Mysterious Radioactive Cloud Over Europe Hints At Accident Farther East

NPR ^ | November 10, 20172:05 PM ET | Geoff Brumfiel, Alina Selyukh

[x_plus_one]

All kinds of radiation leaks everywhere...

http://beta.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nuclear-waste-accident-20140824-story.html

https://sincedutch.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/10272014-uranium-hexa-floride-uf6-leak-at-honeywell-plant-in-metropolis-illinois-upwind-from-paducah-ky/

[rdl6989]

Yes, that sums it up. I’m no expert of course, but it would surprise me if North Korean nuke test radiation was the cause of this.

[VeniVidiVici]

How does something drift west all the way to Italy from Kazakhstan?

[353FMG]

So are Iran and Pakistan. Both have nuclear ambitions.

[tumblindice]

Reptilicus Rules!

[alexander_busek]

“It’s a very low level of radioactivity and it poses no problems for health and the environment in Europe,” Gariel says. But modeling suggests that any people within a few kilometers of the release — wherever it occurred — would have needed to seek shelter to protect themselves from possible radiation exposure.

That seems contradictory.

Not at all!

The people within a few km of the release - wherever it occurred - would have had to seek shelter to protect themselves against the slightly higher lifetime risk of cancer. People there who didn't seek shelter but instead stood outside all day, inhaling deeply and drinking unfiltered rainwater, for months, might have a 500% higher risk of someday contracting, e.g., lung cancer, or thyroid cancer, or... - if the radiation hadn't dissipated by itself over time.

And by the time that radioactive cloud passed over, e.g., Germany, the radioisotopes therein had probably already largely decayed, the cloud itself had probably become extremely diluted by fresh air, etc. - so no problem.

I was in Central Europe back in 1986 when Chernobyl blew. Went jogging everyday for an hour... Drank a liter of farm-fresh milk (from pastured cows, which concentrates the levels of radionuclides) everyday... In terms of increased health-risk, probably equivalent to smoking three cigarettes a day for a few weeks.

In short: Modifiers like "increased risk" or "hazardous" are meaningless unless quantified and - for the layman - set in relation to understandable risks.

Regards,

[alexander_busek]

How does something drift west all the way to Italy from Kazakhstan?

Most of that "something" was probably washed out (removed from the atmosphere by normal precipitation) long before it reached Italy.

What wasn't washed out was diluted by a factor of a thousand.

Did you know that the dust on your outdoor window sills contains particles of dust from the Sahara?

Of course, we're talking about concentrations measured in the ppm, ppb, and ppt here!

Such articles are fear-mongering unless they express the hazard in comparative terms.

Regards,

[alexander_busek]

That is my theory about the Baby Boom generation. They had ingested contaminated milk which screwed up their brains badly. Remember, back then breast feeding was frowned upon, due to the ‘new technology’.

The farther up the food chain an organism is, the higher the concentration of (non-bio-degradable) contaminants in its food.

Breast-fed babies are higher up than their mothers.

A mother who drinks slightly contaminated cow's milk and then breast-feeds her baby is subjecting that baby to a significantly higher level of contamination.

Regards,

[NorseViking]

Nope, it is mostly a medical cancer therapy material, also used in certain spacecraft for power.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 on Oct. 3