Big and Bashful wrote:Carl,
When it comes to broken reactors and radioactive contamination, I look at the facts, what happened and why. Then I look at the documentaries, new headlines and what the media wants people to believe. It's an interesting game of "Spot the difference"!
Indeed it is an interesting game -- and one that can be very, very informative.
One thing which stuck in my mind was the radiation doserate displayed next to the millions of bags of contaminated waste they are racking up. The meter was showing 0.15 microsieverts/hr maybe 10 or 15 metres from the heap of waste. If you didn't know what that meant you might be worried, however, living in the UK on an average bit, the normal background dose around here is about 0.23 to 0.25 microsieverts/hr. nearly double what is being measured at that bit of Fukushima. When you consider that in Mmurica your annual background dose burden is around 6 mSv, compared to about 2.5 mSv in the UK, it starts to put that Fukushima doserate into perspective. Yes, there are some very hot areas at Fukushima, away from those, they are lifting contaminated soil which is actually less radioactive than Scotland.
Much of the worry is artificially stoked. Here in New England, we live in an area with a lot of granite -- and in that granite is a small amount of uranium. Uranium, as part of its decay process produces the colourless, tasteless, and invisible gas radon, and this has much of the place in a tizzy nowadays.
I recall an hilarious episode when my landlady was worried about radon levels in a couple of other properties that she owns and picked up a couple of "radon detectors". Since I live on the lower level I offered to plug one in to see what it reads -- and it read stupidly high. Instead of doing the little sheep thing and panicking, I read up on how the things work, and it turns out that they're simple ionization chambers which'll detect any sort of alpha byproduct that happens to pass through. Once I relocated the thing away from a stack of laser-printed paperwork the detected level dropped to near zero. (A great mitigation strategy for radon actually happens to be laundry-dryers installed in the basement which eject to the outdoors. I don't know where my periodic table of the elements has gotten to, but if I recall correctly the atomic weight of the stuff is higher than that of lead (which it eventually decays into anyway), so in the absence of stirring, it's going to be pretty close to the deck.) I'm not going to worry about it.
There's a lot to be said for passive cooling! Oh and putting generators in high places!
Indeed! But, I suspect the designers did their level best with what was accepted wisdom
at the time.
I'd forgotten that you're "in the business", and for that I apologise. It's good to be in the company of smart folks!