I would check the numbers from those labs, if possible. After the Deepwater Horizon blowout here on the Gulf Coast, the seafood harvested couldn’t meet the safety standards at the time. Millions of dollars in profits were lost because of this, so the PTB just lowered the toxicology safety standards, problem solved…for the seafood processors, not the public. They did this very quietly of course, I haven’t eaten Gulf seafood since, and miss it dearly.
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Could it be the difference between radioactivity and petroleum? Deepwater was an oil well, wasn’t it? Afaik, petroleum poisons while radiation cooks.
My memory of the fish irradiation wasn’t clear enough any more so I had to go look at it again at NOAA’s and Woods Hole’s sites.
The levels of radiation immediately offshore (in Japan) immediately after the disaster were about 50M times higher than normal, which killed a helluva lot of neighborhood marine life.
The non-migratory fish around Fukushima suffered a lot over time because they didn’t know enough to go elsewhere. The damage was mostly from 131Iodine which, while very bad news at the time, went away quickly (8-day half-life), 134Cesium, which half-lifes at just over 2 years and 137Cesium with a half-life of just over 30 years. (There’s still 137Cesium around from nuke testing and Chernobyl.) The two Cesiums are proxies for other radiation sources, e.g. Strontium90 because if the Cesiums aren’t detectable, neither is anything else.
Two of the migratory species --bluefin and albacore tuna-- got the cesium, but not a lot, possibly because they travel constantly. By the time they got to the west coast, the radiation was not so significant as to make eating the fish dangerous; those whose lives did not end by being eaten probably lived out their normal lifespan.
The National Academy of Sciences looked at bluefin tuna caught by non-commercial fishermen off the California coast 5 months after the disaster. The level of the Cesiums was low enough that, after reviewing the data, the FDA concluded it would need to be 300X higher even to trigger a study to determine if there might be some cause for concern. I.e., it was really, really low.
From NOAA:
Two examples of these migratory fish are Pacific bluefin tuna ( Thunnus orientalis ) and albacore tuna ( Thunnus alalunga ), and both 134Cs and 137Cs have been detected in these species caught in the eastern Pacific. For public health, the levels of radiation are very low and far below levels that are considered cause for concern.
In a recent study of fifty bluefin tuna sampled off the U.S. West Coast in 2012, the smaller bluefin (recent migrants from Japan) had 134Cs (0.7 ± 0.2 Becquerels (Bq)/kg) and elevated 137Cs (2.0 ± 0.5 Bq/kg) in their white muscle tissue, while most larger, older fish had no 134Cs and only background levels of 137Cs.
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“Could it be the difference between radioactivity and petroleum?”
Absolutely, it’s apples and oranges between the two situations. My point was be skeptical of these lab findings, if they are proven to be true, that there’s no danger to the public, great. Perhaps “follow the money” best applies to this situation also, who’s paying for the lab studies, and who benefits from their results.
Many scientists suspect that the dispersant used (cortex, I think?) to drop the crude to the bottom (out of site, out of mind), was more damaging to the Gulf’s ecosystem than the crude oil it’s self. Millions of gallons of this product was used here on the Northern Gulf, and the producers of it, nor BP, would release the chemical make-up of the product to scientists, a major red flag IMO.
Oh Yes
Now that you two are done with kissy face
The corporate shill is regurgitating all over the page again
Doing his mind boggling math for everyone
So we’ll pay attention to the red herring wizardry
And not the Eons it will take to clean up the excrement left by the nuclear twits
Sorry been there
Cleaned up after you guys for 20 years
At least those areas we could clean
And your Bold Faced Lies
Get so Obvious it reflects poorly on your remaining un-indoctrinated brain
So you’re not clear on what “upstream” means
The careless lack of thought your industry has exhibited over the decades is staggering
And now you would have us believe simple dilution is sufficient
If that is the case then why store the water at all?
Cause it’s Far from Safe
Who knows
It might travel Upstream in that little Food Chain we all belong to
Cancer Anyone
Remember that BIG number we spoke about last time you ventured out from under your rock
Each HOUR 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth .
Geez and humans only use 410 quintillion a YEAR
But you must be right
Let’s go for radioactive waste instead of SAFE SOLAR
I see your inner 12-year-old is still with you.
“The corporate shill is regurgitating all over the page again”
Because if anyone holds a view you don’t agree with, it must be because they are a corporate shill. It’s a great way to insulate yourself from any view you do not hold. Also a great way to arrest your own development.
“Doing his mind boggling math for everyone”
I take it your inner 12-year-old struggles with elementary arithmetic.
“So we’ll pay attention to the red herring wizardry
And not the Eons it will take to clean up the excrement left by the nuclear twits”
The article was about dumping the water. Commenting on topic does not constitute an attempt to distract from other issues which were not the topic. I have no problem talking about nuclear waste when that’s the subject.
“And your Bold Faced Lies
Get so Obvious it reflects poorly on your remaining un-indoctrinated brain”
I’m seeing a distinct lack of even one example of anything I said that was false.
“So you’re not clear on what “upstream” means”
In the context of an ocean release, yeah. Is the idea that tritium is going to swim against the flow from the discharge pipe? How would that work, and how would that be a problem even if it did happen?
“The careless lack of thought your industry has exhibited over the decades is staggering”
Not my industry. And I’ve been plenty critical of how the old-tech nuclear industry has been run, and repeatedly indicated my hope that a new and better industry will replace the old.
“And now you would have us believe simple dilution is sufficient”
Dilution after filtration to remove everything but tritium, yes. The amount of tritium in storage is negligible compared to natural tritium, and once it is dispersed, it will be a complete non-issue. Only when it is concentrated is there any risk of biological effects.
“If that is the case then why store the water at all?”
It took years to set up the water treatment facility, so initially, all the contaminated water went straight into storage to await treatment. Now that the facility is operational, the backlog will take years to catch up on. They’ve done a quickie first-pass to reduce the on-site radiation just outside the tanks, but the highest level of cleaning is much slower, and that’s the standard the water will have to be cleaned to before it can be released.
“Remember that BIG number we spoke about last time you ventured out from under your rock
Each HOUR 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth.
Geez and humans only use 410 quintillion a YEAR”
And in the uranium we already have in storage, there’s about 400 sextillion joules of energy which we could extract with fast reactors, and this could be clean, flexible, on-demand power that takes up very little area.
“But you must be right
Let’s go for radioactive waste instead of SAFE SOLAR”
Certain kinds of fast reactors should be able to consume and convert the waste we have in the process of producing large amounts of carbon-free energy. And with flexible nuclear, we wouldn’t be forced to choose between solar and nuclear. We could have both.
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I don’t think you appreciate the lengths that non-industry people go to understand your side of the issue. And your presentation of that position. There is more than one level of what amounts to patronization that happens in these discussions. I think what is meant is that you discuss this based only on an industry specific analysis that you consider to be not only the only appropriate standard that has to be met but any criticism as well. Discounting some very huge flaws and in my opinion a history of abuse and neglect that you parse into revenue streams, and questionable practices regulated by industry with a vested interested in the outcome that doesn’t include responsibility for the harm it creates or see the big picture in terms of accountability. So you get comments like the one you just responded to and the people of Fukushima will get there homes back in a few hundred years but never the way it was before. This will not only change their lives, but the lives of their children and grandchildren.
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I can very much tell the difference between people who are actually trying to understand my position, and those who go to lengths to keep their minds closed, and those who want to keep others from understanding me. And while I do try to make my position clear, I realize some of the concepts can be complex, so I’m happy to answer any pertinent questions that I can.
“There is more than one level of what amounts to patronization that happens in these discussions.”
When people act like children, I have no problem treating them like children.
“I think what is meant is that you discuss this based only on an industry specific analysis that you consider to be not only the only appropriate standard that has to be met but any criticism as well.”
I strive for factual and scientific accuracy. My view is that facts and science are not the exclusive purview of any industry.
“Discounting some very huge flaws and in my opinion a history of abuse and neglect that you parse into revenue streams, and questionable practices regulated by industry with a vested interested in the outcome that doesn’t include responsibility for the harm it creates or see the big picture in terms of accountability.”
I sometimes have difficulty understanding what you are attempting to say as well. To me, that doesn’t even register as a sentence.
“So you get comments like the one you just responded to”
And I gave it the response I thought it merited.
“and the people of Fukushima will get there homes back in a few hundred years but never the way it was before. This will not only change their lives, but the lives of their children and grandchildren.”
That looks like a non sequitur. I don’t see how that has relevance to anything I said.
Ok, a couple of thought here.
I’m not sure that is the best way to treat children or adults that have child like behavior.
Not questioning your scientific literacy, maybe how that is applied to include other ancillary support services where your industry intersects with the larger community of operation.
I see this a dichotomy as your industry having more than a single function that includes environmental accountability. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.
Definitely your call there.
I think you are right, it is something I said.
I remember that one major seafood operation in Seattle(?), with a size and reputation much like Legal Seafood’s in Boston (if you’ve never eaten at Legal, there’s no walk-in trade because they’re fully booked weeks, sometimes months, in advance) had a catastrophic drop in bookings because of fear. (I tried looking up the name and details, but it’s apparently gone into the bit-bucket.)
Anyhow, the owners asked an independent lab with an impeccable reputation to cost out a definitive study, expense no object, no expectations about the result other than total accuracy. And they paid upfront.
The lab came back after several months work saying basically, but with more numbers, what Wood’s Hole and other respected oceanographic agencies had said: the fish being caught now had absorbed more radiation than was present in fish caught before Fukushima, but, in most cases, the increase was barely measurable with standard instrumentation.
That’s the only privately-commissioned study I can really remember tho I’m pretty sure a couple of smaller operations also commissioned studies by less-prestigious labs that didn’t receive anywhere near the press that this first one did.
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Maybe we are not asking the right questions? It doesn’t matter how it adds up, these reactors should never have been built in the first place. What is determined in a laboratory can be changed far easier than the entire marine ecology. Based on historical evidence, human beings have evolved to the point that they continue at the expense of every other species and the life giving planet they inhabit. Yet still incapable of making these fundamental correlations. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
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And the one that seemed to get the most press at the time was publicly-funded.
~https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/05/30/153925233/nuclear-tuna-is-hot-news-but-not-because-its-going-to-make-you-sick
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Nice catch [npi] !
“Polonium is a very rare element in nature because of the short half-lives of all its isotopes. Of these, 210Po is the only isotope with a half-life longer than 3 minutes. Polonium can be found in uranium ores at about 0.1 mg per metric ton (1 part in 1010), which is approximately 0.2% of the abundance of radium.”
Isn’t Polonium a man made element found in nature?
It is found in nature. (part of the uranium decay series) I’m not aware of any human activity that produces it.
Thanks very much. I must have been thinking of something else. It is pretty bad stuff.
“The radioisotope used to kill Alexander Litvinenko is extraordinarily toxic even in quantities less than a billionth of a gram. The LD50 of this compound is not a property of its chemistry. While other toxic metals such as mercury and arsenic kill through the interaction of the metal with the body, polonium kills by emitting radiation which shreds sensitive biomolecules, such as DNA, and kills cells. Its half-life – the time taken for half of the ingested material to decay – is about a month, leading to a slow death by radiation poisoning.”
@fern @Trog This is what I found:
Polonium is a very rare natural element. It is found in uranium ores but it is uneconomical to extract it. It is obtained by bombarding bismuth-209 with neutrons to give bismuth-210, which then decays to form polonium. All the commercially produced polonium in the world is made in Russia.
Source: =https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/84/polonium
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And Russia had a supposed non-commercial use for this material at one point (supposedly anyway - I’d believe it). That is one crazy substance ~https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/58088.
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Thanks very much. I remember reading something about polonium being a pollutant from one of the space craft landings, so sorting it out.
From Trogs article in an earlier post: Hot Tuna
“Yes, radiation in seafood seems scary. But here’s the catch (if you pardon the expression). Tuna, like every other food on the planet, already contains naturally occurring radiation. It has potassium-40 and polonium-210. It always has and it always will. In addition, seafood in general contains a trace of cesium-137 left over from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Evidently its use is based on the need for a powerful energy source for space exploration . Where
Plutonium-238 has numerous advantages.
Plutonium-238 as an energy source for spacecraft - Foro Nuclear
~https://www.foronuclear.org/en/updates/in-depth/plutonio-238-como-fuente-de-energia-para-naves-espaciales/
And that gets us halfway there. The original question was about whether polonium was a man made element found in nature. I did not know of a human activity that produces the polonium found in nature, but if humans are producing it, we might also be leaking it. So then the question becomes one of how much of it escapes out into nature.
Looks like total world production is around 0.1 kg. per year, and I think the marine equilibrium value alone for Po-210 is around 375 kilograms (with a lot more polonium on land) so humans are probably not a major source for the polonium found in nature, but even so, it would be interesting to know what fraction of it actually leaks out–and how.
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I believe most Po-210 found in nature occurs through the U-238 decay process. My comment about the production of Po-210 through human activity was in response to your comment: “It is found in nature. (part of the uranium decay series) I’m not aware of any human activity that produces it.”