UN Chief Warns Nuclear Waste Could Be Leaking Into the Pacific (engadget.com) 97
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: A UN chief is concerned that a Cold War-era nuclear 'coffin' could be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific. According to Phys.org, the structure in question is on Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands -- where the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1958. The tests included the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb, which was reportedly about 1,000 times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the late 70s, waste from those tests was dumped into a crater and capped with a concrete dome 18 inches thick. That was intended to be a temporary solution, so the bottom of the crater was never lined.
Now, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine fear nuclear waste could be leaking from the pit. They're also concerned about cracks in the concrete, which they worry could break apart if hit by a tropical cyclone. Guterres says the Pacific's nuclear history needs to be addressed. Further reading: The Washington Post
Now, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine fear nuclear waste could be leaking from the pit. They're also concerned about cracks in the concrete, which they worry could break apart if hit by a tropical cyclone. Guterres says the Pacific's nuclear history needs to be addressed. Further reading: The Washington Post
Could be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this easy to test? If the radiation levels are anywhere near worrisome, a simple inspection with a geiger counter should tell us what we need to know without fear-mongering.
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Re: Could it be that you're not a radioactivity ex (Score:1)
If we can't detect it in the water, then the leak has not become dangerous. You are obviously not one of those scientists who understands this topic.
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You obviously don't understand radioactivity. You can pick up uranium off the ground in the Grand Canyon. A geiger counter will show elevated levels of radiation but nowhere near dangerous to organisms. If it's leaking at that rate or less, there is no problem, the isotopes will leak into the ocean and disperse. The problem would be if massive amounts of toxic waste are suddenly and in great volumes being released into the ocean.
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Re:Could be? (Score:4, Insightful)
of all the shit that actually is leaking into the ocean every fucking day, and actually has potential to do actual significant harm, this gets a slashdot headline.
why?
Because OMG RADIOACTIVE!
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Because OMG RADIOACTIVE!
And while that may not be appropriate wrt atomic energy, it certainly is appropriate when it comes to atomic BOMBS.
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Isn't this easy to test? If the radiation levels are anywhere near worrisome, a simple inspection with a geiger counter should tell us what we need to know without fear-mongering.
It is extremely likley that the dome is leaking it has no bottom seal. Coupled with the one Fukushima reactor open to the sea, we have quite a nice cocktail brewing.
Re: Could be? (Score:2)
Ok, so we can detect the radiation from Fukushima in California, yet according to experts, the radiation leaked into the water becomes "safe" before you get out 30km out or so.
So, if we can't detect this shit in California, then it stands to reason it's impact is even smaller than Fukushima.
Why should anyone care that there's a 20km patch of unusable ocean?
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Why should anyone care that there's a 20km patch of unusable ocean?
The patch of ocean is in an island cluster that people call 'home.'
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Why should anyone care that there's a 20km patch of unusable ocean?
The patch of ocean is in an island cluster that people call 'home.'
The people who lived there were told they could move back. Turned out to not be true at all.
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The Geiger counter tells you almost nothing. It does not even reliably tell you whether to run or not. You need a full radio-spectrum to know how dangerous things are and even then the most dangerous things (high-energy Alpha emitters, great for causing lung-cancer at very small dosages) are hard to measure.
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Yeah, um, alpha particles are blocked by human skin. The article is about nuclear waste in the pacific. If you're breathing the pacific, you have more important problems on your plate than lung cancer. Correct me if you think I'm wrong[1], but I suspect that radon is the only gaseous alpha emitter that exists, or at least the only one that matter. Possibly there are also radioactive particulates from smoke can
FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole story is FUD.
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Except the whole damn area has a higher background count because of the literal nuclear explosions that happened over the last 50 years.
This dome was built over a god damn blast crater from one of the explosions that they just dumped irradiated topsoil into, and the workers have had elevated cancer rates and sickness, if not outright death.
But no, I'm sure they got all of the fallout and neutron-activated soil and put it in that one crater, and none of it has gone anywhere since.
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It's a bit more complicated than that. If even low levels of that waste gets into the food chain it could have a very negative effect on the ecosystem.
TFA on Phys.org isn't fear-mongering, it's quite rational and accurately states what the problem is.
Radiation vs radio-isotope (Score:5, Informative)
I think there is no such thing as a stupid question, so I'll explain.
First, you need to understand the difference between a radio-isotope and the radiation it emits. The radio-isotope is the material metal that is the source of radiation. The radiation itself is alpha, beta and gamma at various electron volts depending on how energetic the particular radio-isotope is. In this case we are talking about plutonium or pu239, weapons grade plutonium.
The 'leaking' concern is that when the US military concluded these tests the fragments of plutonium from failed tests (not all of the bombs achieved a nuclear explosion) were placed into small bags within barrels dug a hole and put concrete over it.
As you know saltwater is very corrosive. That means that because the hole hasn't been sealed seawater can flow in and out of the hole underneath the concrete. This corrodes the barrels and corrodes the weapons grade materials, first in trace amounts, then increasing as the corrosion continues. This is a huge amount of water and simply the volume would render the materials virtually undetectable as the water acts to absorb the radiation. This doesn't make it less dangerous, it simply makes it undetectable. This is the first part of the problem.
The second part would probably lead you to say "Hey dilution is the solution, right", well no, and this is where nature takes over. The dangerous thing about these elements, these radio-isotopes is they have properties that make them "appear" like micro-nutrients, which means they get absorbed by plants and animals in a process called 'bio-accumulation'. IIRC radio-Strontium 'appears' as calcium and radio-cesium 'appears' as iodine to metabolisms. A plant may absorb this, like seaweed, then something grazes on the plant, then something eats that and it continues all the way up the food chain to us.
In the ocean there isn't a great deal of iron which is the beginning of metabolic processes that carry oxygen, so it is sought after. Plutonium 'appears' just like iron to metabolic processes. To complicate things, plutonium is also chemically toxic as well as being an energetic alpha emitter.
Whilst you may say "But MrKaos, plutonium is a mere alpha emitter, this is easily deflected off paper or skin" that would lead you to the third thing to consider, Internal vs External radiation exposure. We all know about External radiation exposure that deflects the alpha emitter, so here is how you consider Internal radiation exposure.
If you, for a moment, imagine a single microgram of plutonium, corroded via seawater become a highly soluble plutonium chloride. Once absorbed into the body and deposited where ever it is needed, perhaps in the blood, the microgram of plutonium radio-isotope continues to emit radiation exposing internal organs directly. Cancer in this case depends on how much radio-isotope has been absorbed and deposited. The gestation period of the cancer is about 6 years.
Worse than this though, in the case of reproductive organs even low energy beta emitters damage DNA, particularly the germline of a species. This happens with tritium, thought to be benign, which has some affinity with fats which are mostly around the abdomen. In this case the result is transgenic disease in the next generation in whatever form the damaged DNA expresses.
I hope that explains the concern with these materials, no matter what the source is.
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The tested bombs contained Pu239, which is the highly-radioactive isotope that is concentrated to make "weapons grade plutonium". Significant traces of Pu239 are mixed into the soil and ash remaining after the test, making it dangerous - and this is what what is contained under the concrete dome.
It's nowhere near concentrated enough to be worth recovering, but it's still very much not something you want leaking into the ecosystem.
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One man's transgenic disease is another man's erect, almost-naked chimpanzee (weirdly, we mainly conceal with shame the "almost" part).
Just like some guy said yesterday that the free market ultimately self-corrects; so too does evolution ultimately self-correct.
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While I agree with you that there's no such thing as a dumb question, there are rhetorical queries masquerading as qu
Well, sure, but... (Score:3)
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5-eyed fish
A bit too hot for me. When I go out for Thai, I order my food 3-eyed.
Godzilla (Score:1)
Please tell Godzilla to enter the US, this time (Score:2)
Re: Please tell Godzilla to enter the US, this tim (Score:3)
It wasn't the Japanese who did all that Nuke testing.
No, their thing was very much testing on people.
haven't ppl been (Score:1)
Popping off nukes for muchos anos in la Pacifica
What about all those chemical weapons they dumped on purpose
Classic whataboutism .
But what about it?
And that is just the problem with anything nuclear (Score:3, Insightful)
They never do it right. Temporary solutions, putting it off, half-assing it, too cheap engineering, etc. The pervasive mindset is "leave it for somebody else". Sure, doing it right is expensive, and when it becomes obvious how extremely expensive all this nuclear crap is, some people may actually object having their tax-money wasted in this fashion, but doing it this way is far more expensive.
In principle, nuclear tech is fine. The people doing it are almost universally not.
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More expensive, yeah, but after you've been able to invest your savings in the stock market for a while, the growth should be enough to pay for remediation.
Oh right, the environmental concerns! I keep forgetting about that. Oh well.
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There's another nice shitpile of radioactive garbage in the Ohio Valley where a gaseous diffusion plant was built for weapons production, and the geniuses at DOE have decided to bury it on site, where many geologists have told them that there is groundwater fissures and it will not be suitable for anywhere close to the amount of time needed.
Yeah, they're doing it anyway. Because nobody really lives downstream along the Ohio river. Or the Missouri. Or the Mississippi.
Just like the shitpile on the banks of
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Because cost was a huge factor in the design and manufacture of the nuclear arsenal during the cold war?
You're not wrong that this was totally half-assed, but it was likely half-assed on purpose and without cost really being a factor other than some bureaucrat somewhere decided they could save a few million by doing a totally botched job and there would be no official accountability - the islands were basically made independent about 3 years after this mess was capped by that shoddy concrete, which means ne
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Have you looked at what France is paying to deal with its nuclear waste? 32 billion euros [statista.com] in 2013 alone.
France reprocesses a lot of its waste, yet it still has over a thousand specialised dumps scattered around the country to help store the 1,300 tons of nuclear waste it produces annually. They're spending 100 million euros [nature.com] each year to find out how to better deal with it all, and the huge underground storage site they're planning for long-term storage will likely cost another 31 billion euros. France is be
First Rule of Government Spending (Score:2, Insightful)
That was intended to be a temporary solution, so the bottom of the crater was never lined.
Never assume that there is a budget for do-overs. Political attention span ends when the representatives go to places like Aspen after the budget is approved.
Fear is not evidence, show me the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is based on evidence. Show me the measurements.
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We already know the area is radioactive, because in the picture you can see two fucking craters from nuclear explosions. And they buried a couple million cubic feet of radioactive shit under 18 inches of concrete less than 40 years ago, nearly all of which has a longer half-life. Oh, and the crater they used to dump all this shit in, was not lined so that water could not enter from the bottom.
Good thing there's no water anywhere around a fucking atoll in the south pacific that had a 300 foot crater blaste
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why don't you take a geiger counter over there and stand on that dome and measure it for us?
That shouldn't be a problem. Scientists check up on it all the time. And some of those beach houses on Eniwetok Island look pretty comfy.
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Yes the area is radioactive. You see, everything is slightly radioactive, it is called "background radiation". But this area is more radioactive than a typical background, because Americans exploded some 95 nuclear weapons there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
One of explosions was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which poisoned wide area with large amount of fallout.
So, the area is already more radioactive than normal background. The situation is even more complicated by the fact that water is a very g
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That's what she is calling for. There are visible cracks and we know that the bottom is probably unprotected, so checks should be done. Those islands don't have the resources to do it properly, so she is asking for international help, especially from the US since the US is responsible for creating the issue.
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And this bit..."Of course there are questions of compensation and mechanisms to allow these impacts to be minimised."...tells us why there's not a lot of motivation to "look into it".
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If there is indeed no motivation to look into it, then it's because the US dumped a load of nuclear waste in a temporary container and is now unwilling to take responsibly. I'm hoping that isn't the attitude of the US.
Translation (Score:2)
"UN Chief Warns Nuclear Waste Could Be Leaking Into the Pacific"
Translation: "UN Chief Warns Nuclear Waste IS Leaking Into the Pacific"
They're just trying to ease into give everyone the bad news.
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Low level waste? (Score:2)
Is this low level waste from the fallout, or high level waste from production?
Not new news see BBC 2013 (Score:2, Interesting)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21119774
Russia explores old nuclear waste dumps in Arctic - BBC in 2013.
I remember hearing about Russia dumping toxic and radioactive waste in the arctic in the 1990s.
The question is "Should a country, company or individual be required to clean up toxic waste decades after it was disposed even if it was legal to dispose of it?"
A good portion of high value Washington DC real estate is built on the WWI era army base where chemical weapons were tested and not cleaned up.
ht
Notre Dame (Score:1)
No one will put the money up to fix like they did for Notre Dame.
Here it is on Google Maps (Score:2)
Google map link [goo.gl].
Terminal Beach (Score:1)
In honor of this depressing, but not terribly surprising news, I shall re-read J. G. Ballard's Terminal Beach. Eniwetok!