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Radiation Absorbing Mineral Found In the Arctic
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Sep 07, 2007 02:41 PM
from the the-power-of-suck dept.
from the the-power-of-suck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A mineral has recently been found that exhibits the astounding property of being able to remove radiation from water-based solutions. 'After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.' Also, the article notes that although only grams of the material have been found, tons of it are needed; they are confident they could artificially reproduce it."
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Radiation-eating Fungi 192 comments
SEWilco writes "Fungus growths have been found in many extreme environments, including the Chernobyl reactor walls. Some fungi have been found whose growth is enhanced by radiation. I wonder if someone saved samples of the MIR-eating fungi."
Submission: Radiation absorbing mineral found in the Arctic by Anonymous Coward
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correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I thought radiation levels around 3 Mile Island never got more than twice background? Aernt there are plenty of normal places around the word (i.e. not uranium mines/dumps) where the levels are naturally higher?
Re:correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:correct me if I'm wrong (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:correct me if I'm wrong (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that another bad analogy I see? Oh yes... Ok, lets put it into perspective then. Based on the radiation dose people were exposed to from three mile island it was estimated that you could expect 0.5 cases of cancer as a result. I.e, there was a 50% chance that one person might develop cancer due to the radiation at some part during his/her life. Now, start comparing it to risks we accept every day. The risk of getting cancer from the Sun's UV rays. The risk of getting killed when you cross the road. The risk from fossil fuel emissions. The risk of drowning in a hydroelectric dam. The risk you will choke on a peanut... etc. Basically, if you don't think the risk from accidents like TMI is acceptable, you'd better not eat any solid food tonight, because there is a chance you will choke on it. Oh, and I wouldn't ever take a shower if I were you, you might slip and hit your head against the tub.
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Re:correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I'm on Slashdot, that advice is irrelevant.
Parent
You insensitive clod! (Score:5, Funny)
I just died that way!
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Re:You insensitive clod! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:correct me if the story changed (Score:5, Interesting)
http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi03.htm [si.edu]
7:45 a.m. By now there are at least 20, perhaps as many as 60, operators, supervisors, and other persons in the control room. Although none is yet ready to believe that the core had been uncovered, radiation levels in the power plant buildings are so high that Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require the declaration of a general emergency. While state and federal officials are being informed of elevated radiation levels, unbeknown to all, a molten mass of metal and fuel--some twenty tons in all--is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel. The bottom of the reactor vessel is steel, five inches (13 cm) thick. But even that thickness of steel would not be expected to hold up for more than a few hours against such heat.
Note that the information presented here comes *after* they discovered the true magnitude of the molten blob years later. It took INEEL a good while to chisel out twenty tons of highly radioactive material with a remote-controlled jackhammer.
From the rather tame Kemeny report [pddoc.com]
e. There is no indication that any core material made contact with the steel pressure vessel at a temperature above the melting point of steel (2,800F).
Well, they later discovered that twenty tons of material well above that temperature was puddling in that vicinity at an alarming rate: perhaps no longer than episode in the series 24.
The story of TMI is not what was actually released, but how clueless they all were for a long time afterward about how close it came to dumping a Chernobyl-unit of molten goo into the Pennsylvania water table.
Concerning Chernobyl [wikipedia.org]:
All remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read "off scale". Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h), while the true levels were 5,600 times higher in some areas.
Because of the fallacious low readings, the reactor crew chief Alexander Akimov assumed that the reactor was intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building was ignored, and the readings of another dosimeter brought in by 4:30 a.m. were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, trying to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most of them, including Akimov, died from radiation exposure within three weeks.
I suspect he took one look at that reading and thought to himself, "if that reading is correct, my goose is cooked". The Soviet Union never established much of a track record in encouraging the self-preservation of men poured into the breech. Typically, your reward for survival was being shot.
Back in America, the debate centers around 0.5 cancers in the aftermath, rather than the one or two hour window between what actually happened and the China syndrome. I wonder if they made an explicit political calculation: let's rush through publication of the Kemeny report before we learn anything more frightening we'd be obligated to disclose. Under the Bush administration, those obligations have mostly been terminated. They could probably write the accident report today for a future accident that hasn't even happened yet.
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Re:correct me if the story changed (Score:4, Informative)
The point everyone forgot is that heat rises. And the second point is that unlike water and ice, molten metal is less dense than the unmelted metal. Once the water boiled out, the fission stopped, and the decay heat wasn't enough to chew through all the non-fuel containing structure, which was sagging to the bottom of the fuel zone. So remains of the reactor stayed in the vessel.
Now, in Chernobyl, the graphite did not boil off, the reactor kept going well after it started to come apart, and, well, the heat still went up, carrying the reactor with it. That "Elephant's foot" was a portion of the melt that did go down, but in the end it stopped while still inside the building.
SL-1 went prompt-critical, blew it's control rods UP into the roof, and did not melt down either. Windscale also went up, not down.
Meltdowns probably do need to be designed against, but they look much less likely to occur than originally thought.
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Re:You're not wrong, you're an idiot! (Score:4, Interesting)
There are places on earth where background is one hundred times the global average, and people aren't dropping like flies there. A tiny rise in background is a fairly minor issue - significantly smaller than pretty much any accident which could happen in any other business - but because it's from "radiation", it's endlessly repeated as proof of how dangerous these power plants are.
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Re:You're not wrong, you're an idiot! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:You're not wrong, you're an idiot! (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
*ducks*
Filtered water (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
It removes the radioactive isotopes from water, not the radiation itself.
Yeah, and what kind of radioactive material? Strontium and Cesium? Beta emitters? How about I-131? Or is it just heavy nucleotides? What about radioisotopes that happen to be toxic besides being radioactive?
I'll be happy to run the dosimetry for anyone who wants to experiment but you won't catch me drinking any radiation snake oil the Russians cook up...that doesn't start with a vat of potato peelings anyway.
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Re:Filtered water (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone knows that the Arctic is useful only for its oil fields, but that doesn't mean you can't pretend to be interested in the Arctic for other reasons--like world-saving minerals only your scientists can find.
I'm a cynic.
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Re: (Score:3)
There is another, heavier, water. (Score:4, Informative)
Oxygen has 2 isotopes, but I don't think either of them are radioactive, or otherwise very interesting.
Parent
Fooled again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Learn every day; life is too complicated for games (Score:5, Informative)
The article linked in the Slashdot story does not say that radioactive minerals are being absorbed, a chemical impossibility. It says radiation is absorbed, which is impossible in physics, in the way that that the article states.
I know that this will probably be moderated down by those who use games to avoid dealing with reality. However, it seems useful to say that life is too complicated to play games; it is necessary to learn everything you can every day.
Slashdot editors have, according to them, spent a lot of time playing games, and they are often fooled by junk pretending to be science. I'm guessing that there is a connection between their game playing and their ignorance of the real world.
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Re:Learn every day; life is too complicated for ga (Score:4, Informative)
Water can become contaminated with readioive material. There are lots of ways to filter out the contamination but they tend to be expensive because it isn;t just a few gallons of water water you have to deal with but a lake, aquifer, or river.
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No way to selectively absorb radioactive minerals. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Space Travel (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Space Travel (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
-Lasse
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotium 404. A rare, low-energy isotope of unobtanium. A naturally occurring byproduct of cheetos, Jolt and bad upbringing, frequently found in mother's basements and video arcades it is of no known use.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, a sprinkling of radiation absorbing mineral would have completeley prevented a 30GW steam explosion wouldn't it?
By they way, I'm not cynical of the Russian scientists as there is every possibility of them having discovered a new filtration compound. Rather the idiotic reporting of it as some new 'radiation antidote'.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK the annoyance no 1 contaminant in nuclear waste is radiactive Rutenium. Whatever you do it always ends up in both your "pure" fraction and your "waste" in significant quantities and has a spectrum of isotopes which while not very long lived, have a halftime long enough just to be a major annoyance. So if someone in the arctic has discovered something that absorbs it in quantity and tried to explain his discovery to a Russian journalist over one of those standard "beyond the arctic circle" cocktails known as "Vupej, poliarnikom budesh" the resulting article on the morning after would have been something like this.
So it may be not the bullshit detector going off the scale. It may be the alcohol one when applied to an illiterate journalist.
Parent
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone know more about this story (assuming there is more to know)?
Eco-friendly nukes (Score:4, Funny)
Is the ATLANTUS OUTPOST near buy (Score:3, Funny)
In Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
In Russia radiation absorbs minerals from you!
Three Mile Island disaster? (Score:5, Informative)
27-4 sounds like (Score:5, Funny)
What is the "Kolsky Research Institute"? (Score:5, Informative)
As nice as it would be to believe that this is true, it sounds like pseudoscience to me. Absorbing any radioactive substance from water just does not sound plausible, given that absorption would be a micro-level physical process, or a chemical one, acting on a nuclear-level phenomenon.
Re:What is the "Kolsky Research Institute"? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Light on details (Score:4, Insightful)
Dan East
Bollocks (Score:3, Informative)
You cannot 'remove' radiation from water; the reason water might be radioactive is that it contains contaminants that themselves are radioactive. But ordinary water - containing just 1H and 16O - is completely stable.
This highlights a common misconception about radioactive contamination. Things that are initially inert only become radioactive either by contamination or by transmutation; they are not 'infected' by radioactivity.
science??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless they are talking about a chemical that precipitates the specific elements or isotopes that are responsible for the radioactivity (in which case why is this a new discovery?), I would suspect a hoax, or at least a gross mischaracterization of the discovery.
I know the mineral - it's LEAD! (Score:5, Funny)
Please use common definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
Brett
Indirect disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Coal has gotten cleaner over time, so you can't just multiply by the number of years since the accident, but it's still many hundreds of people dead.
Parent
Too good to be true? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course - there is always the possibility that radioactive isotopes can be filtered out from water, but each isotope has a different chemical signature so it's not easy to find a wonder-material that catches all. And that without contaminating the water with other chemicals that may be poisonous instead.
For radiation shielding [wikipedia.org] Lead and Barium sulfate are two common materials. Depleted uranium isn't that bad when it comes to shielding, but it's harder to get. Then there is also the question of if it's Alpha, Beta or Gamma radiation. Each is shielded in a different way, but the absorption shield may generate secondary radiation when absorbing the primary radiation.
Neutrons are a special case since they have a tendency to penetrate most materials relatively easy and magnetic fields can't be used to deflect them either...
Cosmic radiation is actually a mix of various types of radiation, Helium nuclei, protons, electrons etc., all with high energy so the counter-measures have to cope with a mix of radiation.
And the mineral is.... carbon! (Score:3, Informative)
Small Typo in Article (Score:5, Funny)
It was supposed to say, 'Ten half-lives after coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe.'
Re:The applications are obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
The mineral absorbs "radioactive substances", not the radiation itself.
While radiation poisoning can occur due to exposure to radiation and transmutation of the isotopes in the exposed substance, that particular effect is relatively minor.
The larger concern is that in the process of running a neuclear power plant, tiny flakes of the radioactive power rod detach and mix with flakes from other parts in the machinery thus forming a radioative dust. Since dust is so easily transfered, if I touch the dust and then I touch a book and then you touch the book, you may get a small amount of this radioactive dust on you. I didn't really make the book radioactive as much as I put dust that was radioactive on it. (Radiation suits don't actaully protect from direct radiation, they just make sure you don't track radioactive dust through the rest of the station.)
My guess is that this mineral is just filtering out heavy radioactive metals (i.e. taking the radioactive part of the dust out of the dust).
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