Fukushima contaminants found as far north as Alaska's Bering Strait | Hacker News Reader

Fukushima contaminants found as far north as Alaska's Bering Strait

reuters.com

48 pointshoward94145 comments

Read the article, this is essentially non-news with a jarring headline. Wow, an already extremely rare isotope in seawater is now 40% higher in concentration. Do you know what a very small number * 1.4 is? Another very small number. It has no health effects of any kind and no appreciable affect on the earth or humanity in any way.

Not to mention

> levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

These contaminants stories spread unnecessary paranoia among those with an already irrational fear of things like radiation.

Then they create complacency among those who notice we're talking microscopic amounts and changes.

But the thing is that this release of radioactive elements can still cause substantial problems, not everywhere you detect traces but specific areas where various factors reconcentrate such light or heavy radioactive elements - the top of the food chain and tbe arctic come to mind but I'd guess we'll find others.

Cesium is highly soluble in water, which in my layman understanding means it won't bioaccumulate nearly as much as nonsoluble/large substances like mercury and pesticides.

The issues with all of these things that are pragmatic is that the additive effect of all the little things we have done in the past 100 years over the course of a very small period of time say 10,000 yeas. So 100 fold is significant. Progress and growth is an addiction and we're blinded to any other facts in the face of that. For most of history we have basically 0% or negative growth... then all the sudden you had massive growth say 3-10% each year which was to say the least impossible a few hundred years before. To maintain this sort of monstrous growth you need to create energy and that means pollution... which adds up over time as many of our technologies are based around things that are not natural and don't break down.

Cesium-137 half-life is ~30 years. So in 10000 years any additives will fade to what, something like 10^-100 of what they've been when introduced?

Yes I actually did some more research and it seems that even in the case of Chernobyl this is not a concern in the long run. In that Plutonium is not a concern in general which has a half-life of up to 300,000 years. And most other elements decay after a few decades. So in the case of nuclear meltdowns the concerns are limited to the century in which they happen mostly.

https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl-envi...

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r...

I still think the issue exists with other contaminants but with at least nuclear energy it seems the long term effects of its use in terms of disasters and even spent fuel are very limited.

Except Pu is toxic and accumulates in the bone marrow, compared to Cs which is excreted.

Unit 3 at Fukushima was the only one fueled with MOX fuel containing 6% Pu.

Everything about this says the scientist they interviewed was trying really hard to stress how safe it is and how non-issue this is.

You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels. All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.

> All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.

Also that we are really good at detecting trace levels of radioactive materials.

That's a good point. We're REALLY good at detecting radiation. Which is why I usually chime in when an article just says they "detect" levels of radiation. The distance between detect and danger can be huge (it can also be low, but that's less common).

> You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels

.. to humans; news flash, not all life that matters is human

You're right, a lot of other animals are less affected by radiation than humans. But a lot of that is our long lifespan, so we live long enough to see the major affects of mutations.

> You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels

The article almost starts talking about bio-concentration, but veers away after talking about findings in seals.

Just because the open water concentration is well below safe levels does not mean that everything is hunky-dory. Cesium is an element that can be bio-concentrated, and then consumed as part of the food chain. It's not a simple thing to say this is "completely safe".

> It's not a simple thing to say this is "completely safe".

At those levels, yeah, yeah it is.

The biological half-life is about 70 days. There's also the issue of uptake. IIRC for 137Cs it is about 10%. So each time that radiation travels along that food chain only about 10% of 137Cs from food is taken up. You can see how fast that's going to dilute.

> The biological half-life is about 70 days.

You can't make that claim without knowing the species and the conditions. For instance, the study [1] below finds a biological half-life 4 times longer than that in rockfish in coastal waters. As I said, it's not that simple.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1...

The problem I'm taking with your comment is that while technically you're correct, it isn't meaningful.

We can always argue about semantics. ALWAYS. Every subject is so nuanced that you can spend hours upon hours better refining things. Hell, I've seen books on o-rings that are several times larger than graduate level textbooks on classical mechanics.

The point is that there's a certain amount of refinement that is "good enough".

Here's an example, using the paper you linked. They say that there is no significant difference between biological half-lives in the different sexes of rock fish. They show that males have 274+-39 days and females have 253+-37 (P=0.16). To be publishable in many journals you have to have p<=0.05. And there's a 15% error on those numbers (most likely due to small sample size). But we don't just throw the results out because they aren't "exact".

In our case at hand, we're talking about a radiation level that is __EXTREMELY__ small. Unless we want to write a textbook we have to generalize. Given that we're on a forum and not an academic setting, this should be expected. Convoluting the subject to make a point that you can say with certainty that the vast majority of marine life will not be significantly affected by these levels of radiation. Again, this is because the quantities are VERY VERY small.

And if you don't believe me, read the freaking report [0]. We're talking about levels that are only slightly above background levels. We're talking about a possible anomaly considering that several samples previously were still below background levels. This is the reason we can make this generalization of "yes it is that simple".

We can restate the report as "radiation approximately maintains background levels." If we read it this way it is clear that nothing would likely be in danger. That's why I can make this claim with high certainty. And I'm not having any of your fear mongering when the case is trivially provable.

tldr: Don't be "fun at parties" and read the report if you want to sound smart.

[0] https://seagrant.uaf.edu/bookstore/pubs/MAB-72.html

A useful perspective is that we find contaminants from fossil fuel burning everywhere.

I've read, though can't find a citation right now, that we dump more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere every year, just from burning coal, than has been released in all the nuclear accidents in history, combined.

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste — Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

—

Radiological impact of airborne effluents of coal and nuclear plants

DOI: 10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

Thanks! By "can't find", I'd meant, "not in a place where I can take the time" because my build was about to finish, sorry.

I think this SA article's title is a bit hyperbolic, frankly. The editor's note even cites the article's text having been changed so as not to say that. But not the headline...

For a comparison, remember every living being still has contaminants from the nuclear bombs detonated over fifty years ago.

I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enough but the safety features of the reactor were poor reliability engineering. "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" was one of the lessons learnt.

The reactors are leaking and contaminating ground water. The solution is to store all that water in thousands of tanks and run them through an expensive decontamination process. They are considering freezing the ground under the reactor to control the ground water contamination!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U Understanding the accident of Fukushima Daiichi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8 Return to Fukushima - PBS

> I went into a youtube marathon yesterday

Of course, this can be dangerous in and of itself…

"We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up"

This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.

Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/]

Fuku is puzzling in many ways.

Daiichi was built 10m above sea level in a region where several huge tsunamis had struck in the previous century, including one in 1896 which rose to 38m. The 2011 tsunami: 15m.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...

Also puzzling: the consequences of opening the containments to relieve H pressures, as against the consequences of letting them explode.

Also puzzling: the coast of Japan has A LOT of offshore winds. Why is importing fossil fuels a better idea than going with wind?

Whatever the source of this mistake, what's certain is that the cleanup cost will be hundreds of wasted billions. The hidden costs will be kept hidden for as long as possible ... a long, long time.

Wind farms kill more people per watt-hour than nuclear power.

> The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean.

>Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said.

>Cesium-137 levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards, officials said.

Of course it's 3k times higher, because it all decayed to Barium 137 aeons ago.

> It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier

First of all: It is the world's worst nuclear disaster. A long way still far from being a solved problem. The use of "was" here is too optimistic and not justified.

The article focuses in how radioactive stuff can travel miles and miles and cross boundaries. Something that is not unexpected but is always interesting to report and measure. Facing the data is not spreading fear, is improving our knowledge about a problem.

The water masses in the ocean are not homogeneous. Contrary to what most people think, the ocean is not a place covered by water; is a place covered by waters. There are many different layers of saltwater that do not mix (or do it very slowly). If a water mass can transport a low level of radioactivity between Alaska and Japan, is not impossible having the next month a storm bringing a different, maybe deeper water mass with more salts and a different radioactivity level. To measure just one layer is not enough to understand the entire system and shouldn't be extrapolated as a value for the entire system. Wouldn't be a wise move.

If we can learn something from the article is that USA will need to remain vigilant and keep measuring things, ready to apply quick corrective actions (and close fisheries if necessary) for a long time.

I wonder how is that comparable to contaminations due to a natural volcanic eruption. I bet the numbers will be several times bigger for volcano.

Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano.

From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA

Remember:

The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago.

Almost everything dangerous had since decayed.

What we can detect long-living and thus not-so-dangerous isotopos, or detect minute traces of short-living ones because we have very sensitive equipment means exactly nothing besides the fact that we can.

> The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

> The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

> Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous had since decayed.

Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and is pretty dangerous AFAIK [1]:

> Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the environment today will stick around for the next half a million years.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous-u...

Yeah, even longer lived things that decay via alpha particles are dangerous when ingested... high energy atomic nuclei hitting DNA makes for bad juju.

Of which Radon-222 and Radon-226 still are way more threat than some reactor blowing up somewhere.

edit: if you've got granite in the basement, be vefy afraid :)

Lead has infinite half life and it's very dangerous when ingested!

Fukushima wasn't a military breeder producing Pu-239.

Its release was mostly I and Cs isotopes with half-lifes in days. And Cs-137 with 30-ish year half-life which we have to thank for this discussion.

I think you mistook the point of the response. I was responding to the points I quoted, i.e. regarding the lengths of half-lives involved and the associated dangers and decay rates. The fact that the link mentioned Fukushima when discussing these was a coincidence.

> Almost everything dangerous had since decayed.

Is not so simple. In the decay process new radiactive compounds are being created. And this is happening since 8 years.

To have a half-life of 24.000 years is not equal to "this atoms will sleep for 24.000 years" or we could just save all that plutonium in a mayonaise jar in our bedroom. It does not work like that.

You can have a fair change to observe a case with very low probability if you have a population big enough. Each single plutonium atom can decay anytime in the next 24.000 years splitting in other dangerous compounds and treatening life and humans around.

Look at some decay diagrams before spreading this, please.

You are confusing different things. Decay diagrams report energy released and elements generated when/after the atoms start decaying and how fast. Decay diagrams can't predict the exact timestamp when a particular unstable atom will "lose the grip among their components", burst and split in a waterfall of other radioactive elements. Statistics say that unprobable events are rare, but still possible.

change -> chance

These statements are good for guide lines, but there are materials which are long lasting and highly radioactive. When you don't introduce these things as guide lines people will show you the examples where it isn't true (as seen here).

> Almost everything dangerous had since decayed.

This is where I take issue with your comment. Frankly because long lasting isotopes still can be dangerous, even if their levels are low. Excluding the effects of radiation, most of these are heavy metals. With the difficulty of the subject matter I think it is easy for people to pick apart generalizations. The subject matter is just really convoluted and required a high degree of knowledge to even feel like you can understand what scientists are talking about. Plus combine all the fear associated with nuclear.

I think you could reword it as

> Most of the material with high activity has decayed and we're mostly left with long living isotopes that tend to be less dangerous.

Also, for data I like this map:

https://jciv.iidj.net/map/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com