee just decided to incinerate waste? Is this something that could happen if someone was goofing off? Is this something that could be undetected, due to lack of monitoring equipment, at the source?
- varjag 9y ago
  It's quite possible the source is aware but it's being hidden on sub-government or institutional level. Not uncommon in places with personal responsibility for public or corporate accidents.
- yk 9y ago
  On one hand, 100 TBq is less than a thousands of a gram of Ruthenium 106. On the other hand, anybody handling radioactive samples with terabecquerel activity will be very very aware that they are handling a lot of radioactivity. So my guess is, either an accident or an breach of safety protocols at a nuclear facility. Either way, the source is most likely aware that something did go wrong.
- polack 9y ago
  USSR tried to keep Chernobyl blowing up a secret until caught and preassured by Sweden to admit there was an accident. I really don't expect Russia to act different today. Just look at the "we have nothing to do with it" handling when Crimea was invaded.
  - fpoling 9y ago
    The Communist government even tried to hide the blow up from local population exposing a lot of people to extra risk when trivial measures could have minimized it. In Minsk, Belarus my mother was warned by friends of friends that worked at a research reactor. They spent few hours trying to identify a leak at their facility as all Geiger counters showed a very high rise over the background level. Then they were reluctantly told that it was an accident in Chernobyl. Then from the reading of the counters they realized how bad the accident must be and asked all people they knew to stay in doors and close all windows.
juretriglav 9y ago
Detected (and reported) in Slovenia on Oct 9 too: http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/ http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/ Gone now: http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/select/sporocilo_za_javnost/article/12088/5991/ http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/selec... Sorry, both links in Slovene, but Google Translate can help.
rutheh 9y ago
It would be interesting to log levels daily and then compare to incidents
foxyv 9y ago
When I was working on my BS in Physics we measured Cesium-137 from nuclear accidents and weapons testing. We wanted to see if we could detect any change due to the release of material in Fukushima. We didn't see any change though because we were using a pretty insensitive gamma spectroscopy method and the increase was so small. I think they later found a small increase using a mass spectrometer. It's amazing that you can still detect the results of the Chernobyl disaster on the opposite side of the world, decades later. That was one heck of a meltdown!

259 points by kawera 9y ago

Why do they warn us 2 weeks after the fact ? Should I up my iodine intake or it's useless against ruthenium ? edit : according to this article it started sept 29 : https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-radioactivity-europe.html https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-radioactivity-e...

GeneralMayhem 9y ago
From TFA: >The IRSN said that the concentrations of ruthenium 106 in the air that have been recorded in Europe were of no consequence for human health and the environment. I presume that if it had been serious they (a) would have been able to detect it more quickly, since more serious means more of it, and (b) would have immediately announced it more widely rather than doing a full investigation first.
- jmnicolas 9y ago
  Yeah and they said the same thing for Chernobyl. My mother got cancer.
  - perlgeek 9y ago
    We've learned a lot since Chernobyl. We are still far from knowing everything about danger from radioactive fallout, but there has been a lot of research since then.
  - Arnt 9y ago
    Chernobyl was bigger. A lot bigger. Locating that source was not a challenge.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    My grandmother got cancer too. Heck, so did my other grandmother. Of course, neither of them were ever anywhere near Chernobyl...
  - JeanMarcS 9y ago
    For people downvoting the parent, this is a "joke" in France (and based on his pseudo I guess he might be french). When the Chernobyl accident happened, french authorities told the population that the radioactive cloud haven't cross the french skies. But evidences quickly showed that it did over the France borders countries. So we say here that it never happened because the cloud was blocked at the border. It's now an historical reference of government lying to our face without second thoughts.
    - pm90 9y ago
      Ah, thanks for clarifying that. If I may ask: aren't there mechanisms that prevent the French State from lying so blatantly to its citizenry? How was this ultimately found out?
      - JeanMarcS 9y ago
        When thyroid cancers started increasing in south east France, what was a rumor (imagine a cloud consciously avoiding France...) begins to be a proof that leaded to an investigation. More infos (in English) here https://www.expatica.com/fr/news/country-news/France-hid-info-on-effects-of-Chernobyl-cloud_134486.html https://www.expatica.com/fr/news/country-news/France-hid-inf... I'm afraid I don't know how it ended (I wasn't in France at that time) Edit : it seems the case was dismissed (as it is often in France when government is implicated...) https://amp.rfi.fr/en/asia-pacific/20110907-french-court-dismisses-chernobyl-nuclear-fallout-case-after-10-years https://amp.rfi.fr/en/asia-pacific/20110907-french-court-dis...
jmnicolas 9y ago
To answer my own question about iodine : > KI (potassium iodide) cannot protect the body from radioactive elements other than radioactive iodine—if radioactive iodine is not present, taking KI is not protective and could cause harm. Source : https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp
lbruder 9y ago
Taking iodine would be useless after two weeks. On the contrary, that would make future problems with your thyroid more probable, so don't do that. Iodine shouldn't be taken at all if you're more than ~45 years old (as a remedy for radiation problems) as the side effects would be statistically worse than a slowly developing cancer.
- jobu 9y ago
  > Iodine shouldn't be taken at all if you're more than ~45 years old (as a remedy for radiation problems) as the side effects would be statistically worse than a slowly developing cancer. What side effects do you mean? The only one I'm aware of is the Wolff–Chaikoff effect, but for most people that's only temporary as they adapt to the excess iodine. Right now there's actually an issue with iodine deficiency in the US because of the trendy use of pink Himalayan salt, various sea salts, or Kosher salt that are all non-iodized.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    > Right now there's actually an issue with iodine deficiency in the US because of the trendy use of pink Himalayan salt, various sea salts, or Kosher salt that are all non-iodized. Citation please? I find this very hard to believe for a number of reasons. 1) Most salt intake in the US is through packaged and prepared foods, not table salt. 2) The American Thyroid Association disagrees with you - "In the United States, iodine status has remained generally adequate in the last 2 decades" 3) There are many commonly consumed foods in the US that contain iodine other than iodized table salt [1]https://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/ https://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/
lucaspiller 9y ago
There are other sources from the beginning of October reporting the problem: http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171004-Detection-ruthenium-106-in-the-air-in-Europe.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171004-Detection... Must be a slow news day...
cjslep 9y ago
Unfortunately, the media and governments do a very poor job of outlining the whys of radiation, and leave it a very scary boogeyman for concerned citizens. Iodine pills don't magically protect people from radiation. Taking them doesn't do anything to prevent nuclear decay from happening, doesn't grant people superpowers to stand in a radioactive environment, and doesn't let you lick fuel rods without consequence. In fact, taking them is to leverage the chemical benefits of diffusion. Before I dive right into it, let me mention that a few forms of radioactive decay don't impact humans well. Alpha decays bounce off your clothing and skin, and can only travel a few cm in air. Beta decays bounce off your skin, or only make it so far into the already-dead skin cells, and don't travel very far in air either [0]. Gammas (sunlight) are a different matter, as are neutrons (from nuclear reactors). Hence, the sunscreen and the giant concrete containment units. This all changes if you inhale/ingest radioactive isotopes, and alphas suddenly become the most deadly (ask Alexander Litvinenko) and betas are up there too. Iodine 129 is a beta emitter, a pile of which will continue emitting radiation long after this generation of human beings are ash and dust. Eating this stuff is like eating glass. Back to the iodine pills: You take this pill because $GOV says so, and it saturates your body (thyroid) with a stable isotope of iodine. It's like taking a half-empty biological sandbox, and filling the rest of it up with sand. The inner child that lives within us can continue playing safely as this iodine doesn't decay. It means no new iodine 129 will be able to be retained in your body, your body is already full of the stable stuff, so such a person will still ingest iodine 129, but won't retain it in their body for a long period of time. However, failing to take an iodine pill beforehand will mean the sandbox is half-empty when a nuclear fission accident releases iodine 129. This means that sandbox will become (over time) quarter-sand and quarter-glass and still half empty, due to the laws of diffusion. No inner child wants to play in that box. And that means iodine 129 is sticking around inside the body, and in particular the thyroid (which is an organ more sensitive to radiation than others, for reasons I don't know since I'm an engineer not a doctor). So, how does this stack up against ruthenium? Your body doesn't use ruthenium in any significant way. It'll just pass it right back out. You can think of it as your body being permanently on the ruthenium pill. Yes, ruthenium 106 is a beta emitter exactly like iodine 129, but with a much shorter half-life of around a year. It decays to Rhodium 106, another beta emitter, which within a minute is already burned out into stable palladium 106. So on the whole, the human body is going to have an extremely tough time concentrating this stuff to dangerous levels inside of it. So overall, your risk is not zero, but if you want to offset it I recommend not taking an airplane the next time you otherwise would, as flying up at cruising altitude in the atmosphere usually exposes you to more radiation than ruthenium 106 scattered around the earth ever will. I highly recommend playing with [1] for nuclide information and decay chains. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo [1] https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html
doe88 9y ago
> Why do they warn us 2 weeks after the fact ? Agreed, concealing these informations for so long is deeply troubling. I'm not againt the nuclear at all, but given the potential risks, the transparency ought to be maximal, and again and again we are observing a lot of opacity.
- seszett 9y ago
  It wasn't concealed at all, it hit the news in France in beginning of October. Maybe it wasn't picked up by foreign media then. The news here is the results of the investigation, showing the probable origin of the contamination after weather analysis.
  - doe88 9y ago
    You're absolutely right, I stand corrected, they seem to have released some information as early as 10/4/17. http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20171004_Detection-ruthenium-106-en-europe.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      April? No, for all those outside USA the date of the article is 4/10/17, ie 4 October 2017.
      - averagewall 9y ago
        That's still ambiguous. Safest to use ISO format 2017-10-04. Nobody will be confused and it's the national standard for some countries. I never realised how obscure the US date format is [1]. Nobody should be using that on the internet except for specially local sites. It makes no sense to just about anybody. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
        officemonkey 9y ago

ajnin 9y ago

Article on the IRSN website (in French) with a map of likely release locations : http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20171109_Detection-Ruthenium-106-en-france-et-en-europe-resultat-des-investigations-de-l-IRSN.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...

Xophmeister 9y ago
There's an English synopsis on their website, with the same map: http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection-of-Ruthenium-106-in-France-and-in-Europe-Results-of-IRSN-investigations.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection...

goptimize 9y ago

It would be sufficient for media to launch shitstorm again.

phkahler 9y ago

How can I detect nuclear fallout at home? It would be interesting to log levels daily and then compare to incidents like this. In particular I'd like to monitor the effect if/when North Korea does an atmospheric test.

jacquesm 9y ago
Get a second hand (army surplus is a good source) Geiger counter with an instrumentation output. You may have to do some conversion if your current computer does not do RS232.
- officemonkey 9y ago
  The problem is differentiation from background. A release from NK or Russia, by the time it hits your Geiger counter, will likely be so low that it will be lost in the noise of background radiation. And local sources (such as radon gas) would mask anything but significant nearby events. The reason why France identified the release is because their detectors can determine different radioisotopes. It's a little like the difference between a photovoltaic cell and a camera. Your Geiger counter can tell when the "light's on" (presence of radiation) but it takes a different instrument to determine that it's Ruthenium 106.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    GGP spoke about general levels, not specific elements, and yes, you are 100% right, a Geiger counter is a pretty blunt instrument.
    - officemonkey 9y ago
      Even after Chernobyl and Fukushima, outside of the impacted area, there really wasn't any detectable increase in background. You're much more likely to get an increase in background going into your basement (because of Radon daughters) than from an nuclear release halfway around the planet.
- 9y ago

koliber 9y ago

I remember reading something similar about a year ago. Did anything come of those reports?

yk 9y ago
Last year was a release at a Norwegian research reactor. First of all, that was an impressive feat of analytical chemistry, that they could detect a fairly insignificant leak all over Europe. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-for-Norwegian-research-reactor-2510165.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-for...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
asclepi 9y ago
I think you're referring to the detection of radioactive iodine at trace levels in Europe back in January 2017? This made some headlines worldwide and was also covered on HN. http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20170213_Detection-of-radioactive-iodine-at-trace-levels-in-Europe-in-January-2017.aspx http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20170213_Detection... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676570 As far as I know, that case was never solved, and media coverage died quickly.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I wonder if the source of the accident is really aware of the accident? Without knowing a lot of the details, is this something that could happen if a naive, or lazy, employee just decided to incinerate waste? Is this something that could happen if someone was goofing off? Is this something that could be undetected, due to lack of monitoring equipment, at the source?

varjag 9y ago
It's quite possible the source is aware but it's being hidden on sub-government or institutional level. Not uncommon in places with personal responsibility for public or corporate accidents.
yk 9y ago
On one hand, 100 TBq is less than a thousands of a gram of Ruthenium 106. On the other hand, anybody handling radioactive samples with terabecquerel activity will be very very aware that they are handling a lot of radioactivity. So my guess is, either an accident or an breach of safety protocols at a nuclear facility. Either way, the source is most likely aware that something did go wrong.
polack 9y ago
USSR tried to keep Chernobyl blowing up a secret until caught and preassured by Sweden to admit there was an accident. I really don't expect Russia to act different today. Just look at the "we have nothing to do with it" handling when Crimea was invaded.
- fpoling 9y ago
  The Communist government even tried to hide the blow up from local population exposing a lot of people to extra risk when trivial measures could have minimized it. In Minsk, Belarus my mother was warned by friends of friends that worked at a research reactor. They spent few hours trying to identify a leak at their facility as all Geiger counters showed a very high rise over the background level. Then they were reluctantly told that it was an accident in Chernobyl. Then from the reading of the counters they realized how bad the accident must be and asked all people they knew to stay in doors and close all windows.

juretriglav 9y ago

Detected (and reported) in Slovenia on Oct 9 too: http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/ http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/ Gone now: http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/select/sporocilo_za_javnost/article/12088/5991/ http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/selec... Sorry, both links in Slovene, but Google Translate can help.

rutheh 9y ago

It would be interesting to log levels daily and then compare to incidents

foxyv 9y ago

When I was working on my BS in Physics we measured Cesium-137 from nuclear accidents and weapons testing. We wanted to see if we could detect any change due to the release of material in Fukushima. We didn't see any change though because we were using a pretty insensitive gamma spectroscopy method and the increase was so small. I think they later found a small increase using a mass spectrometer. It's amazing that you can still detect the results of the Chernobyl disaster on the opposite side of the world, decades later. That was one heck of a meltdown!