How bad do 200,000 particles of nuclear fuel pollute the ocean?

[sweetheart]

Near where i live, a nuclear plant "accidentally" dumped particles of
nuclear fuel rods from machining.. (tailings from lathes cutting rods)
in to the ocean. This was back in the 60's, and now they are turning
up on beaches near where there is a recorded leukemia hotspot.

The focus of the media has been to "discover the problem" but i am
curious how long uranium 235/8 takes to decay whilst being shifted
along the coastline by tidal forces. Today, only a few miles of
coastline is polluted, and fishing is illegal in a few miles of water
off the coast. I'm wondering if this problem will not be 100 miles
bigger in a decade, as the halflife surely will take small bits
of uranium further afield that massive areas of ocean and fishstocks
will become destroyed.

If there was a sand-grain sized piece of nuclear fuel rod on a beach
where you were swimming, how would you feel about it? Would you
get the hell out of there? I've attached a few links that downplay
the problem, as one of them is the nuclear company that dumped the
particles to start with.

Methinks the environmental disaster is 1000 times bigger than they
are willing to disclose... a dirty bomb has been let off and they
are unwilling to admit it, for fear of seriously scaring the public.

http://www.sepa.org.uk/radioactivity/dpag/index.htm

http://www.foodstandards.gov.uk/scotland/fsascotwork/dounreay

This is the party that dumped the particles:
http://www.ukaea.org.uk/dounreay/consultation_dounreay_particles.htm

My concern is that the focuses are incredibly short term, and that
the environmental damage looks to last several hundred years.

I figure that for every particle they find, there are 1000 they
can't see. How would you go about cleaning up nuclear fuel rod
bits on the ocean bed?

[htuttle]

1. The half life of Uranium 238 is 4.4 billion years

For U-235, it's a far more reasonable 700 million years, and for U-234, it 's a mere 246,000 years.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/uranium.htm

Then again, it's probably still kind of dangerous at half the radioactivity level, especially if ingested, so you might want to double that time period.

[theivoryqueen]

2. cool site, BTW

and don't eat the radioactive sandsized particles.

[sweetheart]

3. by that standard, its worth...

sending down divers with underwater hoovers(vacuums) to suck up every
bit of sand in a few square miles before the next million years
pollutes the fish stocks from iceland to norway and denmark.

So if i ate a fish 100,000 years from now that had swallowed a hot
particle, i could die from radiation poisoning. Wow.

[htuttle]

8. Nuclear fission byproducts...

Our civilization's own 'gift' to Earth's future.

More than 100,000 years from now. At least double that long -- U-234 is quite dangerous. While U-238 is somewhat less dangerous, it's still lethal enough if swallowed or inhaled. It will certainly cause cancer. And that's dangerous for billions of years.

It really struck me what we are doing to the future when they had that 'Yucca Mountain Warning Monument' contest a few years ago. The idea was to design a physical monument that could warn future humans about the dangerous material stored in Yucca Mountain.

It not only had to last for as long as the material was dangerous, it had to communicate the danger without relying on any particular language or international symbols. Who knows what people might speak in hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years? (Assuming we're still here). I found it to be quite the thought experiment.

Here's a link about the contest (with gallery of submissions):
http://www.desertspace.org/warning_sign/uwsGallery.html

[Taylor Mason Powell]

13. "Deep Time" by Gregory Benford

Is a great book, with a chapter all about that Yucca Mountain issue. Way fascinating.

As I recall, one of the ideas involved arranging stones so that the wind created a low, ominous, eerie whistling tone throughout all time...

It's striking how incredibly, incredibly difficult it was to find a suitable way to warn people 10,000 years in the future. I don't know if they ever settled on anything.

[sweetheart]

16. interesting they did not choose the ocean

It seems they could drop the bad rods down the abysmal's in the
western pacific that are 6 miles deep, and that 10,000 years on
not much would get out.... probably safer, truth be told, than in
some place where people will be about....

Likely the problem with a really good monument, is that it might
come to be worshipped like stonehenge... with lotsa people standing
on the only lasting monument of our time period... a massive dump of
toxic sickness.

That alone leaves pause in my heart for what we and our lives stand for.

[Taylor Mason Powell]

19. He discusses that in the book...

...how making it "artistic" or stoneheng-y would attract people from far and near - not exactly something you want to do when you're talking about radioactive waste!

I don't remember if he discusses the ocean thing. It seems to me that it would be harder somehow to keep the casing or whatever from eroding or wearing away after thousands of years of water and pressure...

[whistle]

4. Well, I would say your community needs to go underground...

...for a little while:

<snip>
Half-life
The time required for half of the atoms in any given quantity of a radioactive isotope to decay is the half-life of that isotope. Each particular isotope has its own half-life. For example, the half-life of 238U is 4.5 billion years. That is, in 4.5 billion years, half of the 238U on Earth will have decayed into other elements. In another 4.5 billion years, half of the remaining 238U will have decayed. One fourth of the original material will remain on Earth after 9 billion years. The half-life of 14C is 5730 years, thus it is useful for dating archaeological material. Nuclear half-lives range from tiny fractions of a second to many, many times the age of the universe.
<more>

As for the size of a particle, my guess would be that it is much bigger than say an atom, but I'm not a physicist. The number 200,000 certainly wouldn't be much even if it is the size of a molecule. But if these were shavings that were allowed to float off into the ocean, that is a lot of contamination. Maybe the company that was responsible can bring in some antimatter and just blow the bad stuff away. That would also take care of the planet as well. :nuke:

<link> http://www.lbl.gov/abc/Basic.html#Nuclearstructure

[ThomWV]

5. The Story Doesn't Ring True

There is no machining of fuel rods at any power plant anywhere, not now, and not in the past.

The closest thing to have happened, with any frequency, to what you alude to was the rupture of the casings (aluminum) on fuel rods in the mid 50's at the Hanford Reservation. These things were dumped into outdoor cooling ponds and much of their contents spilled into the Columbia River. If you choose to call it particles I guess that's OK, but the 200,000 number would be way way low. This is a practice that went on for years and has been well documented in several books.

[sweetheart]

7. its all secret, national security and all that

The primary nuclear submarine training place for the UK, called
"vulcan" is also on that site... and they have processed submarine
reactors there, and like all military stuff, have said dick about
it. The facts as they come out: bits of "FUEL ROD" are appearing
on local beaches. I presumed they were machined. How else do
bits of fuel rod arrive on beaches?

This nuclear facility was the first one ever built in the UK and
has been the learning place... given that it is as far as you can
possibly get from london and still be on the uK main island... the
idea was to keep the nuclear mess away from london... Given that
this was the first fast breeder reactor every built in the UK,
a lotta things could have happened that do not happen "normally"
in the nuclear profession.

HOw else could bits of fuel rod get out?

[uncle ray]

15. you "presumed" they were machined?

wtf? you said they were tailing from being turned on a lathe? you just made that up? what made you think that?

and people wonder why a link is the god of all things DU.

[sweetheart]

17. did you read the links?

I know people who work in that nuclear plant, and they've suggested
that the experimental reactor used to machine the rods back in the
early 50's before they had better practices. That is why i said it
that way. The bits they've found are fuel rod.

I was not there... had you read the link i provided, or done some
searching on your own, you would have noticed the distinct presence
of the words: "fuel rod" in the descriptions of the particles.

Lathe? Milling machine? What kind of metal process shapes fuel
rods and leaves bits that might be discarded as waste?

[Massacure]

6. Uranium 238 is found naturally on Earth.

You live with it 24/7. It really isn't the worst thing in the world to deal with. Basically the shorter the half-life, the more radioactive it is. I would be far more concerned about the things it breaks down to than the uranium itself.

[BeFree]

9. I live with Uranium 238?

Got any links to back that up?

And what's to fear about what it breaks down into? If we live with it 24/7 because it's been dug up and spread around, then there is everything to worry about, eh?

[Massacure]

10. It is 500 times more abundant than gold, and twice as abundant as tin.

However it breaks down into a whole host of other stuff, and some of it can get pretty nasty. It may not be very radioactive now, but as it breaks down the problem gets multiplied.

Do a google search, I'm sure you can find some pretty interesting stuff. :)

[Nevernose]

11. Regular U-238 is really fairly harmless, unless inhaled

It's number 92 of the Lanthinides/Actinides. It's one of the few radioactive elements that exist naturally (including the isotopes, 234, 235, and 238); all the elements with bigger atomic numbers, 93+, are man-made.

When they talk about Saddam using centrifuges to create "weapons grade uranium", what they're really discussing is the use of centrifuges to separate the different isotopes of naturally occuring uranium.

[BeFree]

12. So, I can hold U238 in my hand all day?

Really fairly harmless?

Yer pulling my leg.......

[Nevernose]

14. I used to have a chunk of the stuff as a paperweight

No shit. One of my old chemistry professors gave it to me when he retired; he had a crate of uranium in his closet. The most accessible uranium in North America is in Colorado/Utah; someone with the a basic knowledge of geology can walk around on any mountainside and pick up uranium ore.

It IS fairly harmless, and you could hold it in your hand all YEAR. Of course, I personally grew paranoid of having a fist-sized chunk of it sitting six inches from my crotch, so I threw it out. I'm not suggesting you buy any as a toy for the kids or anything, but naturally existing uranium is relatively harmless, and remarkably common in nature (at least as opposed to Molybdenum, gold, or gemstones). I'll see if I can't find a link.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. Probably, as long as you wash your hands afterwards

Since the radiation is alpha particle radiation, which can be stopped by a piece of paper, or the outer layers of your skin (which are dead, and therefore not a cancer concern). In theory, the products of the decay might themselves decay as beta or gamma radiation, which might do some damage - but since the 238 half life is so large, that means it produces the daughter products very very slowly. As the EPA says in the reference given above, the risk from it being a toxic heavy metal (like lead) is probably just as much as the radioactive risk. Ingestion or inhalation (when the alpha particles get right next to live cells) are the danger.

[BeFree]

20. Okay....

But what about the claim that these were millings from fuel rods? Could I hold one of those in my hand all day?

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. I don't know, but I wouldn't want to try

Since they have enhanced amounts of U-235 in, and are made to undergo fission (at least when there are several of them together), their characteristics could be quite different.