Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com