9 ms·
If I ingest a grain of sand size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No.4 core
- HillaryBriss 7y agoreally puts my mind at ease
- lisper 7y agoGotta love the conclusion: "In summary, it is preferable to not eat spent nuclear fuel."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DuskStar 7y agoIt was interesting to see that it truly was only "preferable" and not "mandatory" or "this will kill you" IMO
- lisper 7y agoThat's the interesting thing: it's not really very hazardous, but it is awfully annoying.
- DuskStar 7y agoAnd not even "annoying due to health issues" but instead "annoying because it'll make you leave your job if you work in a field with dosage limits" and "annoying because you'll be setting off the radiation detectors when leaving the exclusion zone"
- CydeWeys 7y agoTo be fair, it has had several decades to decay, and the most dangerous radionuclides are the ones with short half-lives and thus high output. It's pretty amazing that it's still that dangerous given it's had over 30 years to decay.
- mikeash 7y agoAnd it’s really tiny. Lots of serious poisons would be harmless at that dose.
- andai 7y agoNoob question, if it decays so quickly, how come there's so much of it around this late in the Earth's history? Or was it created only decades ago, by artificial means?
- jellicle 7y agoSome things decay quickly and some very slowly, forming a sort of chain where the events might happen fast-slow-fast-fast-superfast-superslow-slow-fast-medium-fast-slow, or something like that. So these fast-decaying things disappear quickly but are also being constantly created by things spontaneously decaying into them. The point of a nuclear reactor is to increase the overall rates of decay, so you end up with disproportionately large amounts of the short-lived isotopes as opposed to what you would find in nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain If you scroll down you see thorium series, neptunium series, uranium series, and so on. You can see the half-life at each step.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe short answer is, we created it. The half-life of Uranium 235 is 700 million years, so there's plenty of it around. When you bring a bunch of U235 together and cause it to undergo fission, it creates a bunch of the shorter-lived stuff as a decay product. Especially when a reactor melts down; you get a lot more of the stuff you didn't want, in a much more uncontrolled manner.
- microwavecamera 7y agoSort of not really? There's some specifics to this hypothetical situation that minimize it's effects. In this scenario you're consuming a solid piece of radioactive material that passes through your body and is quickly expelled. When you have a Chernobyl type disaster or a nuclear explosion the radioactive material is atomized and spreads through the air. As you breath in the radioactive particles they pass directly into your blood stream.
- ducttape12 7y agoNow you tell me! What are you going to tell me next, that yellowcake isn't made from flour?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- javadocmd 7y agoThis is how you know it was written by an engineer. The executive summary is at the bottom.
- ianai 7y agoA discussion about the everyday occurrence of radioactive sources may be more productive.
- ribalda 7y agoGood to know. I was worried for this girl :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y
- userbinator 7y agoI had a feeling it was a bionerd23 video before I clicked that link... she has some pretty scary radioactivity videos.
- dkersten 7y agoI recently watched her videos for the first time (the one where she visited the reactor 4 control room and a few others). A very interesting channel indeed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- beaner 7y agoCouple naive questions: 1. How does a piece of spent fuel end up in a "grassy bit of ground" outside the reactor? Thought it would have all melted in one big clump in the same spot? 2. Why is Chernobyl still so dangerous if literally ingesting the spent fuel isn't super bad? Or is Chernobyl no longer dangerous?
- ris 7y ago> How does a piece of spent fuel end up in a "grassy bit of ground" outside the reactor? There was a pretty huge steam-based explosion, blowing the top off the reactor building and scattering fuel and various debris quite far & wide.
- tilt_error 7y agoThere is a possibility that the first explosion (there were several) was nuclear-based and not steam-based [1] and produced radioactive plasma, but the plasma jets cut through both the bottom and top of the reactor. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1384269 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1...
- AaronFriel 7y ago1. There was an explosion (edit: two explosions) that began the incident which destroyed the reactor and ejected matter a significant distance. 2. Chernobyl, IIRC, isn't really so dangerous to visit but you should avoid eating or drinking anything in the exclusion zone. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 will poison you from the inside out. The latter ends up bio-accumulating in bone.
- godelski 7y agoIIRC the uptake rate of Cs-137 is about 10%. Meaning you only store about 10% of what you ingest. Also, we are SUPER safe when it comes to radiation. No chances. No ifs ands or buts. When it comes to dosage, rad workers already have several safety factors from what we can detect an increase risk of cancer, as it should be.
- soundpuppy 7y agoIf we were to make an analogy between radiocative matter entering the body, and toxic information entering the mind, what metrics do we use to measure the dangerous effects of the information? How long it lasts or how deeply it can modify conscious/subconscious brain processes?
- rmdashrfstar 7y agoThere's no such thing as dangerous information, only truth and not truth.
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoI disagree having read about people who work as content moderators for websites like YouTube. They frequently suffer from acute forms of PTSD having only passively consumed information. If information can cause PTSD, I would consider that information dangerous to one's mental health.
- godelski 7y agoNot to mention simpler examples like the anti vax movement. Which has put not only individuals in danger, but whole populations. There's plenty of examples of information leading to harm. (This comment is neither a recommendation for censorship nor a push for freedom is speech)
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoThat's true. I also thought of something like state secrets where a government agent might show up one day and make you disappear. But that type of information is only indirectly dangerous. The actual danger is the government agent or your personal actions based on misinformation in the case of antivaxx. I was thinking more in terms of information that is objectively dangerous. Just ingesting the information alone is enough to cause damage. I was also reminded of an article I read recently about artists and animators who worked on the newest Mortal Kombat game suffering from PTSD due to the graphic nature of their art and the reference materials they had to use.
- remarkEon 7y ago>Me, riding the whole body counter in SP1430, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, after being inside the Unit 4 “Sarcophagus” What do people do who actually go inside the Sarcophagus these days? I assume there’s monitoring that needs to be done, but I also assume that you can monitor a lot of this remotely. Also, how much longer until Chernobyl is considered “safe”?
- philjackson 7y agoI think I heard 20,000 years before it's safe.
- guitarbill 7y agoThe Chernobyl New Safe Confinement has two cranes inside, and a lot of sensors. Incidentally, it's a great engineering project. The only downside is that if you visit now, you can't see the sarcophagus.
- atemerev 7y agoThis is purely hypothetical, as like he noticed, the fuel particle is not soluble in gastric acid. The damage would be much less than that. Inhaling the similar amount of finely powdered radioactive dust is another story, though.
- roenxi 7y agoIt is worth noting that there is almost literally no mention of potential health impacts; almost all the outcomes listed in the answer are regulatory. On the one hand, that might be good regulation - we don't want workers getting harmed. On the other hand, it serves as ongoing evidence that getting worried because a situation exceeds regulatory standards is foolish. Given how little attention he gives it the "marginally higher theoretical likelihood of later detriment such as cancer" turns out to be something trivial like less damage than done by drinking sugar water or not exercising.
- Retric 7y agoHeath impacts are literally the first thing mentioned. “probably nothing; certainly nothing obvious and immediate“ A grain of sand is extremely tiny and solid so it’s also got a very low surface area. Further, if it was suck in your lung you would get significant radiation to the same tissue, but in your digestive system food would act as a barrier while also pushing things along. From a regulatory framework it’s enough to detect and be concerned about which is interesting.
- exabrial 7y agoI left with more questions than answers...
- kahoon 7y agoAs it is usual when reading Quora "answers".
- JadeNB 7y agoI had a really hard time with the title displayed here, which is a truncated version of an already-confusing title on Quora. The actual title, with, I think, desireable punctuation included, is "If I ingest[ed] a grain-of-sand-size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 core, what would happen to my body?"
- kochikame 7y agohttps://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ This masterfully illustrates the relative risks of various sources of radiation, something that the typical person on the street knows almost nothing about but thinks they do I live in Japan and read up on this topic after the Fukushima disaster
- Creationer 7y agoWhich one is 3.6 roentgen, which is not great, not terrible?
- MagnumOpus 7y ago3.6R is about 37mSv. So the bottom left one, "ten minutes next to the Chernobyl reactor core at the time of the meltdown", also the top right "maximum yearly dose permitted for a radiation worker" is 50mSv too - I guess the show did its research.
- zaarn 7y agoThe "ten minutes next to Chernobyl reactor core at the time of meltdown" is 50 Sv, not 50mSv. 3.6R was measured by the small dosimeters on site (and also happens to be their maximum read value). The bigger dosimeters didn't work or also maxed out and the person in charge didn't believe it. The show mentions a 1500R value later on but outside the reactor building.
- jhallenworld 7y agoI've watched this interesting (but long) talk by Brian Sheron, retired director of Nuclear Regulatory Research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI4TTaA7qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI4TTaA7qM It gives me a better understanding of the risk of nuclear power, particularly for current US reactors, and what our regulatory agencies actually focus on: really it's on preventing direct radiation induced deaths, and not so much on property damage. So: It's not so much that accidents directly kill people, instead they kill the land. The idea is that loss of cooling incidents are contained for a significant amount of time- at least 8 hours. I'm dubious, but this is thought to be enough time to evacuate people from the land that will eventually become contaminated. Only when people move back do people die, and then only from increased cancer risk (Brian says this becomes an EPA problem). So now the land is lost, because who would move back? [of course this focuses only on deaths from radiation, and not for example, deaths caused by stress to elderly people forcibly relocated]. I did not remember when people were evacuated after the Fukushima accident, but it was pretty quick, here is a timeline: https://www.oecd-nea.org/news/2011/NEWS-04.html https://www.oecd-nea.org/news/2011/NEWS-04.html There is another question I'm still trying to answer. If the final heat sink is lost (someone blows up a dam), can the reactor be shut down without incident, assuming no blackout? This would require that the decay heat is spread across a large enough surface area. I'm not sure if the containment building provides such an area (a 1000 MW reactor generates ~70 MW decay heat after shutdown). It reminds me that this is another area that NRC does not focus on: "terrorist attacks are a military problem". Edit: well I answered my own question from wikipedia entry on containment building: "While the containment plays a critical role in the most severe nuclear reactor accidents, it is only designed to contain or condense steam in the short term (for large break accidents) and long term heat removal still must be provided by other systems." So if the heat sink is a man-made lake held by dam, it's a big risk (of course dam loss would cause direct loss of life anyway). I was wondering about this because my inlaws live near Duke Energy's Oconee Nuclear Station, on man made Lake Keowee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee
- henearkr 7y agoI'm baffled at the fact that the answer is entirely about radioactivity. Rather than that, uranium in itself is highly toxic (I mean, chemically).
- altmind 7y agoThere are things much scarier and devastating than uranium. It took 10 micro-grams(10^-5 g) of Pu-210 to poison(ARS) Litvinenko. You cannot see that amount - so tiny it is. And the damage is almost 100% gamma rays - so its hard to detect and the damage is lowered when handling and maximal when ingested.