Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Radioactive Longer Than Expected

[G_j]

Source: ABC

Published on Sunday, December 20, 2009 by ABC News

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Radioactive Longer Than Expected
Radioactive Material Isn't Disappearing From the Environment as Quickly as Predicte
by Alexis Madrigal

Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created an inadvertent laboratory to study the impacts of radiation  and more than twenty years later, the site still holds surprises.Reinhabiting the large dead zone around the accident site may have to wait longer than expected. Radioactive cesium isn't disappearing from the environment as quickly as predicted, according to new research presented here Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Cesium 137's half-life  the time it takes for half of a given amount of material to decay  is 30 years, but the amount of cesium in soil near Chernobyl isn't decreasing nearly that fast. And scientists don't know why.

<snip>

"I have been involved in Chernobyl studies for many years and this particular study could be of great importance to many researchers," said Faybishenko.

The results of this study came as a surprise. Scientists expected the ecological half-lives of radioactive isotopes to be shorter than their physical half-life as natural dispersion helped reduce the amount of material in any given soil sample. For strontium, that idea has held up. But for cesium the the opposite appears to be true.

Read more: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/20-2

[FreakinDJ]

1. Pseudo Science - Non-reliable source - Full of Bull Shit

the more I read from these guys the less there is to believe from them

[madokie]

2. Could it be that you don't want to believe what they say?

show me something that is counter to what they're saying here

[NNadir]

8. By direct citation from the PRIMARY SCIENTIFIC literature, as opposed to a site

run by anti-nukes self referentially repeating themselves to one another" we have the following articles on distribution of cesium isotopes in soils through out Europe.

Mind you there is NOT ONE person on this website obsessed with Chernobyl, NOT ONE, who can produce a single scientific or pop website that gives a rat's ass about the continuous deposition of coal wastes in Europe, just as there is NOT ONE such Chernobyl obsessed anti-nuke who has EVER on this site produced ten scientific references about say, heavy metals (just one of many dangerous fossil fuel wastes) from coal in European, Chinese, or American flesh, land, water or sheep.

The reason? "Selective attention" which is a term for people who hear only what they want to hear.

I would be willing to discuss with any person on this website any one of these papers, on the condition that they be able to show that they have read and comprehended any of them, but I am convinced, in my growing disgust at our waltz into oblivion, that this challenge will not be met, any more than my challenge to the anti-nukes to produce as many deaths from the 50+ year history from nuclear energy as have taken place in the last month from dangerous fossil fuels.

It's a safe bet there'll be no such comment, proving once and for all that the disaster now befalling humanity is deserved, but in no way was necessary. It could have been prevented by the use of something called E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N, but education is difficult and ignorance is easy, if pernicious.

Among the many thousands of scientific papers I have collected on the subject of energy, I have a whole directory devoted to consideration of Chernobyl and Windscale, in technical terms, as opposed recycled junk from pop websites where hysteria substitutes for scientific inquiry.

My directory, omitting my name, is: C:\Users\xxx\Documents\s\E&E\Nuclear\Risk,health, and Environment\Chernobyl and Windscale.

The following papers are just some on the subject are collected on this topic in that directory, the first ten only:

1) Atmospheric Environment 41 (2007) 3904–3920 "Atmospheric emissions from the Windscale accident
of October 1957"

2) Atmospheric Environment 41 (2007) 3921–3937 "A study of the movement of radioactive material released during the Windscale fire in October 1957 using ERA40 data."

3) Atmospheric Environment Vol. 32, No. 24, pp. 4325-4333, 1998 "VALIDATION OF THE OPERATIONAL EMERGENCY RESPONSE MODEL AT THE SWEDISH METEOROLOGICAL AND HYDROLOGICAL INSTITUTE USING DATA FROM ETEX AND THE CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT."

4) Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 99 (2008) 1799–1807, "Comparative advantages and limitations of the fallout radionuclides 137Cs, 210Pb and 7Be for assessing soil erosion and sedimentation"

5) Environ. Sci. Technol. 1998, 32, 663-669 "Competition of Organic and Mineral Phases in Radiocesium Partitioning in Organic Soils of Scotland and the Area near Chernobyl."

6) Environ. Sci. Technol. 1999, 33, 1218-1223 "Predicting Soil to Plant Transfer of
Radiocesium Using Soil Characteristics."

7) Environ. Sci. Technol. 1999, 33, 2752-2757 "High Plant Uptake of Radiocesium
from Organic Soils Due to Cs Mobility and Low Soil K Content."

8) Environ. Sci. Technol. 2000, 34, 3895-3899 "Impact of Preferential Flow on Radionuclide Distribution in Soil."

9) Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 2820-2828 "Assessment of the Suitability of Soil Amendments To Reduce 137Cs and 90Sr Root Uptake in Meadows."

10) ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY VOL. 39, NO. 9, 2005, "Retrospective Search for Evidence
of the 1957 Windscale Fire in NE Ireland Using 129I and Other Long-Lived Nuclides."

This by the way, is just the first ten references in my file, and hardly represents a complete picture of my files on this subject. It is relevant to note that despite Windscale, more than 50 years ago, and Chernobyl, Europe still seems to not have a high nuclear death rate, much to the disappointment of the anti-nukes, who seem disappointed to learn that Kiev (and, for that matter, Harrisburg, PA) still have populations leading useful and productive lives.

(Maria Sharapova was just one of the Chernobyl evacuees. She doesn't look dead, but maybe I'm missing something.)

In general, when one reads journalists writing about Chernobyl, it's immediately clear in better than 95% of the time that they are totally clueless about the subject they presume to discuss intelligently.

Let me assure, as someone who is current in the literature, continuously, that the presumption of intelligence is only presumption, and were it not so pernicious and deadly, it would be side splitting funny.

I will bet that there is NOT ONE journalist at CommonDreams who can interpret a shred of nuclear science, since there are zero such journalists who have any respect for nuclear scientists or zero such journalists who has ever read a single paragraph in the primary scientific literature, especially if one defines reading as involving comprehension.

In general, journalists hate science, which may account for why they are journalists. The probability of them passing a course like P-Chem was extremely low and it wasn't like that they were smart enough, for the most part, to do science. (Apparently it wasn't possible for them to write about science either.) Journalism classes, by contrast, are relative pieces of cake when compared to science courses.

I recall one such journalist on another website, someone who I regard as a sort of Glenn Beck of energy, ignorant and evil, who deigned to inform me, who has spent a good part of my adult life trying to understand nuclear energy on a sophisticated level, that "I know what scientists say about nuclear energy because I wrote about it in the 1970's..."

Imagine that! The 1970's? There is NOT one anti-nuke who can speak wisely or intelligently about the tens of thousands of reactor-years on an exajoule scale where lives were saved from coal death. For all of them, life on earth seems to have ended in 1986 when the reactor at Chernobyl exploded.

Nuclear science research is entering a new era, a fast and furious pace has been set by scientists in those countries that will rule the future. We learned a lot from Chernobyl, but most of the Chernobyl obsessed miss entirely what was learned. Chernobyl had a lot to do with my own interest in nuclear science, particularly because I naively believed (at the start) the pure bullshit that was being shoveled by journalists then and since. When I peeled away the layers, aided and inspired by giants like Hans Bethe, another picture entirely emerged, but one needed the intelligence and skills to grasp it.

I have waited decades to see this kind of creativity in nuclear science, and it's exciting, though I regret that the US will not lead humanity into that future. Nevertheless, the wealth of ideas and approaches gives me hope for a time beyond my own. But with the abuse of nuclear science and nuclear scientists, here on this website and elsewhere in this country, it is likely we are assured that it is now too late to do what could have been done were it not for deliberate ignorance couching itself as seriousness. It's appalling.

The suffering that will take place here as a result is terrible, and history will judge those responsible harshly.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be better than everything else. It merely needs to be better than everything else. Since it is better than everything else, choosing something that is worse is, well, there is no polite way to put it...

Not since the time of Urban VIII, who destroyed the Italian States hopes of remaining the center of scientific inquiry that it was in the 17th century, has any comparable sacrifice of science on the altar of dogma taken place. Probably at no time in history has such contempt for science been the cause of so many human deaths, never mind the destruction of so much natural habitat.

History should view these people harshly. They have caused a great disaster and untold loss of life and wealth.

[madokie]

9. I hate to burst your bubble but nuclear energy is not perfect, never was and never will be

Yep the whole world is crazy except for nnadir, I got ya'
At least you half assed cleaned up your spiel somewhat, but how long will that last I ask? How long will that last.

Nuclear energy is the worst thing that man has ever come up with and history will and is already showing us that. All your boisterous bullshit will not change the fact that after 60 some odd years we still have but one use for the waste and that is depleted uranium weapons, hardly acceptable. Go to Fallujah and then come back here and tell me that radiation is acceptable on any level. Go visit with the Navaho's and tell me that nuclear energy is acceptable on any level. Chernobyl is not a good study for your argument because birds, bees and insects have such short life spans anyway.

The Mayak nuclear plant in the Southern Urals was one of the dark secrets of the cold war. It was the Soviet Union's primary nuclear complex, a massive set of plutonium production reactors, fuel production facilities, and reprocessing and waste storage buildings. and the list can go on and on.

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7018-8.cfm

Russia shuts down infamous site of nuclear disaster
Ural plant tainted water for decades
By Alex Rodriguez, Tribune foreign correspondent.

Russia has shut down a notorious, aging nuclear plant responsible for decades of environmental ruin in the Ural Mountains, a decision heralded Monday as an unexpected shift in how Moscow views dangers posed by nuclear waste.

Since the 1950s, the plant in Mayak, in central Russia, had been dumping radioactive waste into a nearby lake, contaminating drinking water for thousands of people. More than 40,000 Russians living in the villages and hamlets surrounding Mayak have been treated for the effects of radiation exposure in the last 10 years. Officials with Gosatomnadzor, Russia's nuclear safety agency, said Monday that they denied the plant a license to continue operations this year because of evidence that it was contaminating local drinking water.

"We are now deciding on what conditions need to be fulfilled so that work can resume," said Andrei Kislov, a senior official at Gosatomnadzor.

Known as Plant 235, the facility is part of a large complex that includes a U.S.-Russian project to store plutonium from Russia's dismantled nuclear weapons. The plant was the site of one of the former Soviet Union's worst nuclear accidents, eclipsed only by the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine.

In 1957 a radioactive waste tank at Mayak exploded and exposed more than 470,000 people to radiation. Officials kept the accident secret for years.

I think TMI or Hanford here in the US will and does speak for themselves

We'll be building no more nuke plants and you can take that to the bank

What I really want to know is have you found yourself a paying customer for your tripe yet?:rofl:

[MaxPlancker]

13. Your judgment is clouded by your emotionalism

DU, (initials for depleted uranium, somewhat ironic), use as weapons material does not reflect upon uranium's usefulness as a power source. DU has other uses such as counter weights in modern aircraft with but one example being Boeing's 747. Due to its density there are other uses as well. It can be safely handled by hand. Just don't eat it or otherwise breath DU dust. That is where I will agree with you that it is a problem.

I find it specious to compare US nuclear history and safety policy with that of the USSR's. The Chernobyl disaster could not, and can not, happen here for the simple fact that we use containment buildings where the Soviets did not. We do not use graphite piles as moderators for power stations either. The US nuclear industry is far more sophisticated. Note that Chernobyl was one of four reactors of that type at that location. The other three are still on line. Also note that the prime driver for nuclear weapon development, i.e. the cold war, is gone with the demise of the Soviet Union. Using the former USSR as an example of why the US should go anti-nuke is rife with absurdities and false comparisons. It is an irrational argument and therefore worthless.

TMI does not even remotely compare to the disasters in the former USSR. What were the casualties with TMI again? Hanford is a mistake that occurred under different historical circumstances. It can not be repeated, not because of anti-nuke activism, but because of the lessons learned that no one is willing to replicate. The knowledge that did not exist in the early days of Hanford, we have now because of Hanford. There are no "do-overs", only "don't do again" actions. We apply lessons learned as we go forward unless prevented by activists, even with good intentions at heart, impede said application.

I take issue with anti-nuke advocates due to their activity forcing a greater dependence on fossil fuel and all of its attendant problems. Coal fired power plants consume several mile long trains of coal per day. Coal that is stripped mined BTW and emit more than just CO2 when burned. What is the size of the carbon footprint of a coal fired power plant compared to the carbon footprint of a nuclear power plant?


No tripe here. It is foolish and short-sighted to be anti-nuclear.

[kristopher]

14. If nuclear and coal were the only options you'd have a point

But they aren't.

Renewable energy sources are a better strategy than either of the Republican options.

[MaxPlancker]

17. Please allow me qualify my post

I would add the word, "viable" to to the choices for choosing an energy source. Renewable energy sources are certainly a welcomed addition to supplying the grid, but they are not a sufficient replacement for large scale energy production and are not likely to ever be. The other issue with renew-ables like wind and solar is that they are intermittent and there is no viable energy storage medium that can hold the grid up until the wind or solar pick up again. Hopefully in the future these issues can be solved, but we live in the here and now.

Our energy grid is a "legacy" system in that it originated over a century ago and evolved from then on. It has no party affiliation.

[kristopher]

19. That is absolutely FALSE.

I will guarantee that you cannot produce one legitimate peer reviewed piece of literature that demonstrates your claim. However, there are literally hundreds of scientists and engineers that contradict you. Nuclear energy is too expensive, takes too long to build, and has significant environmental and weapons proliferation issues. None of those are associated with a diverse portfolio of renewable energy.
Fundamental to this analysis is a resource and technology assessment:

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[kristopher]

20. Funny how these type claims about renewables are NEVER supported with discussion or evidence

[madokie]

21. bullshit washes away in the rain I guess is the only answer I have

And what you're saying is true, I've noticed it also.

[madokie]

15. Whatever you think there

TMI couldn't happen either or so they were saying. While in actuality we dodged a bullet there. Your being in denial is not going to change the facts. Nuclear power is ideally suited for one thing and that one thing goes boom in a big way.
Oh and btw, what do you do with those Issues you take, Use them like toilet paper maybe?


it is stoooped and foolish to think that nuclear power can or will save us.

[MaxPlancker]

18. Then we must respectfully agree to disagree

I am not sure how you infer I am in denial, or what I am in denial about. The differences in nuclear safety between the US and former USSR are clear. Compared to Chernobyl TMI was insignificant in context.

Nuclear power in the "boom" sense is in reality quite inefficient considering the actual amount of mass that is converted to energy so I can not call that an "ideal" case. (Please understand that I am speaking from a strictly technical perspective and not lamenting that nuclear weapons are too "inefficient" at releasing energy in an explosion. Good heavens no!)

Nuclear power is, however, much more efficient at releasing heat than any chemical process can ever be. The nuclear process of fission has the highest realizable energy density per unit mass of any power source presently viable. Hence my position that it should not be dismissed out of hand. I like the idea of using less fossil fuels for many reasons and nuclear is the quickest way to achieve that in the scale we need, both time and size. As the renewable stuff comes on line in sufficient quantities in the future then sure, decommission the nukes. One does not have to preclude the other. At least in my opinion.

Please forgive my obtuseness, but I do not understand the "issues/toilet paper" comment. Should I be humored, or insulted, or.....?

Respectfully yours


Max

[bananas]

10. The National Laboratories are run by self-referential anti-nukes!!!

What an idiot!
:rofl:

[bananas]

6. Savannah River National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

:rofl:

[Warpy]

3. In the meantime, it's provided a fantastic natural laboratory

for seeing how quickly the planet heals a place once human interference stops. The area has become a massive wildlife sanctuary as buildings and machinery all go back to the earth.

The reactor itself will likely need to be re encased in concrete every couple of decades or so as the last sarcophagus degrades from radiation and weathering. They're collecting useful data from that, too.

[wordpix]

4. maybe a wildlife sanctuary but how long will animals live without tumors and health problems?

:shrug:

[Warpy]

5. They have a limited lifespan

that doesn't allow the time it takes for them to grow. More concerning was the possibility of birth defects and other harmful mutations, but so far that hasn't happened in either flora or fauna.

It seems they're more resistant to human designed poisons than humans are.

[Igel]

7. There's already a bunch of research on that.

Medvedev noticed a bunch of Soviet articles on the effects of specific levels radiation on a variety of co-occurring species in different ecosystems, some riparian, some forest.

The question naturally arises, How allowed the researchers to radiate the ecosystems? So he got the great idea of mapping the species' reported ranges. He found the places where the species in a given article coexisted, then the species in a different article, etc. The most likely place was a bit of the Urals. Then he noticed that there were villages on old maps from the mid-50s and before that had vanished, without comment, in maps after the '50s, in precisely that area. And that there was a classified zone nearby which also vanished. A little digging showed it had been a nuclear storage facility. And just before the time the radiation research began it had stopped functioning.

Voila: Nuclear disaster in the Urals in the 1950s.

The answer: Some animals have health problems but, by and large, it's not a big deal. Sure, for the animals involved it's a matter of life and death. But they just slow down and become food; if not them, some other--nature digests that problem. Since the animals mostly are affected randomly there's no obvious skew, no selecting of one attribute over another, with the exception that sensitivity to radiation leads to reduced numbers (and that's usually a species' attribute, not an individual attribute) and can lead to a species' extinction in an area. That can affect that ecosystem irreversibly, but it's adjacent to or near similar ones so the original population has a chance of being reestablished. And, in any event, change happens, it's not like the ecosystems haven't changed in the last 10k years.

[bananas]

11. LOL - this thread was moved from EE to EE!

Apparently it was first posted to LBN, moved to EE, moved somewhere else, then moved back here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x223020

G_j Sun Dec-20-09 10:39 AM Original message

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Radioactive Longer Than Expected

This topic has been moved by the moderator of this forum.
It can be found at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x223018

The nuclear industry is hard at work on damage control!
:rofl:

[tialsedov]

12. The bottom line now is that background radiation in the so-called

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is *less* than that in Moscow, Terhan or Denver. There are minute bits of U238 P238 that poise a hazard, if any, from it's chemical toxicity rather than it's radiotoxicity.

[joshcryer]

16. Wait, you think that the mods are in with the industry?

Or what? I'm confused.