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Plutonium levels near US atomic site in Los Alamos similar to Chornobyl, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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The comparison to Chernobyl is obviously powerful rhetorically, but is it relevant? Is plutonium the most dangerous set of isotopes at Chernobyl? Are there other decay products at Chernobyl that make it an exclusion zone which are not present at Los Alamos?
It should be a scientific discussion which informs public policy, and framing it as comparable to Chernobyl is perhaps misleading.
fuck no, currently most important isotopes are cs-137 and sr-90, both with half lives about 30 years. plutonium isotopes have half lives from 14 (241; probably tiny amount) 90 (238; also not much) to thousands of years (239 and 240; most likely bulk of it). what did the most damage in chernobyl were even shorter lived (days) and so spicier isotopes that normally are given time to decay in spent fuel pools
Yeah this is an article freaking people out over Pu-238, Pu-239, and Pu-240. All of which are alpha emitters (radiation easily blocked by clothes and skin) and all of them have half lives measures in years or decades.
This article has juuust enough detail to get a reader riled up without actually educating them enough to understand what they are reading.
Okay this might sound like conspiracy theory bullshit.... But is there any major country preparing to construct nuclear power plants, or is there a looming decision about nuclear power over fossil fuels coming soon?
Because this is the exact kind of news article you see get pushed whenever someone starts making nuclear power seem like the viable option that it is.
Anything that makes it seem like it's seconds from ending all life on the planet as we know it.
Anything to demonize it.
Anything to turn public perception negative.
Only to people who haven't been paying attention. Russia has been funding Environmental Groups in the US and the EU for decades with the goal of disrupting domestic energy supplies and ensuring reliance on Russian Oil and Gas.
If you web search a phrase like "Russia funded environmental groups" you can find plenty of references, especially around 2014 and again in 2022, but if you dig further you can find research on this dating back to the 1980s.
Here's an article with reliable sources that specifically addresses nuclear.
BTW, if you remember the "Earth Liberation Front" (ELF) that was actively burning shit down (literal arson) back in the 1990s then this article from the New York Times will interest you. One of the ELF's founding members, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, was being hunted by the FBI so he fled home...to Russia.
Yes. China is building quite a few but more relevant is that here in the United States a traditional one was just completed, we have two more in the permitting process, and we have at least one (if not two) next-gen Natrium SMR's under way.
The anti-nuclear coverage isn't all Russian propaganda of course but articles like this one should be viewed with deep suspicion.
I haven't really been keeping up with nuclear news, so that's actually a surprise to me that so many reactors are in-progress!
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the narrative of some is "nuclear is evil" instead of "China is beating us on energy, BUILD MORE TO BEAT THEM!" But oil lobbies really do have their claws into every facet of government... Quadruple down on fossil fuels and smear campaigns, money machine go brrr.
As a tangent, I hate the way reporting often lists the longest half lives, ignoring that fact that the longer the half life of an isotope is, the less dangerous it is. Highly radioactive isotopes are highly radioactive because they have short half lives.
If you think Pu~238~ with its half-life of 90 years is scary, check out Fe~60~ with its half-life of 2.6 million years. That must be super scary!
/s
I'm aware that everything with a higher atomic weight than iron wants to be iron.