Nuclear elements detected in West Philippine Sea | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear elements detected in West Philippine Sea

philstar.com

85 pointsksec32 comments

Reader's note: this is Iodine-129 (which is created in nuclear fission and has a very long half-life), NOT iodine-131 which has a half-life of 8 days and is a highly radioactive short-term fission product.

So it's understandable that Iodine-129 could be detected as a result of decades-old testing or other releases.

Bikini atol strikes again.

This is much less interesting than the headline suggests. 1.5 times background levels, of a single very long-lived isotope, is not much of an increase.

This doesn’t indicate that there has been a recent undisclosed accident or other newsworthy event as you might be imagining.

You are right that due to its very long life we cannot know when it has been produced, perhaps decades ago.

However the fact that only iodine was detected is to be expected, as the other radioactive products of nuclear fission are much less likely to form chemical compounds that are soluble in sea water, so they could be somewhere on the sea bottom.

It's a crappy title - the sea is full of vast amounts of radioactive elements.

The part of the article that caught me was that European Companies used to just drain nuclear waste (not sure what type), into the rivers in China and they would eventually flow into the sea

There are a lot of dirty sites about the globe.

* Naval Nuclear Waste Management in Northwest Russia - https://bellona.org/news/russian-human-rights-issues/nikitin...

* Yucca Flat - https://eros.usgs.gov/earthshots/yucca-flat-nevada-usa

* Hanford Nuclear Site - https://darrp.noaa.gov/hazardous-waste/hanford-nuclear-site

are just three, in no particular order.

Russia's former Lake Karachay was an impressively polluted location, the early Soviet reactors were cooled with an open loop where highly contaminated water was discharged directly into the lake. The lake eventually became thoroughly sedimented with nuclear waste, and when levels dropped radioactive dust would be blown about the region. Apparently just half an hour on its shore would have been enough to doom you from the amount of radiation exposure.

They eventually filled the lake in, I can only say hats off to the poor buggers who had to do that. I think it's safe to say they had the world's worst job at the time.

Where did you get the “European companies” part?

This quote sounds much more like “USSR military apparatus ” than “European companies”:

> decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe,

> UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, which released the isotope into soils and rivers in northeastern China.

The first part is more or less obvious, but I somehow fail to imagine how nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe can affect soils and rivers in any part of China (never mind the northeastern part)?

It only makes sense if it means Russia/USSR doing the tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing on the Far East but rather strange to call it "in Europe".

Can't see any other country in Europe which could've caused it from that statement.

More likely central Asia which is where the USSR conducted most of its tests.

France and the UK did theirs overseas. Asian culprits might be India (unlikely), North Korea (unlikely), Pakistan (unlikely), Indonesia (unlikely) and PRC (highly likely).

This Chinese study says it was dispersed through global atmospheric circulation and mentions the liquid and gaseous discharge from nuclear facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) as sources. Russian tests are mentioned as well but they are apparently not the sole or primary source.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

This news shows the progresss by 2019, but couldn't find more recent updates.

https://www.nucnet.org/news/plans-progress-for-orano-to-buil...

Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants release iodine into the atmosphere. The prevailing wind direction at European latitudes is west to east, so when the iodine comes back down in rain, it'll likely do so over Russia (emptying into the Arctic Ocean), Central Asia (emptying into the Caspian Sea and various lakes) or Northeast Asia (emptying into the nortwestern Pacific Ocean, including the Yellow Sea.) This paper has an illustration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

This is the problem with the "nuclear is completely safe" people: there's only one biosphere, and anything you put in it eventually ends up very thinly spread everywhere.

I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.

The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.

Agreed, “perfectly safe” is nonsensical. Even wind turbines aren't “perfectly safe” either: https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/daring-rescue-of-enercon-w...

"10 people being killed by nuclear power is a tragedy. 5 million people being killed by coal mining and burning is a statistic." - Josef Stalin

Source paper

Tracing the origin, transport, and distribution of elevated iodine-129 in seawater from the West Philippine Sea

Marine Pollution Bulletin, 2026 Jan, doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2025.118916

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41197174/

You know, over several decades I've come to the conclusion that you will never be able to explain radioactivity, radioactive contamination, background, isotopes, decay, and the relative probabilities, cumulative effects, etc to the general public and have them reach sane conclusions based on understanding. It's easier (I think) to explain time travel, or telepathy, or (insert whatever black-magic you prefer).

What if part of the difference in conclusions is the result not of a difference in scientific understanding, but the result of different moral values?

could you explain what moral value you are referring to?

I'm sort of surprised that ecowarriors aren't dropping radio isotopes that are not actually that bad but would cause customer revulsion in places that are overfished.

I wanted to resist a pun, but that would be a drop in the ocean.

Seeding a large body of water with radioactive chemicals would take a ship quite a while.

In the same vein, I've been surprised that alpha gal syndrome hasn't tried to be weaponized.

Great. So on top of everything else, now we have to worry about Godzilla.

Godzilla!

I'm not sure to get. They say took decades for this particular pollution to reach the Philippines via ocean circulation systems but the images suggest it's coming from rivers. Is it possible that china is hiding something?

You'd see other isotopes if it was something recent. It's hard to hide things like this, see the Ruthenium plume that was detected over Europe in 2017 [0]. Radiation instruments are very sensitive!

[0] https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/caused-plume-ra...

Which "the images" are you talking about? The article has exactly one image and it is an image of an island without any rivers.

> Is it possible that china is hiding something?

By publishing recent studies showing a smoking gun?

  UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, ...

China has a great many reactors, nuclear warheads, acres of low level waste from rare earth processing .. they have as much to hide as the US does, that said there's not a lot to gain here by pretending they don't have potential sources - but isotope fingerprints can be verified and all the byproducts from > 2,000 test explosions and the creation of 10,000+ warheads globally do get mapped and tracked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com