3 ms·

Po-210 is in the decay chain of U-238: https://nucleonica.com/polonium210.aspx https://nucleonica.com/polonium210.aspx it is constantly being produced in natu

Po-210 is in the decay chain of U-238: https://nucleonica.com/polonium210.aspx https://nucleonica.com/polonium210.aspx it is constantly being produced in nature from the decay of uranium-238 – the main component of uranium in the earth. Due to this “equilibrium”, the concentration of Po-210 in nature is approximately 75 µg of Po-210 for every ton of uranium-238 It's a commonly known byproduct from burning coal, even though it's very rare, the sheer volume of coal burnt means that a lot of it accumulates. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016236118314467 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001623611... http://www.shl.uiowa.edu/news/polonium.xml http://www.shl.uiowa.edu/news/polonium.xml https://www.chromatographytoday.com/news/gc-mdgc/32/breaking-news/coal-burning-power-plants-affect-po210-in-marine-life/15363 https://www.chromatographytoday.com/news/gc-mdgc/32/breaking...

ben_w 8y ago
Ok, those PPMs are surprisingly high. 1.5 million tonnes per year, 100ppm U-238 -> 150 tonnes U-238/year, 75μg Po/tonne U -> 11,500μg Po/plant-year, LD-50 human adult < 1μg
- Turbots 8y ago
  One gram of 210Po could in theory poison 20 million people of whom 10 million would die... let that sink in :-/
ams6110 8y ago
How expensive/complicated would it be to process the mined coal to remove the uranium. That element is significantly heavier than carbon so chemically and/or physically it should be possible. Of course, better to just stop burning coal altogether.
- cjslep 8y ago
  If you chemically try to, you have to avoid combusting the coal or putting it into a form that isn't combustible or through a process that lowers its potential chemical energy in the powerplant. That leaves physically, which is really tough considering that it would probably require a chemical transformation to be able to run it through a centrifuge (like uranium gas in uranium centrifuges) in order to do the separation, and centrifuges can require nontrivial amounts of power to run, so no free win here either. On top of all that, now an output is a more-concentrated radioactive material (a lump of uranium), and suddenly whoever is doing this removal has quite a number of new NRC and OSHA regulations to follow, which are known to not be economically cheap. So it's no wonder businesses default to "just burn it, let the public suffer the externality costs". Edit: To be fair, a variant of this this has been attempted before: see the gasification of coal and the "clean coal" movement. It failed.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Can't you do it to the ashes? I'd assume that most of the mass is gone by then, so whatever processing needs to be done could be cheaper. If you compress your radioactive ash into bricks and take them to my currently fictional interesting materials recovery facility, I may even pay you for the trouble.

ben_w 8y ago

Ok, those PPMs are surprisingly high. 1.5 million tonnes per year, 100ppm U-238 -> 150 tonnes U-238/year, 75μg Po/tonne U -> 11,500μg Po/plant-year, LD-50 human adult < 1μg

Turbots 8y ago
One gram of 210Po could in theory poison 20 million people of whom 10 million would die... let that sink in :-/

ams6110 8y ago

How expensive/complicated would it be to process the mined coal to remove the uranium. That element is significantly heavier than carbon so chemically and/or physically it should be possible. Of course, better to just stop burning coal altogether.

cjslep 8y ago
If you chemically try to, you have to avoid combusting the coal or putting it into a form that isn't combustible or through a process that lowers its potential chemical energy in the powerplant. That leaves physically, which is really tough considering that it would probably require a chemical transformation to be able to run it through a centrifuge (like uranium gas in uranium centrifuges) in order to do the separation, and centrifuges can require nontrivial amounts of power to run, so no free win here either. On top of all that, now an output is a more-concentrated radioactive material (a lump of uranium), and suddenly whoever is doing this removal has quite a number of new NRC and OSHA regulations to follow, which are known to not be economically cheap. So it's no wonder businesses default to "just burn it, let the public suffer the externality costs". Edit: To be fair, a variant of this this has been attempted before: see the gasification of coal and the "clean coal" movement. It failed.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Can't you do it to the ashes? I'd assume that most of the mass is gone by then, so whatever processing needs to be done could be cheaper. If you compress your radioactive ash into bricks and take them to my currently fictional interesting materials recovery facility, I may even pay you for the trouble.