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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: 2, Insightful) by bluefoxicy on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:31PM
The problem is you're making an emotional appeal. In Portland, they routinely fish dead raccoons and geese out of their open reservoirs, rotting bloated shit. Birds shit in that water. But then one day a human pissed in it, and they flushed the whole thing at a cost of like $60,000.
We know, rationally, that dead birds in the water are worse than some dude taking a leak. But it's just gross, so we cry about it and dump the water.
People are talking about the impact of all this radioactive water pouring into the ocean. Well, the impact is: Nothing. We have sunken active nuclear cores in the water, and they're contributing way more radioactive material than this stuff. That's right: the equivalent of simply dumping Fukushima's spent fuel rods into the sea has happened, and they're still down there.
I don't much care that you want to draw a big scary face and say "RADIATION" in a dark and foreboding force. A brick of spent uranium or a bunch of radioactive iodine pumped into the air is serious business; the long-term effects of lots and lots of Fukushima's water dumping into the sea is just the Bogie Man.
Engineers allow this kind of thing to happen because they have far worse problems to deal with, things that will actually be bad in real life if they're not attended to. For example: they would rather flood more water into the pool and have it continue to dump into the ocean than let the pool run dry, the rods melt down, and the radioactive material bore itself into the water table where it can leech in high concentrations FOREVER. Their primary concerns then become to somehow stop the need for constant flooding (fix cracks in the pool? Might be hard), somehow contain the rods (hasn't been done yet for a reason), and so on. With no way to prevent catastrophic events in the interim, flooding the pool is the best idea they have, and the real long-term damage is negligible.