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There have been rumblings regarding some sort of nuclear incident—or possibly incidents—in the Arctic over the last month. Multiple reports, some of them from official monitoring organizations, have reported iodine 131—a radioactive isotope often associated with nuclear fission—has been detected via air sampling stations throughout the region.
The first detection of the isotope came during the second week of January, via an air sampling station located in Svanhovd, on Norway's border with Russia's Kola Peninsula. Within days, air sampling stations as far south as Spain also detected the presence of small amounts of the isotope. The fact that iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days would point to the release occurring just days earlier, and not being a remnant of a past nuclear event.
Because of the low levels of concentration, there is no health risk to the public or the environment, at least on a wide scale. By comparison, these recent measurements are roughly 1/1000th the size of what was detected during the Fukushima incident and 1/1,000,000th the concentration found in the nuclear tainted cloud that washed across Europe following the Chernobyl disaster.
After weeks without answers, the story seemed to pass as a peculiarity, not nearly an unprecedented one at that, until Friday when the US dispatched its WC-135 Constant Phoenix atmospheric testing aircraft to Europe without explanation. The highly unique aircraft are specifically designed to respond to nuclear incidents—especially those that include the detonation of nuclear warheads.
By sampling the air over wide areas and at altitude, the aircraft can provide critical data to better understand the "signature" of a radiation release. During nuclear tests, this can help scientists define what type of weapon was detonated, and, in conjunction with other data, how large the blast was. They can also be used to measure the effects and scale of other radiological events, like the meltdown of nuclear plants. For instance, the WC-135s went to work following the 2011 earthquake that resulted in the meltdown of Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant.
This leaves us with a number of unanswered questions. The first: What are WC-135s doing up there? Was this a good opportunity for a training sortie and to support scientific endeavors, or is it in response to a specific incident?
Lots of options are presented in the article, but unfortunately no hard answers yet.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:30PM
Just to head it off at the pass, a couple weeks after the samples were taken a cooling fan in a hydrogen cooled alternator on a PWR reactor in France blew its bearings resulting in the alternator blowing up at that nuclear plant. Being a PWR and being an explosion in the cooling system of an alternator the exploding parts were at least two heat exchangers away from anything glowing PLUS the explosion happened weeks after the iodine samples were taken.
Another one to head off at the pass is fission results in all kinds of random halves of atoms some of them highly radioactive iodine as mentioned which has an extremely short half life so whatever blew was booted up and bubbling like after Christmas for sure. It can NOT be fukushima contamination because that reactor broke a couple years ago. Ditto Chernobyl leaking because that was shut down decades ago. Think of it like sniffing data from dynamic ram you can do that RIGHT after you shut off the power but not years later. Probably. Maybe a crappy SN car analogy is is this like the engine being hot on a car, you can't simulate this, whatever leaked out, leaked out of something that was running a couple weeks ago. This isn't from the famous Russian sub graveyard because the reactor this leaked out of was booted up around the new year, and rusty hulks in the Russian sub graveyard have been cold (so they claim) for decades in some cases.
Those things combined make it weird. In the west if a ship goes missing and hundred dead sailors and the "B" crew gets reassigned to a new ship, that isn't staying a coverup for months. So if a sub sank or blew up, someone isn't talking and its probably Russian. Why aren't they talking? That in itself is interesting. Somebodies nuke was powered up and sank around the new year and someones gotta own up to it sooner or later.
My personal suspicion is its the French having an industrial accident at a reprocessing plant and they still haven't figured out who flushed the wrong beaker down the toilet. "Oh I washed those yellow beakers of pee from the drug testing after you went home last night" "You idiot (or whatever French say for an insult, probably something Arabic now a days) you flushed my yellow U-235 salt concentrates accidentally instead" and then a big coverup follows, because frankly what good can it do anyway.
Or some dirty bomb attempt went really wrong and nobody wants to talk about that whole topic. Or an attack on a repro facility was so successful that reporting it would literally harm national security until they can implement new policies which might require like heavy construction or even worse they have no Fing idea how to solve it (I donno, drone attack on a repro facility via the air vents or some Hollywood crap like that)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:35PM
It could be worse . . .
Oh, I thought those beakers of yellow fluid were apple juice. So I drank them. I was wondering why I was glowing in the dark last night.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by Demena on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:47AM
Do not bite any spiders.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jimshatt on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:54PM
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:41PM
Appreciate you heading off pointless speculation. But, let's speculate about that Russian graveyard. Maybe someone tried to fire up an old, cold reactor?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:50AM
What makes you think an old reactor is cold? It may well be less active than it used to be, but it's likely to be significantly active for thousands of years. (That said, so is granite, but it takes a long time for a reactor to cool down to be a low as granite.)
I find it quite plausible than an old, not so cold, reactor got some aging cracks and leaked a bit. Enough to be detectable. What's less likely is that it would only have leaked for a few days.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:54PM
> It can NOT be fukushima contamination because that reactor broke a couple years ago.
The chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority said in October 2015 that "Recriticality is physically impossible."
http://www.fukushimaminponews.com/news.html?id=585 [fukushimaminponews.com]
However, it's not impossible that he's wrong. At Fukushima, four reactors were damaged, and there were fuel assemblies stored in a pool. As I understand it, at least one of the damaged reactors underwent a melt-down and remains fully fuelled because high radiation levels make de-fuelling impractical.
The Fukushima disaster occurred in March 2011 but iodine-131 (which has a half-life of around 8 days) was detected in Japan in November 2011.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/30/has-fukushimas-reactor-no-1-gone-critical/ [time.com]
https://web.archive.org/web/20130921054024/http://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/Meetings/2012/2012-03-19-03-23-TM-NPTD/12_TM-Safety-Dresden_Germany_Maschek-Rineiski.pdf [archive.org]
http://fukushima-diary.com/2011/12/breaking-news-possibility-recriticality-again/ [fukushima-diary.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:11PM
To be a bit more precise: reactors 1, 2 and 3 were loaded at the time, and all melted down after the cooling systems failed. They had stopped automatically during the quake by rod insertion, but exponential decay is a bitch, so they were still too hot (tens of MW) to survive. Reactor 4 was empty, but its spent fuel pool was full, and started boiling.
I concur that it's possible that corium would emit fresh Cesium just because. But reaching Europe takes a while compared to the half-life, so the required emission amounts would make the Japanese sensors go bonkers.
Conspiracy for conspiracy, I'm gonna throw in Bibi having to test one of his secret nukes discreetly, now that he knows that POTUS won't say anything. (idiotic idea, since it's a bad place, and non-cesium fallout would also be found).
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:51AM
Caesium-137 has a half-life >30 years. Perhaps you mentioned it in error? Iodine-131 has a half life of ~8 days; the Le Monde article translated in and linked from the summary says that the levels of iodine-131 detected in France are 1/1000 of what was measured after 11 March 2011. It doesn't explicitly say that the 2011 readings were due to Fukushima, but they would be. Winds of 400 km/h or 250 mph exist in the upper troposphere; at that speed, smoke could circle the Earth in ~4 days.
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/troposphere.html [windows2universe.org]
I don't know what readings are being observed in Japan, but I assume that, Fukushima being on the east coast, prevailing winds blow from the west and carry any smoke out to sea. If higher counts than usual are being taken (and again, I have no information that they are), I wouldn't count on the Japanese government to publicise it.
> [...] Bibi having to test one of his secret nukes discreetly [...]
That might be, although the previous U.S. president was silent about Operation Cast Lead; he and his predecessors maintained the pretense of ignorance of Israel's nuclear weapons programme; wide latitude given to Israel by the U.S. government goes back at least to the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967. If a bomb had been exploded, there would have been seismicity (I'm not saying there wasn't).
The notion that it's a release from Fukushima could be refuted or corroborated by readings from North America.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:28AM
I indeed meant Iodine, since the 8-day half-life is what makes it unlikely. I'm not a specialist of the atmosphere, but I assume that getting up to the upper troposphere takes a little while, and with sensors now everywhere in the Daiichi exclusion zone, it's quite unlikely nobody would have noticed.
I don't expect the Japanese government could cover up any spike in radiation, especially since the very recent news of Reactor 2 close-up measurement.
The Le Monde article does point out that the absence of other elements would likely point the finger at a medical source rather than a reaction product. The highest observed concentration was in Warsaw, which doesn't make Fukushima a prime candidate.
How Radiation could have possibly made it to France, past the famous radioactivity-proof border [expatica.com], is another mystery...
(Score: 2) by WillR on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:52PM
So if a sub sank or blew up, someone isn't talking and its probably Russian.
Probably, but if we want to speculate about notoriously tight-lipped unfriendly governments, it's also possible Best Korea put an experimental reactor in one of the new missile boats they've been building and that went very badly for them.