Chernobyl-ni
CBS carries the AP story: Japan raises nuclear alert to Chernobyl level. That is the top of heap, a level 7, but the AP story doesn’t provide any information as to why it was done.
For a much more technical discussion of what happened “George Washington” at Naked Capitalism releases his inner geek.
The short form is that the Japanese nuclear safety people started looking at the numbers being compiled by people other than TEPCO, including numbers from monitoring stations in the US, and had an OMG! moment. They have finally realized that the fires at the facility were the result of fuel rods in the spent fuel pools being exposed and spewing radioactive particles. They have discovered that it wasn’t just iodine and some cesium, but there was strontium-90 released. We have gone from half-lives measured in days, through those measured in decades, and arrived at those measured in millennia.
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I guess the only surprise here is that their nuclear safety people didn’t expect this. They could have read your blog weeks ago and saved themselves some heartache. (I would put a smiley face, but I know this isn’t very funny.)
Question for you: You’re familiar with Russia – wasn’t the Chernobyl plant kind of in the middle of nowhere – some very rural site? You know, with a town built basically for the workers for the facility. As a consequence, wouldn’t it be easier to isolate people and reduce the effects of radiation to the wider public in that area than it will be in Japan? Japan is so crowded, might we not expect this to be a greater disaster – at least in the regards to the public and radiation related illnesses?
Well, that turned out to be several questions, didn’t it…?
The news here tonight was reporting on the ongoing aftershocks in Japan, and worsening problems at the Fukushima nuclear plants. The Authorities here decided to test Albacore tuna & Kobe beef imported from Japan (mainly used in Sushi here) or other products that contained fish caught in Japan waters, and discovered increased levels of radioactive contamination, though they said it’s not a health concern yet, but will continue monitoring. Nice… No more Sushi for me! (Though, I stopped eating sushi some years ago after ending up in Emergency with severe food poisoning after eating some in Sydney).
Hi Juanita, 🙂
There’s a Wiki with all the info on the Chernobyl disaster here:
Wikipedia: Chernobyl disaster
And this is the Wiki for the closest town to the reactor, Pripyat:
Wikipedia: Pripyat (city)
And yes, it was created (founded) in 1970 primarily to house workers for the plant. At the time of the disaster, there were about 50,000 residents.
The biggest problem with the Chernobyl disaster, was that it affected a huge part of Europe. Contamination has been found as far as Italy, Germany and Greece, with Sweden & Finland getting the worst of it (discounting the then Soviet states of Ukraine – where Chernobyl was located, Belarus & Russia). The USSR didn’t tell anyone about the disaster for a few days until radiation alarms went off at a Nuclear power plan in Sweden, over 1,000 KM (over 620 miles) away.
(Bryan, or anyone… feel free to correct or add!) 😉
Thankfully (sic), Japan is somewhat more isolated than the Ukraine, but it will still cause problems for the rest of the World.
I just came across this news item:
Japan Nuclear Meltdown: Radiation Contaminated Albacore Tuna Heading to U.S.
On that note… bed for me! G’night all. 🙂
There is a very good reason that the location of Chernobyl was sparsely populated – the Pripyat Marshes. The Marshes are the watershed and source of the “black earth” for one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. All of the rivers, whether going North into the Baltic or South to the Black Sea originate in the Marshes.
The Marshes have historically been a major defensive barrier for the Slavs, forcing attacking groups North to the Polish plain, and have provided sanctuary to Slavs facing attacks from the South. The “Rus”. the original Slavs who later spread outwards to become the various Slavic peoples originally settled South of the Marshes on its rivers. One of the original settlements was on the Ros river, from which their name is derived [The country is actually named Rossia, not Russia.]
Putting the reactor there pretty much ensured polluting all of Western Russia’s water supply if anything went wrong.
Because the Carpathian Mountains are just to the West of the Marshes, the location ensures that the prevailing winds will blow towards Poland and Scandinavia, with some slipping over the top.
The entire complex was built on a swamp, with few roads or facilities. Few people lived there, but it was the source of fertile soil for East European agriculture.
No problems, right?
What am I missing here? The wiki on strontium gives a half-life of 28.90 years for 90Sr. What isotope has a half-life measured in millennia?
I guess I was thinking of immediate health consequences of high radiation – the closer to the site, the higher the dose of radiation. My thoughts were that Japan appeared to have a much higher population in close proximity to the site than would have been in Russia. Didn’t mean to imply that Chernobyl wasn’t a horrible disaster, but then again, I surely didn’t realize the full implication of it’s location either. Thanks for education, Professor Bryan!
So, Bryan, do you know if the people just quit farming downriver of the site, or are they still farming and eating/drinking radiated food/water? I wonder what “acreage” has been made completely unusable below the watershed.
Howdy Kryten – good to have you back online!
Sorry, Steve, “assumed knowledge” on my part.
You only find what you are looking for, and initially they were looking for the iodine-131, which is the first and most common. After they found it, they began checking for the cesium-137 which occurs at the next step. When the cesium was found, and found in the US the next level is the strontium-90.
If you find strontium-90, and there is a lot of it, the heavier and nastier stuff will almost certainly be out there. It is the stuff they will start admitting to future, because it is fairly obvious that fuel rods were the source of the fire in the number 4 reactor. cesium and strontium both react in a very nasty fashion to air and water, and they oxidize rather violently – they burn.
While ingested iodine collects in the thyroid, strontium displaces calcium in the body and isn’t flushed out, so it is a nasty piece of work without even considering the radioactivity. But it is a flag that some of the fallout from the plant is going to be a very long term problem. We can hope that they didn’t have the MOX rods in reactor 4, because plutonium is a definite downer.
I understand, Juanita. I just wanted to make the point that nuclear accidents come in two phases – the immediate effect, and then the long term effect. The long-term effect of Chernobyl will probably be worse than Fukushima because it was in the middle of a landmass and a major watershed, while much of the Fukushima fallout will fall into the Pacific and be diluted and dispersed. In the short-term Fukushima will be worse because the Japanese have not defined a realistic exclusion zone. The US-recommended 50 miles may be too small, and the actual zones established by the Japanese are only half as large.
I should have warned you that for a decade I gave a ten-week seminar on Russian history at a local university as part of the Elderhostel program. The Marshes are central to that history. At least I didn’t get into the bears and the bees, and their importance to the creation of the civilization.
The area under exclusion in the Ukraine has been shrinking and there is no way of not growing in the affected soil without starvation in the Ukraine and Belarus at a minimum. The people involved are Slavs, so they expect to be “punished” and continue on with their lives as long as they can. Hope for the best and expect the worst – that’s what being a Slav is all about.
The area under exclusion in the Ukraine has been shrinking and there is no way of not growing in the affected soil without starvation in the Ukraine and Belarus…
I was afraid that might be the situation. They probably can’t afford to move out of the area, much less to buy food from the outside. The level of poverty in much of the world is something few people here can appreciate. When tragedy happens, there are no options but to stay in place and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
strontium displaces calcium in the body and isn’t flushed out, so it is a nasty piece of work without even considering the radioactivity
Good Lord.
It is the best agricultural land in Europe, so farmers won’t leave over a threat they can’t see. The problems are being monitored, and bio-remediation, like the sunflower planting, is taking place, but it is a long-term problem. Nuclear fission produces some fortunately rare materials, so dealing with nuclear waste is a major problem.
There are ways of using nuclear power that are safe, but they require long-term commitments to maintenance and huge initial costs. I don’t see the will that gives me confidence in either at the moment.
What this implies is that the best investment you could make right now is arable farmland that can support you with use of only rudimentary hand tools. Because modern civilization is massively interconnected and could not exist in isolation — this computer I’m typing on contains bits and pieces from four different continents, and if any one of them were missing, I would not have a computer — and requires massive amounts of energy to handle all this interconnectivity. And oil isn’t going to last forever, coal has significant environmental issues (such as, say, the fact that it’s going to put Florida underwater within 50 years if we keep burning coal at faster and faster rates), and solar and wind power aren’t reliable enough and lack the energy density to power technological society.
What that means is that since nuclear is out because humans can’t be trusted with it, we’re doomed to a Hobbesian nightmare of life as nasty, brutish, and short in the long run…
I’m just a ray of sunshine today, eh?
– Badtux the Bright Side Penguin
It is decades past the time when we should stop screwing around and start doing some serious research and development, before the people that know how to do it die. The schools certainly aren’t helping to train any new ones since thinking was replaced with testing in the curriculum.