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Spain asks US to clean up site of 1966 nuclear accident
- logdap 3y agoSeveral pounds of Pu-239? Yeah the US should definitely reclaim that.
- jmclnx 3y agoAt this point, I wonder how bad the area is. it has been 60+ years.
- croes 3y agoIt's Plutonium 239 with a half life of 2.411×10⁴ years, so still bad.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoOnly 24050 years to go.
- CorrectHorseBat 3y agoThen only half is gone though
- bombcar 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards seems to indicate most of the hazards have to do with ingestion of the dust vs radiation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sgc 3y agoIt is the radiation of course, but when it it is inhaled or ingested, rather than just being in the vicinity. Of course, that is true for many types of radioactive particles, and they do require cleanup or other remediation.
- rsynnott 3y ago> It is the radiation of course It's not _just_ the radiation; it's also pretty toxic, and, like a lot of heavy metals, the body struggles to get rid of it.
- colechristensen 3y agoPlutonium is particularly dangerous because it essentially does not exist in nature and evolution has had zero opportunity to create mechanisms to handle it.
- brendoelfrendo 3y agoIt's particularly dangerous because it is a heavy metal and an alpha particle emitter. There are plenty of both of those in nature, and evolution can't do a lot against them. Unless you can evolve tiny shields around your chromosomes to protect them from getting bombarded by high-speed particles.
- dTal 3y agoWe evolved elaborate error-correction mechanisms instead.
- dragonwriter 3y agoWhich still suck against ingested nontrivial alpha emitters. There are lots of things that exist in nature, that humans have been exposed to, and which we don’t have particularly good defenses against beyond the intelligence that enables “if a group of humans encounters this problem, some of them will die and the others will observe this and generally avoid it”.
- speed_spread 3y agoActinides (including Pu) oxidizes readily in air, spalling off radioactive PuO2 airborne dust with no external mechanism required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall#Corrosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall#Corrosion
- croes 3y agoDon't forget the inhaling part >It has been estimated that a pound (454 grams) of plutonium inhaled as plutonium oxide dust could give cancer to two million people
- belorn 3y agoThe question as I read it is about how concentrated the plutonium is in that region. Everything start to difuse given enough time.
- htag 3y ago1. Expectations of what to do in these situations should have been negotiated when Spain agreed to let US fly nuclear armed airplanes in their airspace. 2. The Spanish government is currently renting the land from it's owners. I am very curious about the rent, as this land is currently useless. I don't know the details of Spanish law, but on the face this seems like a good case for eminent domain. 3. At this point, the cleanup process would involve moving dirt that contains trace amounts of radioactive material. This has been done before, but I think this would be both the largest effort and the one in which the dirt traveled the furthest (from Spain to the US, probably to a facility west of the Mississippi River. 4. Once the topsoil is removed, then what? Replace it with top soil harvested from someplace else? Start a project to restore the topsoil with lots of compost? It'll take another sixty years. EDIT: This type of cleanup is an ideal use case for robotics, and I would love to see what technology they use to perform the cleanup. I imagine several semi-autonomous remote controlled tractor sized machines loading into containment boxes made of nine inch thick steel.
- logi2mus 3y ago1. Well should have, but I think in that time nuclear waste was dumped into the ocean. 2. long term lease is common and not that expensive for agricultural land. 3. Well done in Fukushima, I think it is not that big of adifficulty. As it is low activity waste so old mines should do. 4. Renaturation is standard in for example open pit coal mines.
- juujian 3y agoRenaturation is standard, but the environmental quality of result is still subpar. Sometimes it looks pretty, but plant and insect diversity is very low. It's a good idea to think about this -- i cannot think of any large scale example that has ecologic and not just PR value.
- btilly 3y agoI've been to https://www.butchartgardens.com/ https://www.butchartgardens.com/. It is admittedly a highly artificial example, but it is an extremely pretty reclaimed coal mine that is reasonably large, and with good plant diversity. They don't use herbicides or pesticides, but instead rely on released insects to protect the plants. (Unfortunately they have not found an alternative to fungicides to protect the roses.) This suggests at least some insect diversity.
- pvaldes 3y agoSame news in Spain: US tells Spain that is opened to clean site of 1996 nuclear accident. LOL IMAO feels like there is an increase in the perceived danger of a nuclear black swan (shaped as unnamed rogue agents using uncontrolled radioactive waste to make dirty bombs). The Putin war is clearly escalating. We are now at the massive launching of phosphorus bombs part so a "nuclear but not so much and unsigned" event is unfortunately closer than ever. Probably is in the mutual benefit for both parts to take control over this stuff and put it in a safer place.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoSpain has been asking for this for decades
- pvaldes 3y agoYes. It seems that Spain and US signed an agreement about that in 2015 that then never started. The more interesting part here is why now?
- bigbacaloa 3y agoGlib answer is that Trump came and went.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIn general, intra-alliance relations within NATO are getting more attention recently from the US, not just than during the low point of the Trump Administration, but really than probably any point since the fall of the Soviet Union (or maybe just after, with the Balkan crises). That’s not just from the US side; many non-US NATO members (Spain included) are suddenly making much bigger strides toward meeting defense expenditure targets than they had been previously. Ukraine – and the wave of interference in domestic affairs of NATO members Russia has engaged in particularly since the beginning of the 2014 conflict with Ukraine – are a big factor here.
- boc 3y agoRussia using a "dirty bomb" on Ukraine makes zero sense. The whole strategic interest in occupying and conquering Ukraine was to access their resources. If you irradiate everything it's gone for generations on all sides.
- Accujack 3y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/us-to-clean-up-spanish-radioactive-site-49-years-after-palomares-plane-crash https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/us-to-clean-up...