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Posted on 06/05/2002 12:12:30 PM PDT by EggsAckley
Wednesday, June 5, 2002 Residents Near NY Nuke Plant to Get Iodide Pills WHITE PLAINS, New York (Reuters) - Amid fears nuclear power plants could be the target of terror attacks, officials plan to provide residents near the Indian Point installation, just north of New York, with potassium iodide pills to protect against any release of radioactive gases.
West Chester County officials said that beginning on Saturday the pills will be distributed on the first three Saturdays in June at three local schools.
The distribution of the pills, which were provided by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and are known as KI, comes after federal warnings that nuclear power plants could be the targets of future attacks.
KI helps to prevent thyroid cancer in the event of a radiological emergency, officials said, by blocking the absorption of radioactive iodide, one of the gases that can be released in a nuclear accident.
The county has also stockpiled the KI pills and will distribute them to local schools on request. Forty-six pharmacies in the county have agreed to stock the pills, the Westchester County Health Department said.
Incorrect. The fission product 131I has a half-life of eight days. You're not taking credit for decay. You want to block uptake. Once the thyroid uptake is saturated, the main effect is biological clearing time. You don't worry about radiological half-life so much if you're not taking in the material an such a way that it accumulates.
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In a word, no. Study up on the physics of how a nuclear explosion works. I'll give you a hint: in involves symmetric compression of a mass of fissile material that without compression is subcritical. The compression makes it a supercritical assembly - significantly so. A high-yield nuclear explosion requires this. The natural processes involved in even the worst-case meltdown scenario you can imagine simply do not have the energy necessary to attain any kind of compressive effect. Add to that the fact that commercial grade fuel has 235U enrichment on the order of 3-4%. Weapons-grade uranium has enrichment in the 99% range. Unless you postulate some kind of isotopic separation process occurring, you're not going to be able to assemble an explosively-critical mass in any kind of meltdown scenario.
Is this question a joke or do I add you to my ever growing list of people who just have no idea what they are talking about?
If a problem never occurs what have I lost? A few bucks. If you are going to do it, buy a little extra to give to your neighbor if and when the time comes.
He belongs on "Street Smarts".
Incorrect. The area of dispersion is actually quite limited. Widespread dispersion requires release of significant amounts of stored energy. Nuclear explosions produce fallout because of this. The same occurred at Chornobil, wherein the internal energy contained in the fuel drove the material out into the environment.
Additionally, widespread disperal usually occurs when there is significant vaporization of the reacting mass. The explosive materials must reach very high temperatures so its constituent atoms have tremendously high kinetic energy. They then move about the environment, losing energy and eventually plate out or condense onto other materials, far removed from the explosion site.
An event driven by an external force simply doesn't match up on these terms. Sure, you can push materials around somewhat, but in terms of blasting things far and wide, to the tune of some of these widely speculative "doomsday" scenarios involving "dirty nukes" or whatever the kooks are calling them these days, its simply not in the cards, based on the laws of mother nature.
Before you blow me off as not knowing what I am talking about, I did some of the modeling and some experiments involving release of materials from nuclear material transport accidents back when DOE was doing some of the initial transport cask design and validation. I was also a partner on a consulting job for a utility group that was looking into risk management that involved modeling of release terms and dispersion from power plant accidents. If you have any kind of reasonably accurate meteorological model that incorporates realistic transport mechanisms, it predicts quite limited dispersion.
Right now I'm an academic but have had a variety of "previous lives", nuclear industry, government work, consulting, etc. I guess 4 years of college and 5 years of graduate study and 22+ years in the business allow you to learn a few things here and there...(?)
You can order 200 tablets for $21.00 from here.For adults, the recommended dosage is 2 tablets per day for 14 days, followed by 1 tablet per day for 71 days. A total of 99 tablets per adult. Therefore, one bottle of 200 tablets would be enough for 2 adults.
Potassium iodate saturates your thyroid system, thus blocking the absorption of the bad stuff.
However, if you're Ben Affleck, you can wonder around for hours and hours in an area thick with clouds of radioactive dust and debris, swirling all about you, breathing it all in while walking and running, with no adverse impact. (See "The Sum of All Fears").
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