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from the How-About-Colour-Changing...People? dept.
Recently on Last Week Tonight John Oliver discussed the problem of nuclear waste storage, which despite a number of attempts to designate a central storage site is still stored in "temporary" sites throughout the US.
The idea of a central nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain was raised again. However one additional problem, highlighted by a consultation in 1981 by the US Department of Energy, was how to design radiation warnings which could be understood tens of thousands of years into the future even though language, culture, and iconography may undergo significant changes.
And on that note, here's an old guardian article on how colour-changing cats might be the solution.
In 1984, writer Françoise Bastide and semiotician Paolo Fabbri suggested the answer could lie in breeding animals that "react with discoloration of the skin when exposed" to radiation. "[Their] role as a detector of radiation should be anchored in cultural tradition by introducing a suitable name (eg, 'ray cat')."
And following up on that is the project The Ray Cat Solution, in conjunction with Bricobio, the Montréal biology maker community:
New Hampshire Institute of Art's Type 1 class has joined forces with Bricobio and The Raycat Solution to help insert Raycats into the cultural vocabulary.
While Bricobio works towards genetically altering cats so they change color when in the presence of radioactive material, the NHIA Type 1 class is working to insert the idea that if a cat changes color, that space might be dangerous to others.
There is an associated film on the subject on Vimeo.
Originally spotted through the 99% Invisible Episode "Ten Thousand Years"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tonyPick on Sunday August 27 2017, @11:23AM (10 children)
Problem the first - the stuff going into the reactor is heavily refined - the stuff in the ground is diluted with other elements: When it comes out it's still heavily concentrated, and not suitable to be stuck back in the ground
Problem the second - Activation products. The actual generation process creates a number of free neutrons, which are absorbed and produce some nasty transuranic elements - So the HLW coming out is far nastier than the U-235 & 238 that went in. Obvious example: Spent fuel is about 1% Plutonium-239, which has a Halflife in the 24KYear range, and is not the kind of thing you want to inhale.
That would be the US DOE? The NRC? Europe?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Sunday August 27 2017, @12:25PM (3 children)
A very common natural uranium biproduct is radon. In difference from plutonium radon is a gas. And radon is some stuff you don't want to inhale but have to deal with whenever you mine in uranium-rich areas (like most places with granite). (Btw, in order to inhale put you'd need to grind it and breathe it in before it setlles since last agitation)
Oh, and it is pretty insane to bury 1% Pu239 fuel, this is roughly NEU-fuel and should be reprocessed (or just sign an agreement with the canadians that they are allowed to use it and ship it back to you in 20 years - CANDU can take that stuff with only a repackaging to fit their fuel-bundles)
Regardig the entire concentrated/diluted, either downblend it with DU (or grind it up and mix/sinter it with Th, or Si, or C) or just don't care. While still being concentrated you'd need a civilisation able to figure out how to went deepish mines while still not having figured out radioactivity for it tp be a hazard, in our civilisation those things happened just a few decades apart.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday August 27 2017, @01:57PM (2 children)
Damn autocorrect.
Should be
(Btw, in order to inhale Pu you'd need to grind it and breathe it in before it setlles since last agitation)
(change is: s/put/Pu/)
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Sunday August 27 2017, @04:03PM (1 child)
Sorry, I din't notice that one. I was still thumbing the dictionary for "setlles".
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday August 27 2017, @04:43PM
Funny (really, I'm currently chuckling).
Yeah, I had a few other as well, but that was the only that left out information.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday August 27 2017, @06:46PM
As I hinted at, we would need to dilute the stuff back down, perhaps we could mix it with the tailings from the mine where we got it. OR, we could reprocess it and put it right back into a nuclear reactor. A number of reactors don't mind if we leave the actinides in, which greatly simplifies the reprocessing and acts as a poison that makes it unsuitable for diversion to weapons.
Throw the Pu in with the fuel. The reactor will take care of the problem.
The NRC should change their seal to an anthropomorphic chicken wetting it's pants. They jumped the shark decades ago.
The really problematic nuclear waste is the stuff left over from making bombs. 100% of the waste related incidents in the U.S. were from bomb waste.
As for radioactive things you don't want to breathe, Radon is a much bigger problem as other have pointed out.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @08:24PM
No, you don't want to inhale it, mainly because it's toxic like many other heavy elements, e.g. lead. But unless someone gets the bright idea to use tetra-ethyl-plutonium as a fuel additive, there's not much reason you would inhale it. And if you did inhale trace amounts, bad as that would be, when it does decay it goes straight to relatively harmless 235U. Shit like radium is much worse -- not only does it decay much faster, but it decays through a whole series of junk including radon, which, being a gas, merrily bubbles through your bloodstream causing cancers everywhere. Cesium-137 is horrible because it forms salts that dissolve in water and thus get everywhere (oh yeah, it decays way faster, too). As these things go, plutonium is practically friendly.
I get it, 24000 is a big scary number. And it's truly daunting to imagine engineering a containment system that will remain safe through tens of thousands of years of unknown natural and man-made disasters, prevent/dissuade post-apocalyptic illiterates from busting it open with sledgehammers, and all that. But if you actually understand this stuff, that big number is good -- the fact that it has a long half-life means that decay events are rare, meaning low intensity of radiation. There's just no way around it, high intensity means short half-life, long half-life means low intensity. The factor of 106 difference in half-life between, say, iodine-131 and plutonium-239 dwarfs the variation between decay chains. (Something like 238U's radium series has between 10 and 20 stages of decay products, so that's a total of 10x as many particles/rays emitted per half-life as something with one or two stages like 239Pu or 131I.)
The low intensity of that 1% 239Pu means that, once you store unprocessed spent fuel long enough for the short-lived isotopes to decay away, the multi-thousand-year isotopes that are left just aren't a very big problem. Sure, it wouldn't be good to build a house out of them, and worse to grind them up and disperse them in the air, but they're not scary like the medium-short half-life products that can leach into groundwater and deliver serious radiation doses.
GP is technically wrong, of course, as the highest figures I know for uranium ore are single-digit kBq/g, while natural uranium is 180 kBq/g, and 1% 239Pu is 23MBq/g; that's a factor of 104 difference to "when we dug it out", and a factor of 10 even if he meant refined, but unenriched, uranium metal. But compared to, say, 137Cs's 3.2TBq/g (yep, tera), it's far closer to uranium ore than to spent fuel straight out of the reactor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @11:18PM (3 children)
not the kind of thing you want to inhale
Yup.
...nor ingest in any way.
The only sensible thing to do with this stuff is to permanently isolate it from the ecosystem.
Keep it out of the air, water, and soil.
Especially, keep it out of the food supply.
Problem the third: There is no safe dose of ionizing radiation.
Ionizing radiation is carcinogenic and mutagenic.
Getting it -inside- your body, where it can be transported to vital|especially vulnerable organs increases its danger.
...and the thresholds that governments publish are completely arbitrary.
Again: There is no "safe" dose of ionizing radiation.
Note also that when portions of Fukushima Prefecture were discovered to be above the published gov't threshold, the gov't simply raised the threshold number.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Monday August 28 2017, @09:42AM (2 children)
Only if you use the LNT - which pretty much noone takes seriously at low doses.
But just for fun let's assume there are no safe dose - then why aren't people dropping like flies from the UV-light in the sun (even at brief exposure), the alpha and beta radiation from the normal decaychains of pretty much anything radioactive (look at all the C14, K40 (the stuff that makes bananas used as a fun dose unit] or radon (avaiable anywhere where there is less than about half a meter/2ft of dirt between bedrock and air).
People are constantly exposed to between 1.2 and 20mSv (excluding the extremes).
Heck , even humans emit ionizing radiation.
As long as it stays below 50mSv/yr then why even care? Seriously. Heck, even up to 100mSv can be argued as safe but at that dose there are _signs_ of _slightly_ increased risk (less than from smoking, or being in a city, or eating badly, but still a risk)
Iirc the japanese used an initial limit of about 1mSv/year, this is less than wastelands such as scandinavia, uk, spain, denver, japan pre-fukushima (avg 1.5mSv/yr, before adding artificial sources, global avg is about 2.4mSv/yr).. then raised it to 10mSv/yr, this is beaches in goa and brazil and lots of inhabited places (like parts of spain, finland, canada, sweden, wales), and then to 20mSv/yr which still is places like beaches in brazil and natural hot springs.
Quite frankly there are no sane reason to worry about less than 20mSv/yr and at 50mSv/yr you might not want to work with radiation or get a chest x-ray more frequently than every second year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:29PM (1 child)
To repeat: There is no "safe" dose of ionizing radiation.
...and poisoning from ionizing radiation is insidious.
There is the story of the 2 year old who was exposed in the Hiroshima bombing. [google.com]
For years and years she seemed normal.
She was even a top athlete.
At age 12, leukemia caught up with her.
In order to not be a financial burden to her already-impoverished family, she chose to forgo pain medication.
She is known for her effort to produce 1000 origami cranes [google.com]
(She didn't survive long enough to complete the task.)
The really nasty thing about radiation poisoning is how long it can take to knock you on your ass.
...with nuclear zealots denying the link to the cause.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday August 29 2017, @02:34AM
No - we are not denying the link. We are only using "safe" in a non-absolute manner (kinda like how we say that it is safe to use a marble kitchentop [~70Bq/kg]).
But the Hiroshima-bombing - that was an intense dose and people within line of sight got a hefty dose (on average people got a low dose - due to few being in line of sight and not being killed by the shockwave). So, likely not a low dose incident.
In her case it seems she was 2km/1.2 miles from the blast (that was in the area of getting a hefty dose without being killed by the shockwave) which is the worst case. Then it also was stated she was caught in the black rain, by this point we can't _know_ if it was the radioactivity from the bomb or something otherwise carcinogenic that was pulled in (black rain would occur even without radiation beyond heat), but it probably was due to radiation due to being hit with a high dose.
And yes, leukemia in children is one of the few things that increase readily (risk roughly doubles iirc) at higher doses.
But - do note - there is no data that shows increased risk _at_ _low_ _doses_ (below 100mSv/yr, but there is suspicion in the 50-100mSv/yr range).
As I did try to point out more lighthearted. You are constantly exposed to ionizing radiation, and you ingest and inhale a lot of stuff that produces it (only the potassium in you is at about 4kBq), and life has evolved under even harsher radioactive conditions.
The reason why we dislike LNT is that it is based on datapoints at high dose rates. To point out just how silly that is; imagine that you'd where going to drink 40l / 10gal of water. Imagine what would happen if you tried to do that in an afternoon, now imagine if you tried 20l / 5 gal (don't do either, the first will kill you, the latter might kill you). Now you have two datapoints do extrapolate how many people you'd expect to die when drinking 2l / 0.5gal in an afternoon. That is basically what LNT is.
If you'd want to argue about low doses then point me to low dose rates. Or explain why cancer is about 20% as common in denmark as in sweden or germany (denmark has less background radiation than both, and germany has higher solar influx). The issue at low rates is that if there are any net increase it do not beat the noiselevel.
"...and poisoning from ionizing radiation is insidious." not more than from anything else, a low dose that gets ahead of the body's repair mechanism will kill slowly and a high dose will kill quickly. Personally I don't consider a day of diarrhea and vomiting before you die (acute radiation poisoning at extreme dose (over 30Gy), see, doses matter both ways) to be insidious but rather blatant.
Tl;dr - at high doses radiation increases cancer risk, at low doses nothing points to increased risk (yet), and at extreme doses it kills quickly.