6 ms·

Fukushima contaminants found as far north as Alaska's Bering Strait

48 points by howard941 8y ago

opportune 8y ago
Read the article, this is essentially non-news with a jarring headline. Wow, an already extremely rare isotope in seawater is now 40% higher in concentration. Do you know what a very small number * 1.4 is? Another very small number. It has no health effects of any kind and no appreciable affect on the earth or humanity in any way.
- godelski 8y ago
  Not to mention > levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  These contaminants stories spread unnecessary paranoia among those with an already irrational fear of things like radiation. Then they create complacency among those who notice we're talking microscopic amounts and changes. But the thing is that this release of radioactive elements can still cause substantial problems, not everywhere you detect traces but specific areas where various factors reconcentrate such light or heavy radioactive elements - the top of the food chain and tbe arctic come to mind but I'd guess we'll find others.
  - opportune 8y ago
    Cesium is highly soluble in water, which in my layman understanding means it won't bioaccumulate nearly as much as nonsoluble/large substances like mercury and pesticides.
    - devoply 8y ago
      The issues with all of these things that are pragmatic is that the additive effect of all the little things we have done in the past 100 years over the course of a very small period of time say 10,000 yeas. So 100 fold is significant. Progress and growth is an addiction and we're blinded to any other facts in the face of that. For most of history we have basically 0% or negative growth... then all the sudden you had massive growth say 3-10% each year which was to say the least impossible a few hundred years before. To maintain this sort of monstrous growth you need to create energy and that means pollution... which adds up over time as many of our technologies are based around things that are not natural and don't break down.
      - lstodd 8y ago
        Cesium-137 half-life is ~30 years. So in 10000 years any additives will fade to what, something like 10^-100 of what they've been when introduced?
        devoply 8y ago
        Yes I actually did some more research and it seems that even in the case of Chernobyl this is not a concern in the long run. In that Plutonium is not a concern in general which has a half-life of up to 300,000 years. And most other elements decay after a few decades. So in the case of nuclear meltdowns the concerns are limited to the century in which they happen mostly. https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl-environment.htm#2p0 https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl-envi... https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... I still think the issue exists with other contaminants but with at least nuclear energy it seems the long term effects of its use in terms of disasters and even spent fuel are very limited.
        petre 8y ago
        Except Pu is toxic and accumulates in the bone marrow, compared to Cs which is excreted. Unit 3 at Fukushima was the only one fueled with MOX fuel containing 6% Pu.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
> The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean. >Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said. >Cesium-137 levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards, officials said.
- petre 8y ago
  Of course it's 3k times higher, because it all decayed to Barium 137 aeons ago.
godelski 8y ago
Everything about this says the scientist they interviewed was trying really hard to stress how safe it is and how non-issue this is. You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels. All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.
- paulmd 8y ago
  > All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current. Also that we are really good at detecting trace levels of radioactive materials.
  - godelski 8y ago
    That's a good point. We're REALLY good at detecting radiation. Which is why I usually chime in when an article just says they "detect" levels of radiation. The distance between detect and danger can be huge (it can also be low, but that's less common).
- mistrial9 8y ago
  > You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels .. to humans; news flash, not all life that matters is human
  - godelski 8y ago
    You're right, a lot of other animals are less affected by radiation than humans. But a lot of that is our long lifespan, so we live long enough to see the major affects of mutations.
- jhayward 8y ago
  > You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels The article almost starts talking about bio-concentration, but veers away after talking about findings in seals. Just because the open water concentration is well below safe levels does not mean that everything is hunky-dory. Cesium is an element that can be bio-concentrated, and then consumed as part of the food chain. It's not a simple thing to say this is "completely safe".
AareyBaba 8y ago
I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enough but the safety features of the reactor were poor reliability engineering. "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" was one of the lessons learnt. The reactors are leaking and contaminating ground water. The solution is to store all that water in thousands of tanks and run them through an expensive decontamination process. They are considering freezing the ground under the reactor to control the ground water contamination! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U Understanding the accident of Fukushima Daiichi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 Return to Fukushima - PBS
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > I went into a youtube marathon yesterday Of course, this can be dangerous in and of itself…
- khuey 8y ago
  "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.
  - vilhelm_s 8y ago
    Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/]
- 8y ago
scott_s 8y ago
A useful perspective is that we find contaminants from fossil fuel burning everywhere.
- rosser 8y ago
  I've read, though can't find a citation right now, that we dump more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere every year, just from burning coal, than has been released in all the nuclear accidents in history, combined.
  - voxadam 8y ago
    Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste — Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... — Radiological impact of airborne effluents of coal and nuclear plants DOI: 10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
    - rosser 8y ago
      Thanks! By "can't find", I'd meant, "not in a place where I can take the time" because my build was about to finish, sorry. I think this SA article's title is a bit hyperbolic, frankly. The editor's note even cites the article's text having been changed so as not to say that. But not the headline...
zihotki 8y ago
I wonder how is that comparable to contaminations due to a natural volcanic eruption. I bet the numbers will be several times bigger for volcano.
- godelski 8y ago
  Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano. From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA
lstodd 8y ago
Remember: The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is. The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is. Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous had since decayed. What we can detect long-living and thus not-so-dangerous isotopos, or detect minute traces of short-living ones because we have very sensitive equipment means exactly nothing besides the fact that we can.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is. > The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is. > Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous had since decayed. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and is pretty dangerous AFAIK [1]: > Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the environment today will stick around for the next half a million years. [1] https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-uranium.html https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-u...
  - erobbins 8y ago
    Yeah, even longer lived things that decay via alpha particles are dangerous when ingested... high energy atomic nuclei hitting DNA makes for bad juju.
    - lstodd 8y ago
      Of which Radon-222 and Radon-226 still are way more threat than some reactor blowing up somewhere. edit: if you've got granite in the basement, be vefy afraid :)
    - vlehto 8y ago
      Lead has infinite half life and it's very dangerous when ingested!
  - 8y ago
gjs278 8y ago
the article headline makes this sound worse than it apparently is. it does no favor to people that insist nuclear power is safer.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
For a comparison, remember every living being still has contaminants from the nuclear bombs detonated over fifty years ago.
pvaldes 8y ago
> It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier First of all: It is the world's worst nuclear disaster. A long way still far from being a solved problem. The use of "was" here is too optimistic and not justified. The article focuses in how radioactive stuff can travel miles and miles and cross boundaries. Something that is not unexpected but is always interesting to report and measure. Facing the data is not spreading fear, is improving our knowledge about a problem. The water masses in the ocean are not homogeneous. Contrary to what most people think, the ocean is not a place covered by water; is a place covered by waters. There are many different layers of saltwater that do not mix (or do it very slowly). If a water mass can transport a low level of radioactivity between Alaska and Japan, is not impossible having the next month a storm bringing a different, maybe deeper water mass with more salts and a different radioactivity level. To measure just one layer is not enough to understand the entire system and shouldn't be extrapolated as a value for the entire system. Wouldn't be a wise move. If we can learn something from the article is that USA will need to remain vigilant and keep measuring things, ready to apply quick corrective actions (and close fisheries if necessary) for a long time.

48 points by howard941 8y ago

Read the article, this is essentially non-news with a jarring headline. Wow, an already extremely rare isotope in seawater is now 40% higher in concentration. Do you know what a very small number * 1.4 is? Another very small number. It has no health effects of any kind and no appreciable affect on the earth or humanity in any way.

godelski 8y ago
Not to mention > levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
joe_the_user 8y ago
These contaminants stories spread unnecessary paranoia among those with an already irrational fear of things like radiation. Then they create complacency among those who notice we're talking microscopic amounts and changes. But the thing is that this release of radioactive elements can still cause substantial problems, not everywhere you detect traces but specific areas where various factors reconcentrate such light or heavy radioactive elements - the top of the food chain and tbe arctic come to mind but I'd guess we'll find others.
- opportune 8y ago
  Cesium is highly soluble in water, which in my layman understanding means it won't bioaccumulate nearly as much as nonsoluble/large substances like mercury and pesticides.
  - devoply 8y ago
    The issues with all of these things that are pragmatic is that the additive effect of all the little things we have done in the past 100 years over the course of a very small period of time say 10,000 yeas. So 100 fold is significant. Progress and growth is an addiction and we're blinded to any other facts in the face of that. For most of history we have basically 0% or negative growth... then all the sudden you had massive growth say 3-10% each year which was to say the least impossible a few hundred years before. To maintain this sort of monstrous growth you need to create energy and that means pollution... which adds up over time as many of our technologies are based around things that are not natural and don't break down.
    - lstodd 8y ago
      Cesium-137 half-life is ~30 years. So in 10000 years any additives will fade to what, something like 10^-100 of what they've been when introduced?
      - devoply 8y ago
        Yes I actually did some more research and it seems that even in the case of Chernobyl this is not a concern in the long run. In that Plutonium is not a concern in general which has a half-life of up to 300,000 years. And most other elements decay after a few decades. So in the case of nuclear meltdowns the concerns are limited to the century in which they happen mostly. https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl-environment.htm#2p0 https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl-envi... https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r... I still think the issue exists with other contaminants but with at least nuclear energy it seems the long term effects of its use in terms of disasters and even spent fuel are very limited.
        petre 8y ago
        Except Pu is toxic and accumulates in the bone marrow, compared to Cs which is excreted. Unit 3 at Fukushima was the only one fueled with MOX fuel containing 6% Pu.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

> The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean. >Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said. >Cesium-137 levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards, officials said.

petre 8y ago
Of course it's 3k times higher, because it all decayed to Barium 137 aeons ago.

godelski 8y ago

Everything about this says the scientist they interviewed was trying really hard to stress how safe it is and how non-issue this is. You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels. All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.

paulmd 8y ago
> All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current. Also that we are really good at detecting trace levels of radioactive materials.
- godelski 8y ago
  That's a good point. We're REALLY good at detecting radiation. Which is why I usually chime in when an article just says they "detect" levels of radiation. The distance between detect and danger can be huge (it can also be low, but that's less common).
mistrial9 8y ago
> You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels .. to humans; news flash, not all life that matters is human
- godelski 8y ago
  You're right, a lot of other animals are less affected by radiation than humans. But a lot of that is our long lifespan, so we live long enough to see the major affects of mutations.
jhayward 8y ago
> You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels The article almost starts talking about bio-concentration, but veers away after talking about findings in seals. Just because the open water concentration is well below safe levels does not mean that everything is hunky-dory. Cesium is an element that can be bio-concentrated, and then consumed as part of the food chain. It's not a simple thing to say this is "completely safe".

AareyBaba 8y ago

I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enough but the safety features of the reactor were poor reliability engineering. "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" was one of the lessons learnt. The reactors are leaking and contaminating ground water. The solution is to store all that water in thousands of tanks and run them through an expensive decontamination process. They are considering freezing the ground under the reactor to control the ground water contamination! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U Understanding the accident of Fukushima Daiichi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 Return to Fukushima - PBS

saagarjha 8y ago
> I went into a youtube marathon yesterday Of course, this can be dangerous in and of itself…
khuey 8y ago
"We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.
- vilhelm_s 8y ago
  Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/]
8y ago

scott_s 8y ago

A useful perspective is that we find contaminants from fossil fuel burning everywhere.

rosser 8y ago
I've read, though can't find a citation right now, that we dump more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere every year, just from burning coal, than has been released in all the nuclear accidents in history, combined.
- voxadam 8y ago
  Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste — Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... — Radiological impact of airborne effluents of coal and nuclear plants DOI: 10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
  - rosser 8y ago
    Thanks! By "can't find", I'd meant, "not in a place where I can take the time" because my build was about to finish, sorry. I think this SA article's title is a bit hyperbolic, frankly. The editor's note even cites the article's text having been changed so as not to say that. But not the headline...

zihotki 8y ago

I wonder how is that comparable to contaminations due to a natural volcanic eruption. I bet the numbers will be several times bigger for volcano.

godelski 8y ago
Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano. From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA

lstodd 8y ago

Remember: The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is. The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is. Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous had since decayed. What we can detect long-living and thus not-so-dangerous isotopos, or detect minute traces of short-living ones because we have very sensitive equipment means exactly nothing besides the fact that we can.

mehrdadn 8y ago
> The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is. > The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is. > Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous had since decayed. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and is pretty dangerous AFAIK [1]: > Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the environment today will stick around for the next half a million years. [1] https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-uranium.html https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-u...
- erobbins 8y ago
  Yeah, even longer lived things that decay via alpha particles are dangerous when ingested... high energy atomic nuclei hitting DNA makes for bad juju.
  - lstodd 8y ago
    Of which Radon-222 and Radon-226 still are way more threat than some reactor blowing up somewhere. edit: if you've got granite in the basement, be vefy afraid :)
  - vlehto 8y ago
    Lead has infinite half life and it's very dangerous when ingested!
- 8y ago

gjs278 8y ago

the article headline makes this sound worse than it apparently is. it does no favor to people that insist nuclear power is safer.

boomboomsubban 8y ago

For a comparison, remember every living being still has contaminants from the nuclear bombs detonated over fifty years ago.

pvaldes 8y ago

> It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier First of all: It is the world's worst nuclear disaster. A long way still far from being a solved problem. The use of "was" here is too optimistic and not justified. The article focuses in how radioactive stuff can travel miles and miles and cross boundaries. Something that is not unexpected but is always interesting to report and measure. Facing the data is not spreading fear, is improving our knowledge about a problem. The water masses in the ocean are not homogeneous. Contrary to what most people think, the ocean is not a place covered by water; is a place covered by waters. There are many different layers of saltwater that do not mix (or do it very slowly). If a water mass can transport a low level of radioactivity between Alaska and Japan, is not impossible having the next month a storm bringing a different, maybe deeper water mass with more salts and a different radioactivity level. To measure just one layer is not enough to understand the entire system and shouldn't be extrapolated as a value for the entire system. Wouldn't be a wise move. If we can learn something from the article is that USA will need to remain vigilant and keep measuring things, ready to apply quick corrective actions (and close fisheries if necessary) for a long time.