Firm Wants to Drill at Colorado Nuclear Site

[Kire]

Company Wants to Drill at Colo. Nuke Site

By JUDITH KOHLER, Associated Press Writer

DENVER - A company says it plans to drill for natural gas near the site of an underground nuclear blast nearly four decades ago, despite opposition from local residents and the concerns of Energy Department officials.

Presco Inc., based in the Houston area, had received permission from county commissioners to drill one well inside a state-imposed buffer zone around Project Rulison in western Colorado.

Project Rulison was part of a federal project to explore peaceful uses for nuclear devices. The Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 43-kiloton bomb at the site in 1969 to free gas below the surface.

But local officials withdrew their support of Presco's drilling project this week after learning that Presco planned to drill four wells inside the buffer zone.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050604/ap_on_re_us/drilling_radioactive_zone

[punpirate]

1. As I recall, this was one of...

... Edward Teller's wet dreams. The gas forced out of the interstices was too radioactive to use, at the time.

Some corporate idiot was hoping everyone had forgotten about the earlier test, methinks.

[NNadir]

2. Of course the real danger here is the gas itself.

People pretend that methane is non-polluting even though it produces carbon dioxide - the waste about which no one no one knows what to do.

It is likely that this natural gas is contaminated still by tiny amounts of Krypton-85. All of the other prominent gaseous isotopes excepting the terrifying tritium, which has been the subject of much stupidity here, have decayed away.

A kiloton of TNT is said to be 4.185 trillion joules:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/oct98/907545968.As.r.html

A fission event produces about 200 MeV (10 Mev as neutrinos, but we'll ignore that for now) or 3.02 X 10^(-11) Joules. Thus a 47 kiloton bomb would fission 47 X 4.185 X 10^12/1.3 X 10^(-11) = 6.1 X 10^24 atoms of plutonium 239. Dividing this by Avogadro's number, we see that about 10 moles or 2.3 kg of plutonium were fissioned in this explosion.

It is also very likely that this natural gas has slightly elevated levels of radon, but all natural gas contains radon.

http://www.igem.org.uk/radon.html

Here is the table of nuclides which gives standard nuclear data:

http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/

Clicking on the appropriate places in this table, one can find all of the data I will reproduce here as I do my calculations. The yield of the Krypton isotope, which has a half-life of 10.802 years, in fast fission of Plutonium-239 (the probable bomb conditions) is 1.28871E-03, or 0.13% roughly. This means that if 2.3 kilograms of Pu-239 was fissioned in the blast, that about 1100 milligrams (1.1 grams) of Krypton-85 were produced. (I have rounded the atomic weights of the isotopes to their nearest integers here.) The annual decay constant for Krypton-85 is 0.0641 yr^(-1). (The decay constant is the natural logarithm of 2 divided by the half-life in years.) Multiplying this by the 36 years since the explosion and performing the exponential function on the negative value of this product, we see that the fraction of Kr-85 remaining is 0.0992 or 9.92%. (This is the radioactive decay law taught in high school physics classes.) Thus the total remaining quantity of Kr-85 is about 110 milligrams or 0.11 grams.

(Note: In the years immediately following the blast, the radioactivity was appreciably higher: There were likely many highly radioactive gaseous isotopes in the area, including I-131, Xe-133, Xe-135. All of these have now decayed away.)

Now we need to ask ourselves, which is more dangerous, hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere by burning this natural gas, or 110 milligrams of Krypton 85?

I know that the nuclear paranoid - for whom ignorance is fear - will solemnly express in their normally stupid way that the Krypton-85 is somehow more dangerous than the methane and carbon dioxide that will result if these wells begin to produce. They will probably attempt to produce even more illiterate balderdash about carbon-14, or some other such twisted matters about this blast - posting lots of silly dumb misinformation from the dumb websites they dumbly read and reproduce has a symbol of how little they actually know and understand. That is the point: They can't think; they can't do simple mathematics.

The best reason for not drilling this ground is that the earth cannot afford more global climate change. Global climate change is happening right now, just outside your window. It may kill you soon. The fact that no one gets this - and that the radioactivity is national news and the methane is not - is a reflection of how much trouble we really are in.

[punpirate]

3. Please do all the other calculations for other daughter products...

... to include gamma emitters, and you're still left with an intractable problem over thirty-odd years.

I agree that a major problem is CO2 production, but, let's not forget how that gas was expressed. You want to look at this problem in terms of the physics of half-lives, rather than the health physics of it. Anything molecular and atmosphere-borne inside the home is inhaled, and can be adsorbed onto the surface of cells in the lungs.

Radon, for example has a half-life of less than four days, but the presence of alpha-emitting materials in concrete block and plaster used in Navajo housing built by workers in uranium mines from mine tailings created a significant continuing health problem for them--because of the presence of continuous fission by-products, including radon, created by those materials.

One of the fission products of such an event is thorium-230 (and is a natural decay product of U-238 which is a leftover), which is a parent of radon-222.

The problem is one of, first, rates of exposure from the resultant gas used as a commercial product, and second, of the related health physics (namely, inhalation, molecular size and chemical characteristics), which are far more complicated than simply identifying a limited half-life of one daughter product of fission, krypton-85, and attributing relative effects of fission to that daughter product alone.

Cheers.

[NNadir]

4. Thorium-230 is not a fission product. It is a natural decay product.

Neither is radon. Both of these isotopes are found from the decay of natural uranium. Fission is involved only to the extent that by fissioning uranium, one prevents the formation of these isotopes.

Much of the earth's natural gas is exposed to uranium rock formations, because such formations are ubiquitous. Thus the same concern about thorium-230 and radon-222 exists for all natural gas whether or not a nuclear weapon has been discharged in the area. In fact, 100% of the world's supply of helium is derived from just such interactions. Almost all of the helium that is produced industrially originates from natural gas wells. All of it represents the product of alpha decay, an alpha particle being nothing more than an energetic helium nucleus released in nuclear decay.

Helium does not occur naturally in the earth's atmosphere because at ordinary temperatures, a fraction of it has a velocity exceeding the earth's escape velocity. (The non-existence of helium in the earth's atmosphere was one of the first facts to confirm the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law.) Thus any helium that is released into the earth's atmosphere slowly boils off into space. (A tiny inward flux exists because of alpha particles fired off by the sun and because of cosmic rays that are alpha particles.)

When we are talking about fission products here are talking about gases, and it stands to reason that we should only consider gaseous fission products. Necessarily these are limited to Krypton, Xenon, and Iodine. Of these elements, there only two isotopes are long enough lived to be detectable after 36 years of decay time. One is iodine-129 which has a trivial specific activity owing to its long half life, and the other is Krypton-85.

Radon will, long term, be involved for any unfissioned plutonium that will decay over many thousands of years into U-235, which has a half-life of over 700 million years. The radon isotope that is involved however is not radon-222, but radon-223.

The pretense of anti-nuclear idiocy is that the mere existence of fission products is the same as them all being concentrated in one hypothetical individual. Even were some dust particles involving fission products were involved, there is no particular reason that they should all find there way through thousands of miles of pipe and kill someone.

Again, this explosion involved about 2 kilograms of fissionable material. A pipe 100 kilometers long 0.5 meters in diameter would have a surface area of over 600,000 square meters. This means that the pipe, if 100% of the radioactive material magically found its way into the pipe would be, on average, contaminated with 3 micrograms of material per square meter at maximum. Then we have storage tanks, etc, etc, and the fact that most natural gas pipes are much longer than 100 kilometers.

However, all of the fission products will not magically find their way into the natural gas. Most of them are solids and almost all of them will remain in place irrespective of what is done with the gas surrounding them.

The pretense of anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists is to imagine scenarios of very low probability and to try to assert in the absense of any experimental evidence that these probabilities are somehow certainties. This is magical thinking.

I don't approve of this test, because I don't approve of nuclear weapons, and I don't approve of natural gas. I also object, nonetheless, to magical thinking. It is, under the circumstances of extreme danger to earth's atmosphere, magical thinking is contemptible.

As I said, I expected to hear all kinds of desperate distorted nonsense to prove a non-existent danger. I also expected to have a discussion wherein the facts of nuclear science were absurdly misconstrued.

My prediction bore fruit immediately.

Cheers indeed.

[punpirate]

5. I'll accept most of that...

... since I'm not a nuclear physicist (and, it's been a long, long time since I took nuclear chemistry). You're quite right in saying that I was describing, in error, the daughter products from natural decay of U-238, as you say (but--the defined chain of daughter products from U-235 fission resembles the U-238 natural decay chain but for slight differences).

There are likely a lot of unknowns here, but, from what I read, the above-ground portion of the site was still, twenty-five years later, showing evidence of tritium contamination, along with contamination from other radionuclides--including krypton-85, as you mentioned--despite the fact that the site had been plugged and capped in 1976.

That would suggest that the natural gas from 8,000 ft. down is still fairly radioactive, even after thirty-five years.

The question is not one of how many micrograms of material might accrete on the inner surface of a pipeline. Since natural gas is a gas, it's molecular, mobile and easily breathed in--either in its unoxidized form or as water vapor--along with other ionizing gaseous components. The question is one of chronic inhalation exposure (precisely the problem I described with uranium-bearing construction materials decaying to radium, then emitting radon in an enclosed space), and I would guess that the long-term health problems of tritium inhalation exposure are similar to that of radon.

I suppose we won't know about the nature of the gas extracted until Presco gets its way and pulls some.

Cheers.

[Maurkov]

6. What about induced radioactivity?

Those neutrons had to go someplace. How would one go about estimating it?

Assuming the methane is clean, wouldn't we be better burning that than the oil or coal we would burn instead? There's more energy per unit carbon.