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Plutonium, a byproduct of all nuclear reactors and part of their waste stream, is dangerous for 240,000 years.
by mimixco 7y ago
Plutonium, a byproduct of all nuclear reactors and part of their waste stream, is dangerous for 240,000 years.
- strken 7y agoHow much plutonium is likely to be released in a nuclear incident? I thought Three Mile Island and Chernobyl mostly released radioactive isotopes of iodine and a bunch of noble gasses, with cesium, plutonium, and strontium being present in smaller quantities and generally settling closer to the reactor.
- antidesitter 7y agoWhere did you get that number?
- wahern 7y agoSeems like a typo. Half-life of Pu-239 is ~24,000 years, and of Pu-242 ~374,000 years. I'm guessing Pu-239 was intended as 1) an extra "0" digit is the more likely typo, and 2) Pu-239 is (AFAIU) the principal Plutonium byproduct of typical Uranium fission reactors.
- mimixco 7y agoHalf life means that radioactivity is reduced by half, not eliminated. A single particle of plutonium is enough to cause cancer and kill a person. This is why nuclear fuel rod storage (the waste products) must be guarded for hundreds of thousands of years.
- petre 7y agoHalf life is inversely proportional to radioactivity. Hundreds of thousands of years = no worries, you only live up to 1e-3 that amount.
- dingaling 7y agoNot all reactors; fast neutron burner reactors output less Pu than they consume.
- mimixco 7y agoThose exist only on paper. I'm speaking of actual production reactors which create dangerous amounts of plutonium-laden waste that needs to be cooled, monitored, and protected from human intervention for hundreds of thousands of years -- a problem that we still have no way to solve.
- wbl 7y agoPlutonium release is far less being less mobile and it doesn't have the biological issues strontium does.