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mrbluze writes:
"Rachel Nuwer from the Smithsonian Mag gives a good summary around a paper entitled "Highly reduced mass loss rates and increased litter layer in radioactively contaminated areas" (Oecologia, March 2014):
In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight.
... the Chernobyl area is at risk of fire, and 27 years' worth of leaf litter, (researcher) Mousseau and his colleagues think, would likely make a good fuel source for such a forest fire. This poses a more worrying problem than just environmental destruction: Fires can potentially redistribute radioactive contaminants to places outside of the exclusion zone, Mousseau says. 'There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years.'
A forest fire burning radioactive plant debris could be catastrophic. The Fukushima disaster is likely to have the same problems locally, but it poses additional risks because radioactive water continues to flow into the sea at an alarming rate, which will likely affect oceanic bacterial levels in a similar way."
(Score: 3, Informative) by pjbgravely on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:27PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by iwoloschin on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:54PM
It's been a while since I was there, but I think you are correct. The center was a well that the cesium-137 source was stored in. It was manually raised and lowered depending on experiment needs. Around the well there was a cluster of living trees, likely pines (it's in the middle of the Long Island Pine Barrens), though I don't remember. There was a distinct donut shaped clearing around the whole thing though, full of dead, undecaying trees. Very weird.
Also, yes, that's the ring. The big ring to the west is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was formally the world's most powerful collider. That was another very cool thing to tour. They can't run in the summer (not enough power on LI with all the air conditioning), so they turn it off for maintenance all summer, which meant we got to actually go into the tunnels/detectors and see it all up close.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:07AM
Only formally? So what was the actual biggest collider at that time? And why wasn't it formally accepted as such?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.