Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

http://nautil.us/blog/chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal?utm_source=frontpage&utm_medium=mview&utm_campaign=chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal

by gdubs • 12 years ago

149 123 12 years ago

nautil.us

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

A disturbing thought is that Fukishima is an even more dire situation. The Pacific ocean will never be the same.

Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.

ams6110• 12 years ago

The planet is a big place.

cjslep3• 12 years ago

The United States of America has detonated over 1,000 nuclear weapons singlehandedly. I imagine it would take much more than 507 commercial nuclear powerplants to render the entire Earth inhospitable.

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

That's like comparing a lit-match to a gas pipeline fire. Detonations dissipate quickly - the meltdowns are a constant flood of radioactive particles into our atmosphere. Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever.

So no, I don't agree - likely the number is much less than 507 and uncomfortably close to the number of plants already in disaster-mode.

nitrogen2• 12 years ago

Are you aware that our whole planet is warmed by the decay of thorium and other heavy elements below the crust? Geothermal energy is nuclear energy.

To respond to your question, Earth would get over it, and humanity would survive even 507 meltdowns. Fukushima was an exceptional case on a 40-year-old design, so we wouldn't have 507 Fukishimas (keep in mind how many people died from the giant tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown).

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

I'm no expert, but I suspect there's a big difference between the planet's naturally occurring radiation and the high volume of unstable particles spewing out from the Fukishima meltdown everyday.

seccess• 12 years ago

"inhabitable - suitable to live in; habitable." [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=inhabitable&oq=inhabitable&a...

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

Good catch, "un-inhabitable" was the term I was looking for, thanks :)

ori_b3• 12 years ago

The pacific ocean isn't really noticing any effects. Water is great at stopping radiation. In fact, open pool reactors like this one (http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_...) are serviced by scuba divers.

The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific.

A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

sebastianavina• 12 years ago

they say the same about almost any waste... but at the end the oceans are clogged with waste.

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

Enjoy your fish! I for one am taking heed of the warning signs from the thousands of dead animals washing up on the shores of the west coast - not to mention the alarming drop in the number of sea-urchins, starfish, shellfish, and other species who simply cannot be found.

cnvogel3• 12 years ago

Whiel I agree with your statements, it should be noted that sometimes scuba-diving in nuclear reactor's pools isn't as safe and fun as originally intended.

http://www.isoe-network.net/index.php/component/docman/doc_d...

[A diver not briefed on avoiding unknown objects picked up a highly activated bolt laying on the pool floor and received a substantial amount of radioactive dose.]

muuh-gnu• 12 years ago

Please spread your religious propaganda elsewhere.

HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.

mrschwabe9• 12 years ago

How fitting that the lone voice of dissent in this thread would eventually be charged with spreading religious propaganda. Guess we should have saw that one coming!

vidarh9• 12 years ago

The radioactivity released by coal plants still dwarf the sum output of all recorded nuclear incidents many times over.

happyscrappy• 12 years ago

This makes Germany's switching from nuclear to coal quite ironic.

cjslep3• 12 years ago

I think this article is very well-written overall. However, there are still a point that could use clarification.

During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown. It did not work.

Calling the incident a routine test greatly mischaracterizes what they were doing. This wasn't some sort of daily safety checklist test nor a safety margin test, this was a full-blown experiment. Yes, like a science lab experiment, but with a fully fueled commercial RBMK reactor. This is important because the author falsely makes routine nuclear powerplant operation seem unsafe.

To properly characterize the experiment on fair grounds it is nice to mention that the experiment they wanted to test is started by carrying out a simulated emergency shutdown. This is huge. You don't call an emergency shutdown of a gigantic plutonium-making-machine "routine" (Note: RBMKs have a thermal power output on the high side). However, the bigger problem was that the authorities running this experiment treated it exactly the same way the author did.

If the authorities did care, they would have properly trained the night shift personnel with the experiment (or delayed the experiment altogether). The fact that the experiment continued with the night shift that was poorly trained for the experiment operations points to a "this is routine and should not be a big deal" vibe of whoever was in charge. I dislike how nowadays others (such as the the author) looking into the reactor accident keep espousing this giant red flag.

erglkjahlkh• 12 years ago

Also, the experiment's requirement lead into the operators disabling almost every single safety mechanism. The automated systems disallowed the actions they were trying to do, so they disconnected most important security measures.

Operating like that you can make even hydroelectric power station extremely deadly, and kill a lot of people.

dirtyaura• 12 years ago

Is there are a good article or book describing this, i.e. that they disabled safety mechanisms. I'd like to read more about it.

illumen2• 12 years ago

They were doing things in their routine. Thus it's routine.

You're misrepresenting things.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

You could not be more wrong. The circumstances leading to the Chernobyl accident were exceptional and unusual by any measure.

EliRivers• 12 years ago

I could write "Conduct improv brain surgery on the guy sitting next to me" in my daily planner and it doesn't make it routine. Calling a knife a fork doesn't make it so, and calling something routine that isn't likewise doesn't make it so.

kabdib2• 12 years ago

No, the actions leading up to the explosion were anything but normal and routine. The operators went far outside the safety envelope of the reactor by deliberately disabling the mechanisms designed to prevent mishaps.

Chernobyl was caused by irresponsible and reckless behavior. You can't paint this as everyday operation, it's not even close.

acqq2• 12 years ago

It wasn't actually any science experiment, merely an engineering step to improve the emergency process, and not even performed for the first time:

https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c01.html

"The Unit 4 reactor was to be shutdown for routine maintenance on 25 April 1986. It was decided to take advantage of this shutdown to determine whether, in the event of a loss of station power, the slowing turbine could provide enough electrical power to operate the emergency equipment and the core cooling water circulating pumps, until the diesel emergency power supply became operative. The aim of this test was to determine whether cooling of the core could continue to be ensured in the event of a loss of power.

This type of test had been run during a previous shut-down period, but the results had been inconclusive, so it was decided to repeat it. Unfortunately, this test, which was considered essentially to concern the non-nuclear part of the power plant, was carried out without a proper exchange of information and co-ordination between the team in charge of the test and the personnel in charge of the operation and safety of the nuclear reactor. Therefore, inadequate safety precautions were included in the test programme and the operating personnel were not alerted to the nuclear safety implications of the electrical test and its potential danger."

Of course, in hindsight it is obvioust that it was poorly executed. But it's not surprising that they were more relaxed doing the procedure for the second time, and again, during "the routine maintenance shutdown."

mpyne5• 12 years ago

I'd take issue with the idea that there was no/minimal coordination with the reactor operators.

In fact, the issue that made the turbine spindown test such a disaster for Chernobyl was the extended amount of time and number of power excursions that that reactor (not non-nuclear) operators had spent trying to setup for the initial conditions of the turbine test.

The test had been intended for the afternoon shift, and required reactor power and steam output to be set within a prescribed band before the test. The operators duly setup these initial conditions, but then the regional electrical control center unexpectedly asked Chernobyl-4 to remain online (instead of shutting down as planned) to service electrical demands.

The reactor operators then resumed power operations and tried to re-establish test conditions at the end of their shift when they received permission to shutdown. But this shift from power operations to low power back to power operations and back again to low power induced xenon transients, and an extremely unusual and dangerous control rod configuration, all in an effort to establish the nuclear parameters to run the non-nuclear test.

And then they turned over to the evening shift as if they were handing over a set of car keys for a company sedan, an evening shift that had not been expecting the test (though by this point the conditions were such that either shift would have caused the reactor accident IMHO, assuming no one made the brave call to abort the test completely).

I'm willing to grant that professional nuclear testing groups were not actually involved in the design and implementation of the test, but it's simply not true that this was the result of a bunch of steam plant engineers running a test that was felt to be non-nuclear in nature. The nuclear reactor operators were deeply involved in setup and spent almost the entirety of a shift setting up for this test, and had plenty of opportunity throughout to evaluate the possible reactor plant response to their actions.

In fact had the test simply been to take a reactor operating at power and to spontaneously trip the steam supply valve to the turbines the accident would never have happened, even without coordinating with the reactor operators first. In the actual event the closure of the steam valve was simply the non-nuclear nudge that finally tipped off a disaster laboriously arranged during a full shift by nuclear reactor operators, operators who should have known better just from first nuclear principles.

theguycalledtom• 12 years ago

a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power.

A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...

afterburner3• 12 years ago

Ditch both.

chii• 12 years ago

and freeze to death in winter? not cook your food and eat it raw? walk/cycle for 3 hours to commute to work?

vidarh9• 12 years ago

For what magically safe alternative?

(no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths)

EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop solar is higher than the number of deaths from nuclear power plants for equivalent amount of energy. Nuclear gets the headlines because the nuclear incidents we hear about are big and scary and rare and get hyped up.

You don't get massive worldwide news coverage because some guy fell off a roof while mounting solar panels and died. But he's just as dead, and it adds up.

You can't ignore the small incidents if their rate is high enough.

Overall, you could have meltdowns on a regular basis and nuclear would still be one of our safest alternatives. Chances are it will also be one of the alternatives with the lowest environmental impact: Less radioactivity released than coal, by orders of magnitude; far less land area affected by development than hydro, wind and solar.

throwawayaway• 12 years ago

ah so china has a cavalier attitude to safety in coal mines. this also happens to make up a large percentage of the deaths worldwide attributable to coal. china is now rolling out nuke plants. as we've seen previously with high speed rail and coal mines, there will be a cavalier attitude to safety.

my prediction is the outcome will be an increase in the number of deaths due to nuclear power.

shmigheghi2• 12 years ago

Seems silly to me to just leave it sitting there for decades if its internal heat is being generated by how the isotopes are in close proximity to each other. Or I might be misunderstanding why it's generating its own heat.

Could they contain and cool down the waste by slicing off chunks of the mass and containing each chunk in lead-lined boxes? Essentially re-processing the lump into crude 'control rod' sized chunks and storing them in little lead boxes to contain the radiation being thrown off.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

I think the main issue is that no one wants to get anywhere remotely near it.

shmigheghi2• 12 years ago

Clearly you wouldn't send people in there.

Is there too much radiation in the room for robots with radiation-shielded electronics to operate?

brazzy2• 12 years ago

Yes, you are misunderstanding. There is no more chain reaction; the "close proximity" is irrelevant. The heat is generated by the unstable isotopes decaying. And there is nothing in the universe which can stop them from doing that.

It's a misunderstanding I had as well before I read detailed discussions of the Fukushima incident: stopping the chain reaction does not make a nuclear reactor "safe". It just prevents new highly radioactive material from being generated. But the material you already have is still generating massive amounts of radiation and heat, and if you're not able to dissipate that heat (which you want to do without also dissipating any of the material!) then the heat will build up, cause it to melt, and that will usually restart the chain reaction!

spatten2• 12 years ago

So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively:

When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had.

the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from background radiation within a century or so (just guesstimating here, but that's a lot of powers of 10 -- I'm probably being pessimistic).

I'm guessing that this is wrong, though, and that the radioactivity from longer half-life radionuclides will eventually start to dominate and the "effective half-life" will be much longer.

Does anyone have any idea how long it will be until Chernobyl blends into the background radiation?

cnvogel3• 12 years ago

You are right, in that your guess is wrong ;-).

Total activity decrease in realistic "atomic waste" is not at all exponential.

Try a simple example:

Take a mixture of two isotopes. The one isotope has a half-life of 1 year and there's so much of it, that the activity is 10 decays/second. There's also a second isotope in the mix, with a half-life of 100 years, but there's 100 times as much of it, so that in total, you also get 10 decays/second.

After 10 years, the first isotope will be down to 2^-10, so only 1/1000th is left, it will be hardly measurable. But the second one will have decayed only 1/10th of a half-time, almost everything is still there: You are now down to half of the original activity.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA...

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

It's more complicated than that. As you point out, you don't have just one isotope, you have a whole grab bag of stuff. Here's the wrench in the works that adds the complexity, when a radioactive isotope decays it doesn't just go away, it decays into another isotope, sometimes one that is also radioactive and with its own half life.

What yoU end up with is a system of differential equations, which are actually easy to solve if you know how, but that level of calculus is beyond what most folks have studied.

Anyway, a situation that tends to be common is that you have one sort of longer lived isotope which ends up producing another isotope which decays fairly fast along a multi-step chain. This ends up producing a fairly high level of radiation for a significant time in a pseudo steady state. But it depends on the details.

spatten2• 12 years ago

I did a bit more reading, and found this crazy and scary graph. It's under "Uranium-232 Series Activity" near the bottom of this paper[1]. It shows that gamma ray output from U-238 increases > 5x a year after U-238 is first refined, and stays higher than originally was for >100 years.

It's due to the decay products of U-238 (and their decay products) all producing radiation that adds up to more than the original's.

I never would have guessed that.

[1] http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html

mpyne5• 12 years ago

In fact the base nuclear fuels are almost extraordinarily safer than the products of their use, speaking from a nuclear perspective alone. Nuclear fuel that is stable enough to be useful as a reactor fuel has such a long half-life (usually on the order of billions of years) that it's only very weakly radioactive. But the fission products formed from the fission of the fuel are much much more radioactive.

alecdbrooks• 12 years ago

I'm guessing that this is wrong, though, and that the radioactivity from longer half-life radionuclides will eventually start to dominate and the "effective half-life" will be much longer.

Exactly. From a report on Chernobyl [0]: "Most of the decrease [in radiation] in the coming years will be at only the rate of the physical half-life of 137Cs." Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years [1], so if we use the number given in the article (10,000 roentgens/hour) the dose is apparently 434 million times background radiation, 23 microroentgens/hour [2]. It would take over a millennium to reduce Cesium-137 by a factor of 434 million[3]

That's the Elephant's Foot, though. Randall Munroe cites Chernobyl as having 6 millisieverts/hour on average[4]. That's 3000 times background radiation [2], or a 350-year wait before Chernobyl emits the same amount [5].

This is obviously a simplification, though. Plutonium isotopes were released too [0], which have a much longer half-life (thousands of years). It's possible those small amounts of plutonium will emit enough radiation to make Chernobyl have noticeably higher radiation levels than the background dose for much longer.

A final caveat: I'm not an expert or even a devoted amateur. Your question just sparked my curiosity. Although, this New York Times article [6] says scientists say it takes about 10-13 half lives for an area to recover, which is close to my 350 year figure.

[0] https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c02.html. Search for 239Pu, not plutonium, to find the plutonium reference.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_%28unit%29#Significanc...

[3] http://po.st/3ckuGC

[4] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

[5] http://po.st/T2qoni

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.h...

Edit: Fixed math and added New York Times link. (Previously I based the Elephant's Foot calculations on 1,000 roentgens/hour.)

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I guess it is how you look at it. Much of this article has issues but one of the most glaring is this one:

"Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant’s Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."

One of the things this 'foot' proved was that the supposition that a meltdown would have a core melt through the ground and down into the center of the earth, aka the "China Syndrome" was false. The reason was of course that once the core became molten it begins to mix with the materials around it, that causes it to become diluted until it drops below criticality and then it ceases to be a threat. All western reactors (and all of those in Japan) have a pool of borosilicate sand underneath the reactor as just such a final safeguard. Should the core melt through to that, it turns the sand to borosilicate glass which kills neutrons and stops the reaction. Leaving behind a solid, cooling glass chunk. Not contaminating any groundwater and generally not going any further afield. It remains to be seen if any of Fukishima's core material made it as far as the sand underneath those reactors.

The 'foot' at Chernobyl isn't going anywhere, and in a couple of decades will be safe enough to chop up and dispose of more permanently. Unlike radioactive dust in the plant which was getting carried out of the containment building. I expect that within my kids lifetime people to be living once again in the surrounding area.

brc• 12 years ago

I saw a documentary that showed squatter-types already were living in the surrounding area - whatever the exclusion zone area was. They interviewed them, but they were 'meh' about the risk. They had the place to themselves and were pretty happy.

hobbes78• 12 years ago

I envy the ignorant people, for they are happy...

delackner• 12 years ago

That all sounds very nice, but the Fukushima reactor material is still above ground and totally at risk of explosion and entry into the atmosphere if it is not continually water cooled. The cooling water has contaminated the entire nearby water system and the ocean.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

All Japanese reactors have their material above ground and are at risk of at least a steam explosion if they are improperly handled. The point is that Fukishima is just as "safe" today as it was for the 20+ years of operation, just instead of producing power all of the processes are around dismantling it. Which is proceeding.

I understand the emotional fear of nuclear power, it is a scary thing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that you could be dying of radioactive poisoning right now and not know it, and all you need to do to survive is to move over 50 feet but you don't know you have to do that. So you end up dying. That is the giant knot of emotion that wraps up the fear in many cases. I've suggested to folks that have that fear, wear a dosimeter. They are very sensitive, not very expensive, and can completely clear your worry that you have some how stumbled into an unknown radiation hazard. It isn't a stupid or crazy thing to do, it just sets your mind at ease that you are not being dosed with ionizing radiation that you can't see.

Did they dump a lot of 137Cesium into the ocean? Yes they did. Was that more than was dumped by a single nuclear test in the ocean at Bikini Atoll? No it wasn't. There was a paper in Science, not long after the event about tracking the radionuclides [1].

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6085/1115.summary

acqq2• 12 years ago

Related video, also workers at Chernobyl, but another piece of the reactor: the roof.

https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk

"Military people call such places "FRONTLINE", liquidators who worked at the Chornobyl nuclear station called it "ROOF COATING". It was the most contaminated, and therefore the most dangerous, place in the zone. The remains of the roof coating of the 4th reactor. The operation on decontaminating the roof lasted more than five months. We will tell about only two days."

beloch• 12 years ago

While the article does contain some interesting details, I fundamentally disapprove of it's anti-nuclear moralizing. It's the constant trickle of articles like this that maintain public paranoia about nuclear power. This matters, because nuclear power allows us to meet today's power demands with today's technology without releasing CO2 into the environment. Alternative power sources are still some ways from meeting humanities power needs on their own, but every megawatt of nuclear power produced keeps carbon in the ground and gives us extra time. Yes, many will point out that several alternative power generation sources could be scaled up to meet all of humanity's demands right now. However, it's not being done because it's economically and technically challenging and would take decades.

Meanwhile, fully operational nuclear power plants are being shut down. After the Fukushima incident, Germany and several other countries caved into irrational public fears and have begun to phase out nuclear power, replacing it with much more immediately dangerous power sources such as coal. (It should be noted that there are relatively few reactors in Germany that are likely to be hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.) That's carbon emission free power that's online right now, being destroyed out of irrational fear and replaced with what is possibly our dirtiest source of power. This is what is going on in the world, but the author has published yet another fear-mongering article anyways. It's downright despicable.

iSnow2• 12 years ago

Germany's and other countries' reactors are decades old designs that are fundamentally unsound, often enough built on tectonic faults or (in the case of Japan) at the sea. They are not secured against terrorist attacks or even the crash of a passenger jet. In the case of Germany's reactors, the containment is built to sustain the impact of a Phantom fighter, nothing more.

Reactor operators have constantly proven to be unworthy of trust, be it in Chernobyl, Harrisburg or Fukushima. Both their handling of operations as well as their handling of crisis never was up to standards - and every disaster was an exception to the rule.

Ridiculing the German outphasing of nukes with the argument that it is not a tsunami-prone country is both childish and irrational - irrational because it turns a blind eye to the risks that endanger nuclear power plants here - and the far more severe consequences of an accident. In Germany, the nukes are located straight in the most densely populated areas.

mohawk• 12 years ago

I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.

plikan134• 12 years ago

Aside from waste storage there's also the cost of dismantling old reactors. The Wikipedia article on nuclear decommissioning makes for some depressing reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

The tl;dr being "with a few notable exceptions, it's just too damn expensive so we just ignore the problem"

adrianN2• 12 years ago

Similarly, coal and other fossil fuels only look cheap because currently nobody is paying for the climate change they cause.

We have to choose between evils. I think nuclear power is better, because nuclear waste is relatively easy to contain until we figure out what to do with it (for example burn it up in breeder reactors), whereas the world's climate is a system we don't fully understand and meddling with it can cause irreparable damage.

kabdib2• 12 years ago

Many of the existing reactors were designed in the 50s and 60s, and are overly complex; they grew out of designs that were used for production of nuclear material for weapons, and safety features were bolted onto the side (this was an era when seatbelts weren't required on automobiles!). More recent designs are significantly and inherently safer and simply can't get into the same kind of trouble that the older designs can.

Yet we treat all reactors the same. Nuclear = bad for some reason.

I'd much rather be getting rid of coal plants (which are far worse for us than nuclear plants in terms of carbon emissions, pollution and actual emitted radiation) and have a national resolve to build safer, modern nuclear plants. But the fear-mongering and bad politics make this impossible.

Alternate sources of energy can be worse. For instance, when you look at the total cost of solar cells (lots of end-to-end industrial infrastructure involving toxic chemicals and energy-hungry manufacturing) and deaths from installers falling roofs, nuclear starts to look a lot better, even with plants we have today.

But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.

tptacek• 12 years ago

The costs of coal are externalized, and, historically, higher than nuclear --- not in the abstract, but in deaths per year. But practically nobody is afraid of coal.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

The elephant's foot exists and writing an article about it isn't fear-mongering. Also writing an article about it does not require the author to write another one about the problems of coal. There are lots of articles about the problems of coal written all the time, there's even something being called "Obama's War on Coal", apparently, although the Wall Street Journal doubts it exists http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2014/11/28/why-the-war-on-coal-.... Sounds like an easy war though. The enemy is incapable of movement and burns readily. Incendiaries should work rather well. Those articles probably get pro-coal people grumbling in the comments that it is downright despicable how everyone focuses on coal.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

Is nuclear energy above or below break-even, as a whole? Or has the cost of the mess created by nuclear industry accidents and other indirect costs swamped the profits?

chairleg• 12 years ago

Bit off topic: On the first picture right at the top you can see through the workers. I read that this was caused by radiation, but to me it looks more as if they (or he) was simply moving during a longer exposure?

JonahBraun2• 12 years ago

Agreed. Anyone find an authoritative explanation on the photo? I couldn't.

JonahBraun2• 12 years ago

Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing radiation—they have enough energy to scramble atoms and molecules they crash into. (This is different from non-ionizing radiation, like the kind emitted by your cell phone, which does not have enough energy to break bonds.)

I think this is a poor explanation. Radiation from your cell phone is electromagnetic radiation. This is far different from a radiated particle, an actual proton or electron flying out.

Essentially a particle vs a wave, which is more of a difference than "not enough energy". Is that correct?

iolsantr• 12 years ago

Gamma radiation (i.e. ionizing radiation) is just a highly energetic photons. Alpha and Beta particles are not photons, and are not referred to as ionizing radiation.

Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

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