something is leaking in europe

[Nusa]

Some news links?

He's probably referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure.

Many of the details were classified by China until 2005, but it's now clear it was a disaster arguably comparable to Chernobyl.

It's probably before your time, and the government has changed since then. But one can say the same thing about Chernobyl.

Yeah the death toll on that link is "85,600 to 240,000".  Chernobyl was "projected" at 4000 (actual reported, 90).  Or are you comparing the two in terms of land area affected?

Counting deaths depends on your criteria, never mind whether you can trust the official information sources that want to minimize the numbers. Do you only count those that died quickly, or do you count the ones that later died a result of the accident. People stranded without food or safe water in one case and radiation sicknesses in the other.

As for comparing by whatever criteria, that's been done by others, including TV documentaries.

My main point is that the governments have changed since then. China has changed a lot since the days of Chairman Mao. And Gorbachev's USSR isn't the same as Putin's Russa. Even if all the people from the old regimes haven't died off yet. And yes, I'm old enough to remember the previous administrations. I've no idea what's in the history books these days.

[jmelson]

You still need two separate failures before isotopes from nuclear fission get released into the atmosphere:
-one of the fuel cells has to rupture/get a tear in order to get those isotopes into the cooling loop
-the containment of the cooling loop has to fail to get them into the atmosphere

Nope, not even close, for a Boiling Water Reactor.  The fuel elements are clad with Zirconium, chosen for its VERY low neutron capture cross section.  BUT, unfortunately, it is a HORRIBLE metal, expecially in contact with water at 300+ C.  The fuel elements leak all the gaseous radionuclides like sieves.  So, Xenon, Krypton, Iodine, etc. all just pass right through the thin Beryllium sheath.  If they didn't, the cladding would swell up and burst.  So, the gaseous fission products get into the water quite easily.  Then, they pass out of the reactor pressure vessel in the steam, and go to the turbine.  Note, the main steam line coming off the top of a BWR's steam dryer is the most heavily shielded part of the entire plant!  Why?  Because lots of these nuclides settle on the pipe and are not submerged under feet of water for shielding.  So, they have a massive concrete shield tunnel for the pipe to pass through.  Then, due to having to pump leaked air out of the condensers as explaind in my previous message, the radioactive gases just go up the vent stacks.  This is a continuous process at BWRs.  The steam turbines are NOT in the containment building, they are in the turbine hall.

Yeah, could be that one of the RBMKs in Leningrad has had a failure (this somehow sounds familiar…). If i remember correctly those designs didn't employ a second containment around the core, so they could have had a ruptured fuel cell, had to remove it from the core and it vented some gas when it was out of the reactor->not everything went through the filters. Makes you wonder how on earth they planned to safely remove broken fuel rods from this reactor design...

The RBMK1000 is a Plutonium production breeder reactor where they also use the heat produced for electricity and city heating.
A horrible design, with weak containment, some flaky power controls and the horrible feature of positive void coefficient.
A ghastly combination of potential trouble.

(Edit: that still wouldn't explain the clearly airborne caesium: Those reactors use light water as a coolant, the caesium would have reacted with it to form highly soluble caesium hydroxide->perfectly bound in the water of the cooling loop. So we can conclude that the source of this radiation spike was probably NOT sitting inside a water pool (water would have also captured dust too).)

Well, not in a pool of COLD water, anyway.  But, reactor loop water is not usually cold, and a major steam leak definitely can release the cesium and other low-volatility nuclides.

Jon

[jmelson]

If you want to detect such events you need something that can discriminate between ions with different energies: That's a scintillator counter, and it is effing expensive (basically a orange sized monocrystal mounted on top of a photomultiplier).

There's a guy selling slabs of Bismuth germanate (BGO) on eBay for $20.  That's a chunk 25 x 25 x 10 mm, big enough to make a decent scintillation detector.  We had some bits and pieces at work related to Silicon Photomultipliers, so I built up a small detector.  It has a bias supply for the SiPM bias voltage, amplifier and discriminator, and a piezoelectric beeper.  It works quite well, getting a fewe hundred clicks a second from the Cs-137 check source in my Geiger counter.  The only tricky part to get is the Silicon Photomultiplier, they are kind of a new part.

Jon

[helius]

The only tricky part to get is the Silicon Photomultiplier, they are kind of a new part.

Would a mercury-cadmium-telluride detector not work here?

[jogri]

Nope, not even close, for a Boiling Water Reactor.  The fuel elements are clad with Beryllium, chosen for its VERY low neutron capture cross section.  BUT, unfortunately, it is a HORRIBLE metal, expecially in contact with water at 300+ C.

No, they use a zirconium alloy, beryllium is used in moderator rods. It would be an absolutely horrific choice for a pressure vessel as it is extremely brittle, reacts with oxygen (you have a lot of dissolved oxygen in your water, especially in open spent fuel pools) and it absorbs alpha radiation-> gets converted to carbon, you really don't want that.

Btw, those rods are quite sturdy, and because they always have an extremely high outside pressure due to the superheated water and quite a bit of expansion room for gases (they have springs to push the pellets together->also a good way of dealing with the gases) they are probably rather good at containing gases, especially really fat ones like Xe, Kr and I.

Well, not in a pool of COLD water, anyway.  But, reactor loop water is not usually cold, and a major steam leak definitely can release the cesium and other low-volatility nuclides.

Well, if there really was a steam leak like you described why didn't we register a spike for iodine and the noble gases? They are a notorious PITA to filter out, so we would have seen a lot of them and not so much stuff that can be filtered quite easily.
And i heavily doubt that you would get a lot of caesium leakage from a steam leak as the hydroxide that forms when it comes into contact with water is one of the most soluble hydroxides out there (3kg per litre of water @20°C, let that sink in), you would get a few grams of CsOH in hundreds of tons of water->i doubt that the release of a few kg of water in the form of steam would lead to a spike like that.

Let's consider where the Ruthenium and Caesium might have come from:
-could they be the decay products of some gaseous fission products that escaped? Well, Caesium can't come from that: Cs can be created via a beta minus decay of Xenon, but neither Cs-134 nor 137 form. What about Ruthenium? It sits between a lot of metals, so no.
-could they come directly from U-235 fission? Probably, the products of a fission reaction are roughly the same weight, and since both Cs and Ru are roughly half as heavy as uranium they might have formed in two different fission reactions.

[aqarwaen]

maybe it is that ship what sinked like 20 or 30 years ago..name was estonia..i readed that they burried and covered something near ship with cement..

[jmelson]

The only tricky part to get is the Silicon Photomultiplier, they are kind of a new part.

Would a mercury-cadmium-telluride detector not work here?

No, I think they are slow, and deep IR-sensitive.  The BGO gives extremely fast flashes of blue light, and you
need either a Silicon photomultiplier or vacuum photomultiplier to respond to the fast flashes and very
low light level.  When biased correctly, the SiPM gives about 1 million electrons per photon input.

Jon

[jmelson]

No, they use a zirconium alloy,

Yes, you are absolutely right, I typed the wrong element.

Jon

[Siwastaja]

You still need two separate failures before isotopes from nuclear fission get released into the atmosphere:
-one of the fuel cells has to rupture/get a tear in order to get those isotopes into the cooling loop
-the containment of the cooling loop has to fail to get them into the atmosphere

Small cracks and ruptures of the fuel rods (what you are calling "cells") happen time-to-time in fully operational plants, and are not considered accident-level events; not necessarily even incident-level. Then, if not earlier, at latest during the refueling, the containment is opened and the small amount of radionuclei are vented into atmosphere, possibly through some level of filtration.

This is considered normal operation and the amount of "leak" is regulated, and monitored.

Traditional boiling water reactors don't even have a full "containment" building, the steam enters the turbine building which is outside of containment. The idea is that you could close these steam valves during a serious loss-of-coolant accident, but it allows minor leak incidents whenever there is a rod clad leakage.

I find it extremely funny how people who try to give an impression of "nuclear safety" do not know such basics. Especially counting the fuel rod zircaloy cladding as an "independent safety layer" is beyond laughable, it does sometimes crack even during normal operation; and during loss-of-coolant accident conditions it takes some seconds max to break. This isn't any kind of safety layer against accidents, and isn't even supposed to be. I have seen "nuclear safety" posters by actual professors, and from the 4-5, maybe 6 claimed "layers" of safety, there actually is approx. 2. (Electronic equivalent: if you put a 1000W TVS and a 1W TVS in parallel, how many layers of safety against overvoltages do you have?)

Nuclear power is a low-probability-high-risk endeavor where the risk seems to realize every 30 years, every time followed by explanations "how this was a special case with special circumstances and it can't happen again", followed by explanations of "multiple safety layers", regardless the fact they all can fail, and there are no new levels introduced.

It's OK to be either pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear and actually I think both stances can be argumented quite well with real facts, so it's an interesting discussion, whenever the participants are truly knowledgeable.

[jogri]

You still need two separate failures before isotopes from nuclear fission get released into the atmosphere:
-one of the fuel cells has to rupture/get a tear in order to get those isotopes into the cooling loop
-the containment of the cooling loop has to fail to get them into the atmosphere

Small cracks and ruptures of the fuel rods (what you are calling "cells") happen time-to-time in fully operational plants, and are not considered accident-level events; not necessarily even incident-level. Then, if not earlier, at latest during the refueling, the containment is opened and the small amount of radionuclei are vented into atmosphere, possibly through some level of filtration.

Like i described in other posts, the fuel rod has to crack and you need a leak in the primary cooling loop... And such a leak doesn't get any bigger than a partially disassembled pressure vessel for switching out fuel elements.

Did this happen here? Probably not, i still don't see how you would get such Cs emissions from a steam vent/fuel element change (source: i have worked with Caesium, one of the most unstable/reactive elements i ever handled). So let's make an educated guess about where those isotopes might have came from:

-They detected Ru-103 with a half life of 30d, so we can probably assume that the uranium was last radiated in the month/weeks before the incident (it wasn't an old fuel element that sat in a spent fuel pool for years)
-the fuel element could have been older as the Cs-134 predominantly gets created via neutron capture from Cs-133 (which is one of the main fission products). Take this with a grain of salt as i neither know the neutron flux, nor temperature of graphite reactors nor the cross section of Cs-133 at those conditions (wiki says 29 barns, but not at which energy)
-probably got released as dust (see Caesium+ water pools)

Edit: Forgot to add that the amount of material that was released was probably tiny as they only managed to detected the isotopes with the shortest half-life (except for the not reported, but expected Sr-90 peak, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was just due to "naturally" elevated Sr-90 levels [see russian lighthouse RTGs])

[cdev]

Wouldn't they censor sensors, so as not to cause devaluation of stocks and investments, etc?

It's not necessary to buy your own detector.

There are many radiation level monitoring networks running for years already.  Some of them are independent networks, and you can see live radiation overlapped on top of Google maps.  Search for "live radiation levels map", or similar words.

[Zero999]

Let's top off 2020 with a nuclear accident.  As if Covid-19 and the associated economic disaster wasn't enough.

Ahem, as I was reading this reply,  I was recalling that 2020 is forecast to be a heavy solar flare year... Imagine closing the year with something like the March 1989 Quebec Canada black out, times 10 and global. 

Where did you hear that? It's not true. Solar activity is at very low levels, due to solar minimum. There's a load hype about it causing an ice age but it's BS, as solar activity hardly makes any difference to global temperatures. There's a grain of truth that it can affect the jet stream, increasing the likelihood of colder winters in Europe and parts of the US, but when that happens, other regions warm, so the net global temperature remains the same.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1285749/Solar-minimum-2020-NASA-mini-ice-age-climate-change-global-warming

[Rick Law]

Let's top off 2020 with a nuclear accident.  As if Covid-19 and the associated economic disaster wasn't enough.

Ahem, as I was reading this reply,  I was recalling that 2020 is forecast to be a heavy solar flare year... Imagine closing the year with something like the March 1989 Quebec Canada black out, times 10 and global. 

Where did you hear that? It's not true. Solar activity is at very low levels, due to solar minimum. There's a load hype about it causing an ice age but it's BS, as solar activity hardly makes any difference to global temperatures. There's a grain of truth that it can affect the jet stream, increasing the likelihood of colder winters in Europe and parts of the US, but when that happens, other regions warm, so the net global temperature remains the same.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1285749/Solar-minimum-2020-NASA-mini-ice-age-climate-change-global-warming

I don't recall exactly, but it is probably news radio.  I tune to news whenever I am driving.

[Cerebus]

It's worth noting that the radiation release being referred to in the news recently actually happened between 28th October and 4th November 2017. The thing that's put it into the news is a recent paper in Nature Communications analysing possible sources based on environmental isotope monitoring being done (for other purposes) in Austria. Typically, the news stories do not lead with the fact that this is a nearly three year old release and folks don't bother to read to the end (if it's there at all) that this is now a historical release, not a current one.

Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16316-3.

TL;DR - probably related to reprocessing of spent VVER reactor nuclear fuel at the Federal State Unitary Enterprise (FSUE) Production Association Mayak in Ozersk, Russia (Southern Urals).

[coppercone2]

what, the twitter is clear

https://twitter.com/SinaZerbo/status/1276559857731153921?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1276559857731153921%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.com%2Fmysterious-spike-radioactivity-over-northern-europe-accident-russian-nuclear-plant-3002064

The news reports
 Estonia, Finland and Sweden last week measured higher-than-usual levels of ruthenium and caesium isotopes and detected some other artificial radionuclides. They said nothing on their territory had happened to explain their presence, as did more than 40 other countries that volunteered information to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/agency-north-europe-radiation-linked-reactor-71592576


https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Source-of-low-level-European-release-remains-unsol

the first half of June 2020, small amounts of artificial (man-made) radioactive substances have been detected at several measuring stations in Northern Europe. The Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish radiation protection authorities have reported this on their websites. RIVM National Institute for Public Health and the Environment   has analysed the available data to determine a possible cause and source location.

https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/radioactive-substances-in-the-air-over-Northern-Europe

I think you confused something. RIVM owns the detector data.

They even say, if you read the bottom of the article,


A similar situation occurred in 2017: radioactive ruthenium-106 was found in the air in several European countries. Because many more measurements were available then, RIVM was able to locate the source more accurately. The calculated source was in excellent agreement with an existing nuclear facility that was pointed out as the most probable source in multiple international investigations.

TL;DR current and old data is accurate. Attack on thread unnecessary. This is a serious issue, please double check before you come off like a kremlin troll. Think about how much bad can happen if one of these things goes off.

[Cerebus]

TL;DR current and old data is accurate. Attack on thread unnecessary. This is a serious issue, please double check before you come off like a kremlin troll. Think about how much bad can happen if one of these things goes off.

There's no need to be such a dick, no "Attack on thread" is involved, neither is the Kremlin (In English proper nouns get capital letters). No need to go off like a knuckle dragging redneck who's just discovered that Budweiser isn't regarded as beer in the rest of the world. It is, you know, possible to correct someone politely without being vituperative, you might like to try it some time.

The stories I read in the news recently linked to the old release. So I was mistaken, there's another new release as well - mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

[jmelson]

Like i described in other posts, the fuel rod has to crack and you need a leak in the primary cooling loop... And such a leak doesn't get any bigger than a partially disassembled pressure vessel for switching out fuel elements.

it was a fantasy of the original nuclear industry that the Zirconium (thanks for correcting my mistake earlier) cladding would hold in all fission byproducts for the life of the fuel element.  They have now been forced to admit that at least gaseous fission products will seep out of the fuel elements at a steady rate.  When the reactor is running at full power, the neutron flux is intense, and it breaks down much of the Iodine and Xenon fairly quickly.  But, still, some DOES seep out through microscopic pores and into the cooling water.

As for BOILING water reactors (please study up on those) The primary coolant is the ONLY coolant, and it runs from the top of the reactor pressure vessel STRAIGHT to the turbines, which are OUTSIDE the containment.  Even without any malfunction, the gaseous isotopes are sucked out of the condenser by vacuum pumps and piped up the "smokestacks".  This is a small, but steady, release of radioactive byproducts.  It DOES add up over time.  On the other hand, the amount of radioactive isotopes held in the fuel elements that can be released in a major accident is staggering, and (I think) millions of times worse than the steady leakage of Iodine, Xenon, etc.

Jon