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Radiation Absorbing Mineral Found In the Arctic
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Sep 07, 2007 03:41 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
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Firehose: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)
Parent
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.
Parent
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!
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:You're not wrong, you're an idiot! (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot...
Parent
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.
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.
Parent
No way to selectively absorb radioactive minerals. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
-Lasse
Parent
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.
Parent
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)
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.
I know the mineral - it's LEAD! (Score:5, Funny)
Please use common definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
Brett
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.'