3 ms·

No, quite a few orders of magnitude less. A banana is about 0.1 Becquerels/gram [0]. Low-level nuclear waste starts around 100 Bq/g [1]. Below that is another

No, quite a few orders of magnitude less. A banana is about 0.1 Becquerels/gram [0]. Low-level nuclear waste starts around 100 Bq/g [1]. Below that is another category called very-low-level nuclear waste. Disposing of the latter "does not pose any major problems" - you can put it in landfills, or grind it up and build roads with it - but it is still not recommended that you eat it in large quantities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose [1] https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/VLLW_Waste.htm https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/VLLW_Waste.htm

belorn 5y ago
I suspect that the nuclear waste at Fukushima that they intend to release into the ocean is of that category very-low-level nuclear waste. 2.1gram of tritium diluted in 860,000 tons of water. Not sure how many Becquerels/gram that is, but I would be interested to know if its actually higher than the 0.1 of the banana. Is there a minimum level for what can be called very-low-level nuclear waste? (As a minor side note, someone should update wikipedia since VLLW does not seem to exist there as a category and waste with less than 100 kBq/kg is explicitly defined as LLW).
- dmurray 5y ago
  Surprisingly, it's a lot more radioactive than the bananas. Pure tritium is 3.57×10^14 Bq/g [0] It's being diluted at a ratio of 4x10^11 : 1 so the diluted mixture still has 1000 Bq/g, or four orders of magnitude stronger than the equivalent mass in bananas. Of course, it gets diluted more after you release it into the ocean, but it would take a lot of mixing to get the water down only to banana levels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
  - belorn 5y ago
    Very interesting. Looking at those numbers, potassium-40 has 32 bg/g. Does that mean that atoms of tritium gives out 10^13 more energy every second compared to potassium-40? It would be funny to see how long a city could survive on just then 1 gram of tritium, and it does give a bit more context to the idea of running a city on potassium-40.
    - dmurray 5y ago
      Potassium atoms are bigger, so I think it's only 10^12 if you want to compare per-atom, but yes.

belorn 5y ago

I suspect that the nuclear waste at Fukushima that they intend to release into the ocean is of that category very-low-level nuclear waste. 2.1gram of tritium diluted in 860,000 tons of water. Not sure how many Becquerels/gram that is, but I would be interested to know if its actually higher than the 0.1 of the banana. Is there a minimum level for what can be called very-low-level nuclear waste? (As a minor side note, someone should update wikipedia since VLLW does not seem to exist there as a category and waste with less than 100 kBq/kg is explicitly defined as LLW).

dmurray 5y ago
Surprisingly, it's a lot more radioactive than the bananas. Pure tritium is 3.57×10^14 Bq/g [0] It's being diluted at a ratio of 4x10^11 : 1 so the diluted mixture still has 1000 Bq/g, or four orders of magnitude stronger than the equivalent mass in bananas. Of course, it gets diluted more after you release it into the ocean, but it would take a lot of mixing to get the water down only to banana levels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
- belorn 5y ago
  Very interesting. Looking at those numbers, potassium-40 has 32 bg/g. Does that mean that atoms of tritium gives out 10^13 more energy every second compared to potassium-40? It would be funny to see how long a city could survive on just then 1 gram of tritium, and it does give a bit more context to the idea of running a city on potassium-40.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    Potassium atoms are bigger, so I think it's only 10^12 if you want to compare per-atom, but yes.