A physics and engineering perspective Prof. Ben Monreal, UCSB Department of Physics
>
Understanding the radioactivity at Fukushima
~~~
>
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Dollar depreciation leads to higher inflation and ultimately forces foreign creditors to question their rationale and indeed their sanity for continuing purchases of U.S. Treasuries." -Bill Gross
Signs continue that European markets are getting tired. The Spanish and Italian stock markets, big beneficiaries of the sharp decline in their bond yields over the past few months are falling to the lowest since Feb 1. The European bank index is at a 1 1/2 week low after earnings reports from Commerzbank and Credit Ag (RBS bouncing although reporting weaker than expected earnings) were disappointing. This market action is in spite of the German IFO business confidence figure which rose to a 7 month high coming in a touch above expectations and Italian consumer confidence which bounced more than...
read more »
Tweet
Facebook
Reddit
Digg this!
March 20th, 2011 at 10:52 am
Excellent. Hope this gets around.
March 20th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
primarily slide5 – has this incident created a mineable source of Lithium? someday in the future?
March 20th, 2011 at 10:31 pm
of course if you add the word “nuclear” to anything and suddenly “fear” appears. of course “if there is nothing to fear why such a lack of info”? it’s not like the reactors are going to ever come back on line. they’ve been utterly destroyed–or i think the technical term is “broken containment.” so obviously this should be the only goal: to restore “containment” since that is all that billions that has already been spent is spent to do: “contain.” and that strikes me as the “problem with the message”: it may be that we’re dealing with just plain old “incompetence” and therefore “the message suffers.” the damage of a bad message is calculable as well…and negative…and growing. my advice? “our only goal is to regain containment” since it is impossible to “control” a nuclear reaction: it is on all the time thus “only has varying degrees of on.” Right now it appears to be “REALLY, REALLY, REALLY on.” Spraying it with water strikes me as “spraying radioactive sheet everywhere.” But that’s just me. “Letting the reactor meltdown” does seem logical to me since “that’s why we have a containment vessel in the first place.” I find it interesting that we don’t have a discussion as to why we might actually want to have a meltdown. That’s what happened at Three Mile Island “and it never broke containment.” No one can say that either here or at Chernobyl–and while this one might be “far better than Chernobyl” no one who has made this comment has taken into account the “idea of radio-isotopes running wild in a Japanese context.” In short “far from objective.”
March 21st, 2011 at 1:12 am
PAGING DOCTOR FEELGOOD! Another puff piece. I’ll pick on two pages; judge for yourself what the “conclusions” is worth:
PAGE 13
——-
FWIW, it’s easier for me to think in the old dose measures, “rad” and “rem”, which compare to “Sievert” or “Gray” at a 100:1 ratio. 1 Sv = 100 rad = 100 rem = 1000 mSv = 1 Gy.
It says here 1 Sv (100 rad) raises your lifetime risk of a FATAL cancer 0.2%. Not to worry though, as the radiation sickness will be bothering you soon, though you should recover. Get a double-dose, though, say 200-300 rad, your odds of dying from radiation sickness are about 50%, so the cancer won’t bother you much. Remember, your dose accumulates, thru exposure over time.
PAGE 29
——-
Somehow, he managed to leave out the BULK of the fuel, Uranium (any flavor) completely. Conveniently, only the “half life” of other contaminated elements is mentioned. Nowhere do you see the term, “permanent ground contamination”, rain/runoff, wind spread, etc.
His half-life for Plutonium seems low, so I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-241
Yup, should be 14 years, before decaying to Americium-241, which has a half-life over FOUR HUNDRED years.
Hmmm, what does Am-241 decay into? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptunium-237, half-life over TWO MILLION years.
Looking up the half-life and total contamination period for URANIUM is left as an exercise for the student. Guesses in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years are acceptable.
Conclusions:
1. The playground supervisor had the day off when this “presentation” was written.
2. We REALLY need a “Paul Harvey” to vet this stuff, and get “the rest of the story.”
3. Human factors, whether engineering, scientific, political, economic and analytical will F*CK dangerous SH*T up — a recent example being: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/18/BUA01IDTUO.DTL Nefarious historical examples include the case of Karen Silkwood, et al.