#plutonium pollution

[blatentmisinformation]

All rainwater contains trace amounts of plutonium

[kit10phish]

The Dyatlov Pass incident- Industrial Pollution- USSR Nuclear Power Plants [Part 13B1d]

Now we’re starting to get into the reason I wanted to write about the Dyatlov Pass Incident! You needed a lot of information before we could go over this part. Here is a very brief section discussing nuclear power, and we WILL get back to this after a couple more foundational topics. How it Started: Click to access…

[serene-sky-kid]

Well pluto made a fanart of my snail, so I think I should make my own post

A few weeks ago I made a drawing in magma of a dark worm like the one we have now but smaller in Serene's arms (this one)

Shortly after I saw the radio that came out in the board missions and I said "oh! another sound making machine that uses a sea shell" and since then I have been with the idea of ​​making a Snail? of light that reacts to music.

@plutonium-sky encouraged me and gave me some ideas on development, snail references and the idea of ​​imitating sounds!

Will I use these creatures? I'll probably give Serene one as a pet that start as a smal dark worm, because I have no self-control.

It's a creature invented just for fun! so information under the cut!

This is my purified version of the Dark worm

These snails existed in large numbers in rivers and seas during the time of ancestors.

They can hum to the rhythm of music, if you teach them they can imitate sounds and even imitate words

Their size varies, they spend a lot of time between the range in which they fall in your hand and the size of a mantatee.

But if this snail has an ideal environment they can live long enough to grow quite large, something common in the past, now something quite unlikely due to pollution.

They are born looking like a sea slug, but when they feel ready they use a kind of light silk to create their own sea shell.

This sea shell is capable of storing sound in it, the most common being the sound of the sea or flowing water, but not the only one.

They can fly just like Mantatees and sanctuary whales, but they spend most of their lives in the water, only using their ability to fly when It's time to return to the cycle, eating their own sea shell and embarking on the journey to Eden like every creature of light.

A snail that does not feel safe or healthy will not create its silk, much less its shell, but there are ways to force it.

The ancestors found this ability to store sound striking, it was common to see them being sold as a nice decoration for the home, then they discovered that they could store different melodies in them and different devices were created.

Sonorous Sea Shells were very popular especially in Valley

There were many attempts to create a replica of this sea shell, but there was no material that could match the light silk that these snails produced, they were necessary to manufacture it.

The industrial use of these poor creatures and the pollution in the snails' environment brought them to the brink of extinction.

[abuffzucchinisvariousposts]

Mushroom Cloud - Original Poem

Wrote this one a while ago but didn't feel like posting it because it's like "too personal" or whatever but hey that's part of the fun? My mindset has changed so here's probably my best writing as of today

A mom, a dad and two kids

In a man-made pandemic

One wears no mask and catches custody 

Another is scraped away of his savings and declares alternating weekends

One believes in all kinds of ailments and ointments, poignant appointments, all perpetually anointed until medicine or man's expiration

Another deemed antagonist by Ursula herself, ink dressed swimming in an ocean of fluctuating temperatures, forces him into an oxygen bubble with no words in edgewise

Her ocean is polluted, her judgement clouded as hallucinogens are diluted in its rivers

Certain doom is set in stone, syringe-spiked boulder rolling as toxic chemicals burn, mushroom tea bag set to soak in scalding hot waters

Blaring sirens narrate a hundred insistent trips to the hospital, she shouts and wails, tales of bombs going off inside of her, telling her son in her living room that the fuse is lit, that she has few months left to live

Telling her son in her living room that even the aftermath of a nuclear family will soon be blown to pieces, an essential pillar crashing down to submerge a coliseum where two people who hate each other very much fight to the before-day death over someone else’s fate, to submerge it in gasoline and liquid plutonium

She describes her lungs slowly severed as a thousand poison particles ricochet inside of her as fast as light itself, burning holes in her as she burns through cigarettes, and tears a hole in her son’s heart as she tells him she doesn’t want to put herself through anymore hurt to live even a minute longer

The two kids go to live with their father, filled with misplaced guilt and grief and anger and something else that is definitely toxic as numbness greys out blood-red insides

The father is a hero, he saves two children from a burning building that not even the arsonist knows is on fire yet

That fire is the heat of a kettle, burning old tea tainted by bad judgement and psychedelics

The tea breeds a wretched and weary-eyed witch hunted by shadows so visible and engulfing only to her sharpened pupils, so serrated they could cut initials on a sports car

Her psychosis speaks in launch codes, she screams but of what she is not fully aware, sobs over familial falling outs while spewing fallout of her own through melted lips

And as all this is happening, tucked into the bottom bunk of bunker bedrooms two children curl up dazed by the stench of radiation, eyes paralyzed wide open

One son is filled with unwavering hatred stemming from a smell so familiar to home

Another son just wanted the people he cared about to get along, just wanted to pretend for a little longer that on her the shadow has not overwritten the self, that he could still see good in her and not just a melted ribcage out of a horror film

That son recalls memories torn from books and toms littered with glitter, promised fairy dust fueling the second stage of grief and leaving animals to rot and die

Memories of picketing with her against his will, protesting against explosives too lately-lit to be defused, fruitless fighting for frailty and fragility's susceptibility to entropy, being dragged into a war zone to watch sunburned suffrage

Memories before she was the spur of her own self-destruction

This mushroom cloud-induced zombie of a mother is sick and tired, every breath her last, clutching her chest as a tangled mess of green red and blue wires connects itself to a timer, reading numbers that make no sense as if being spoken from a manic geiger counter

Her self is poisoned, mushroom-clouded, a zombie praying forgetfully for forgiveness on vaporised ears because you can’t reverse a nuclear explosion

And the awful truth of it all is that

In a way, she was right, a bomb went off and killed her

What was left is just a fallout mom, a toxic waste of breath projecting her half-life onto her children, internally mutilated by the decaying wrath of her own mushroom cloud judgement.

[misfitwashere]

TIMOTHY SNYDER

MAR 8

The scene: an office in the West Wing of the White House, with a "DOGE Helpline" sign on the door. Four consumer relations specialists take phone calls.

Rep. 1 "Yes. Here's the theory. We call it libertarianism. For now, anyway. The point is to create the conditions for the survival of the fittest. That's American, right?"

Rep. 2 "We got rid of USAID and foreign aid to create an environment of desperation and hatred of Americans. Americans will show their best side in these situations."

Rep. 3 "The FDA was wrong to track food-borne illnesses. We need an honest competition among digestive tracts out there."

Rep. 4 "Consumer Protection just makes people stupid. It should be killed. Americans should be able to identify bank fraud by themselves."

Rep. 1. "Yes, we define what is natural and what is fitness."

Rep. 2. "You see, the FBI is an unnecessary government intervention. Americans are best placed to handle crime by themselves. We need to allow Americans to take part in an unfettered competition against organized crime."

Rep. 3. "We take a different view. Infectious disease is in good. It weeds out the weak and the unfit. We want measles back. And polio. Right. You're catching on. Toxicity in the environment is also good. For the same reasons. EPA will have to be scaled way back."

Rep. 4 "Of course there should be no Department of Education. That sort of government interference just gets in the way of the development of the brightest minds. Americans should be able to make themselves productive and competitive without schools."

Rep. 1 "Yes, you are correct, such a competition is rigged from the beginning, since it is organized by an oligarch who controls the government. He is fit. You are not. That is natural."

Rep. 2. "The same goes for the CIA. National security is an inappropriate concern for government. And when the CIA stops international cybercrime against Americans, that's inappropriate interference in the internet. Russian and Chinese attacks on Americans are free speech, part of nature."

Rep. 3. "That's also why we have to cut Medicaid. The government shouldn't be interfering in the natural competition between human cells and viruses, bacteria, and toxins. And Social Security just supports the unfit. That's what we mean by fraud, by the way."

Rep. 4 "We don't need the science data assembled by NOAA and other government agencies. The weather is what it is. Hurricanes happen. Carbon pollution is a natural result of the free market. And the constant droughts, fires, and floods will bring out the best in competitive Americans."

"Rep. 1. “And so yes, the point is to make the government entirely dysfunctional for the rest of you. But, right, we will keep the government functional for us. You will keep paying taxes and we will treat you as drones."

Rep. 2. "Of course the Department of Defense shouldn't be tracking weapons of mass destruction. That's just government interference in the free market of plutonium, enriched uranium, and centrifuges. Loose nukes are the natural state of being. We'll all be facing a more bracing and authentic reality without cities and with radiation."

Rep. 3 "The bodies than can survive all of this are the only ones we want around. Yes, to be sure, the likely survivors are the people who are already oligarchs today. They dream a dream of immortality. It can only be proven by the mortality of all the rest. That's natural."

Rep. 4 "Of course we lie. Lying is good. Let science and the humanities compete with other opinions in a free market of ideas. The dark enlightenment will be better than that last enlightenment. Without the knowledge. And the humanism. We'll tell you who you need to be and what you need to know."

Rep. 1 "He'll be on Mars, repeating all this. That's the theory, anyway."

This is meant as a theatrical sketch for four performers. It is not long, but then again we don't have a lot of time. This is less of a satire than one might wish.

[archmotif]

Thought this paragraph might be worth sharing for fans of The Half Life of Valery K — it's from a section on the incident/area that is fictionalized in the novel:

"The body of water that received the most contamination from Mayak's nuclear fuel production was Lake Karachay. 'Contamination [in Chelyabinsk] is perhaps the highest in the world, and the most acute problem in that region is at Lake Karachay,' Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at the Bellona Foundation, an environmental organization headquartered in Oslo, Norway, said in 2001, fifteen years after the accident at Chernobyl, ten years before the Fukushima meltdown. He continued: 'The Soviets started dumping waste from reprocessed plutonium into Karachay in the early 1950s, and extreme levels of radiation are still being monitored there.' In fact, an isolated corner of the lake was at one time so chock-full of radioactive particles that human survival after a mere thirty minutes of exposure was fifty-fifty. Over 120 million curies of radioactive waste polluted the body of water. In the 1990s, Don Bradley, along with other researchers, visited one of the least polluted areas of the lake. 'We drove out [to]... the lake with a guy holding a Geiger counter and a watch,' recounted Bradley. 'After ninety seconds, we came back. In that brief time, we received the equivalent dose of radiation of an airplane flight from Moscow to New York.'"

– from Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank, ch. 2: "Of Leaks and Lies"

[christinamac1]

“Tritium Removal”: A Report on the Proposed MCECE Facility at Chalk River

Gordon Edwards, 2 Mar 24 As it happens, both heavy water (used in all Canadian CANDU reactors) and tritium (produced in great quantities as a radioactive pollutant from CANDU reactors) are sensitive materials from the point of view of nuclear weapons proliferation.  Heavy water can be used to produce nuclear-weapons usable plutonium without the need to buy enriched uranium, a carefully…

[v-spicata]

Here's some choice quotes from the article: "A document sent to members of the Sellafield board in November 2022 and seen by the Guardian raised widespread concerns about a degradation of safety across the site, warning of the “cumulative risk” from failings ranging from nuclear safety to asbestos and fire standards." Fuck me, if you can't trust a place to deal with asbestos problems, why are they being trusted with nuclear waste? "A scientist on an expert panel that advises the UK government on the health impact of radiation told the Guardian that the risks posed by the leak and other chemical leaks at Sellafield have been “shoved firmly under the rug”." 👍👍👍

Oh hey, that sounds totally reasonable and not at all worrying. "A senior Norwegian diplomat told the Guardian that they believed Oslo should offer to help fund the site so that it can be run more safely, rather than “run something so dangerous on a shoestring budget and without transparency”. Jesus Christ, the Norwegians are so scared of our incompetence they're offering to stuff the cracks with cash. "Inspectors said that it is not possible to work out how many cracks have formed in the silo so are using guesswork and modelling based on leaks from the facility to work out the risk posed to the public and workers at the site." I mean guesswork's a pretty valid part of my own work but then I'm fixing farmyard fences and not managing a nuclear waste silo. Sliiiiiightly different risk factors involved there. "The ONR warned in its latest review of the Sellafield site, published in March this year, that “regulatory intelligence indicates that improvements are required in conventional safety, fire safety, cybersecurity and progressing high-hazard risk reduction”." Apparently this is all came to light during an investigation on how they've let malware sit in their computers since 2015. And the pièce de résistance:

"A Sellafield spokesperson said: “We are proud of our safety record at Sellafield and we are always striving to improve."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Final thoughts: This is why I don't trust nuclear power over renewables, because cutting corners and "sweeping issues under the rug" is all part of the game in this hellhole. The stakes involved in nuclear power mean that corruption is so much more serious with radioactive material when things do go wrong. Even if Sellafield does somehow get their shit together, the longetivity of nuclear waste means that the custodians of it have to stay reliable and trustworthy for hundreds of years and I just don't see that happening. Near me there's a place called Parys Mountain, an old copper mine from the 1700s. It's a bizarre and barren landscape of red, green and sulphur-yellow rocks that would look more at home on Mars than Anglesey. The reason it is that way is because of the dumped spoil and disposed chemicals from the copper works. The ground is so polluted that even three hundred years later, plants still cannot grow there. The actions we take now will echo far into the future and plutonium's one hell of a riskier toy to play with than copper.

[13thpythagoras]

Cute fascist propaganda, my goodness, this has been debunked by Yale and I'll paste that below my personal debunking--

Nuclear power makes so much sense until the next Fukushima event

Comparing nuclear power's waste to solar power's waste is worse than comparing apples to oranges, when e-waste is 10x what you see from solar panels and both are growing at the same pace, with both having potential for recycling solutions that DO NOT EXIST for nuclear waste. Apples to amulets

waste from cell phones and computers is 10x the waste from solar panels; and guess what, waste from coal is about 10x the size of e-waste. And when you actually account for the YEARS of waste you get from nuclear, that's the most wasteful of all

I'm not able to fathom the difference of something that can and should be recycled like solar waste being compared in the same ballpark to spent nuclear rods that cannot be recycled and kill anyone who goes near them for the next 10,000 years

Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and conscious hydro are the 5-fold system advocated by many, including Lester Brown and myself advocate for, and we also need energy storage. The monopoly fossil fuel has on energy storage needs to end, we know sugar batteries are 10x more efficient than lithium ion batteries, and sugar batteries are theoretically recyclable as well; we absolutely need political gains so that we can focus on long-term profitable enterprises like recycling rather than short term profit...

and now for that Yale debunking-

"Myth: “Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.”

Fact check:

Misinformation about the purported toxicity of solar panels is widespread, but this dubious variation of the myth stood out as one that warranted further investigation.

A non-peer reviewed article arrived at this conclusion with a problematic leap of logic. The authors measured quantities of toxic waste in cubic meters, and “the study defines as toxic waste the spent fuel assemblies from nuclear plants, and the solar panels themselves.”

In other words, the article equates a cubic meter of used solar panels to a cubic meter of spent nuclear fuel. One needn’t have much of a science background to realize that a used solar panel offers a completely different type of hazard compared to a bundle of uranium and plutonium.

Perhaps a more useful unit of measure would consider the type of toxin, the degree of hazard it poses, how long it lasts, and, critically, exposure – that is, how easily it’s transported through the environment and absorbed by humans and other organisms. Volume alone is not a useful measure of toxicity, particularly when it comes to nuclear waste.

As clean energy ramps up, the latest wave of fossil fuel dark money seeks to undermine its benefits. Fellow Yale Climate Connections writer Dana Nuccitelli in June 2018 described this situation in the attacks on electric vehicles and solar panels for the Guardian newspaper.

That said, of course we want solar panels to be as clean and green as possible. They do contain heavy metals and toxins similar to the materials found in smartphones and laptops. Unlike a smartphone, however, a solar panel has a 25-year lifespan.

Solar panels are mostly made of glass, which is easily recycled. The remaining components are plastic, aluminum, silicone, and metals, each with its own pathway for recycling and disposal. The recycling efforts of solar panel manufacturers can be compared using the Solar Scorecard. It’s also worth noting that solar-thermal plants don’t use solar panels at all, they use mirrors.

People who make this argument tend to fall into two camps. In some cases, concern for the environmental footprint of solar panels is genuine. But in other cases the underlying motivation is simply to rally support for more polluting forms of energy.

Either way, it’s easier to take the comment at face value and point out the environmental virtues of solar energy. As always, start by building off of common ground and aim for a response that appeals rather than offends or repels.

A friendly response: “I share your concern about the toxicity of our energy production, and I agree that we should pursue the types of energy that involve the smallest possible amounts of pollution. You are correct, too, in pointing out that every source of energy has some environmental drawbacks. If reducing pollution is your priority, then we surely need to steer clear of fossil fuels. While no form of electricity generation is entirely free from impacts, solar and wind are far cleaner options for us all.”

[denimbex1986]

'Christopher Nolan believes J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. “By unleashing nuclear power,” the film director concludes, “he gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” Nolan might exaggerate, but Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s hit movie, is surely worthy of the title most often applied to him, “father of the atomic bomb.”

Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M., during World War II, managing a team of the smartest physicists he could recruit. Together, they created the bomb — atomic energy, the nuclear age — in a remote corner of America’s Southwest.

In delivering us into the atomic age, Oppenheimer also became the father of the Anthropocene. Given his anguish about America’s deploying his nuclear weapon in 1945, I suspect “Oppie” would also agonize about his ownership of our current geologic time period. Nevertheless, he and his fellow physicists gave us the indicator — what geologists call the “golden spike” — that marks a new epoch in Earth history.

Earth scientists have been debating whether to add this new epoch to their time scale for two decades. In 2019, they reached agreement: If you’re alive now you live in the Anthropocene — a geologic epoch incorporating humans in its very definition: “Anthropo,” as in anthropology, meaning “human”; and “cene,” as in so many recent geologic epochs — Miocene, Pleistocene — meaning “recent” or “new.”

Until the International Commission on Stratigraphy sealed the change with a vote, we were living in the Holocene, the “wholly recent” — a relatively uneventful 12,000 years that started at the end of the Ice Age.

But 8 billion humans now inhabit our planet. Our influence has become so extreme, so pervasive, that we must take responsibility for a new era.

We casually burn fossil carbon from plants that grew 200 million years ago. We alter the climate. We strew waste across the Earth from our industrialized societies. As global temperatures rise and habitats are disrupted, we speed up the course of evolution. And, beginning with Oppenhemer’s “gadget,” our nuclear bombs have blanketed the Earth with radioactive fallout.

Anthropocene. The “peopled recent.” Humans have taken command of geological time. It’s an astonishing thought.

Geologic time periods are graphed, with beginning and ending dates. When did humans take over? When did the Holocene end and the Anthropocene begin?

Historians and anthropologists look back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution or even further, to the adoption of agriculture or the “Columbian Exchange,” when Columbus’ explorations brought together the Eastern and Western hemispheres, scattering once-geographically limited species across the globe. Indigenous people did plenty of landscape management, burning and deforesting when it suited their needs, but it took thousands of years of increasing human interventions to arrive at a geologic hinge point: “an observable, unambiguous change in the physical properties or fossil content of the strata.”

Radioactive plutonium that drifted to Earth in the first years of Oppenheimer’s nuclear age provides geologists with a recognizable, mappable layer in the Earth’s crust — perhaps the most pervasive signal of any marker between geologic time periods. This summer, geologists even settled on a “type locality” for the Anthropocene marker: Crawford Lake, Ontario. This little suburban lake happens to be extraordinarily deep, with perfect chemistry for chronicling annual deposits of sediment, pollution and pollen grains over thousands of years. The lake’s record shifts abruptly in 1950, when plutonium shows up, drifting across the continent from nuclear bomb tests in Nevada and the Pacific.

A worldwide spike in fly ash from burning coal also occurs in 1950. And so most stratigraphic experts have settled on 1950 as the curtain-raiser for the Anthropocene.

The first device that blasted fallout into the atmosphere exploded at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945. The next month the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki — killing 200,000 people, bringing World War II to a close. But we kept developing, testing and exploding fission and fusion weapons after the war, more than 2,000 times, across the world. Only North Korea is still testing today.

Geologic epochs last for thousands and even millions of years. But the Anthropocene — initiated by human interference and likely to end by it as well — may be the shortest of them all.

At Los Alamos and beyond, J. Robert Oppenheimer inspired people. His scientific work was groundbreaking, but his primary skill was successfully corralling dozens of fiery and brilliant minds.

When his team succeeded, when the Trinity gadget exploded, Oppenheimer both exulted and mourned. He said, “We knew the world would not be the same.” And then, after Japan was bombed, he told President Truman, “I have blood on my hands.”

That blood, that stain, the evidence of human hubris and unfettered intellect and meddling with the powers of the universe doesn’t end with nuclear power. The Anthropocene denotes more than just the harnessing of the atom.

We keep rummaging through metaphors and vocabulary for the right words to describe the transformation we’ve caused in the Earth’s chemistry, climate and biodiversity. “The Great Acceleration” signifies even more human meddling than the geologists address. I’d love to be able to ask Oppenheimer, the patriarch, the prime accelerator, the man who gave us that fateful push into this epoch, what words he would use.

With his deep respect for Hindu teachings, Oppie might simply repeat his famous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, the words that came to him after he saw the blinding light of the first nuclear explosion, “the radiance of a thousand suns” in the New Mexico desert: “Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer indeed shattered our world when he ushered us into the Anthropocene. As Christopher Nolan has said of his complicated protagonist, “Like it or not, we still live in his world, and we always will.”'

[thenuclearmallard]

Novaya Zemlya, Russia

Nuclear Weapons Test Site

From 1954 to 1990, the islands of Novaya Zemlya were used by the Soviets to conduct atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. Decommissioned nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines were also scuttled around the islands, turning the entire region into an environmental disaster zone.

Photo: Radioactively contaminated lichen causes high strontium levels in reindeer, which are a dietary mainstay of the local Nenets and Sami populations. © TOYOSAKI Hiromitsu

History

In July 1954, the two islands of Novaya Zemlya (“New Land”) on the Russian Arctic coast were designated a nuclear weapons test site. The indigenous Nenets population was forcibly resettled and the islands were divided into different testing zones. Between 1955 and 1990, Novaya Zemlya was the site of 130 nuclear detonations, including the “Tsar Bomba,” the biggest nuclear device ever detonated, with 50 megatons of TNT equivalent, almost 4,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The “Tsar Bomba” detonation caused severe destruction of the island within a radius of about 100 km and spread nuclear fallout all over the Northern Hemisphere.

In addition, the practice of dumping nuclear waste around the islands contributed greatly to the current environmental catastrophe around Novaya Zemlya. Together with fallout from nuclear weapons testing and the continuous discharge of nuclear waste from the reprocessing plants at La Hague and Sellafield, nuclear waste dumped near Novaya Zemlya added to the radioactive contamination of the North Sea and Arctic Ocean. Thirteen decrepit nuclear reactors, along with spent fuel from nuclear submarines with a total radioactivity of 37 Peta-Becquerel (Peta = quadrillion), were dumped along the coast of Novaya Zemlya and into the Barents and Kara seas. Two of the most contaminated sites on Novaya Zemlya are the Abrosimov and Stepovogo Fjords in the southern part of the island.

Health and environmental effects

Scientific expeditions found increased levels of cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60, and plutonium-239 and -241 in sediments close to the fjords, which were used as radioactive waste dumps. A 1992 Russian study found that in 67–72 % of all underground tests, radioactive gas had leaked through in the rock formation. Together with fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing, radioactive gases from underground leaks resulted in increased levels of radiation across Europe, most notably in Finland, where radioactive iodine-131 was measured in concentrations of up to 5 mBq/m³, and in Norway, with cases of radioactively contaminated milk and iodine-131 concentrations of up to 1.37 megabecquerel (mBq/m³ Mega = million). Iodine-131 is a known cause of thyroid cancer, especially in children.

The indigenous population of the region around Novaya Zemlya received even higher radiation doses. Most notably affected by radiation exposure were the semi-nomadic Sami people of the Arctic region and the former inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya, the Nenets people. The Vepsians, Karelians and Komi people, living along the Northern Russian coast, however, were also affected. Radioactively contaminated lichen caused high strontium levels in reindeer, which are a mainstay of the local diet. As was the case with other indigenous populations affected by fallout and radioactive contamination, no epidemiological studies were ever performed to assess health effects on the people living around Novaya Zemlya.

Outlook

As Norway is only 900 km away from Novaya Zemlya, the Norwegian government is very concerned about the radioactive waste catastrophe taking place on and around the islands. The Barents Sea, which is important for Norway’s fishing industry, has been severely polluted by radioactive fallout from Novaya Zemlya and is in constant danger of being further contaminated by leaking radioactive waste dumps, submerged spent nuclear fuel rods, nuclear submarine wrecks, dumped nuclear reactors and radioactive waste from bases and naval yards. Monitoring and management of the huge region affected by nuclear pollution has become an international responsibility, yet little has been done to contain this danger up to now, let alone investigate the long-term health effects on the local population. They, too, are casualties of nuclear weapons – they, too, are Hibakusha.

References

“The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Testing Program.” Website of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization CTBTO, http://ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/the-soviet-unionsnuclear-testing-programme/

Bøhmer et al. “The Arctic Nuclear Challenge.” Bellona Report Volume 3, 2001. http://bellona.org/assets/sites/6/The_Arctic_Nuclear_Challenge.pdf

Koivisto K. “Nuclear Waste Storage Facility on Novaya Zemlya.” Helsinki Hufvudstads bladet, April 1, 1997. www.fas.org/news/russia/1997/drsov04021997000220.htm

Matzko JR. “Physical Environment of the Underground Nuclear Test Site on Novaya Zemlya, Russia.” U.S.-Department of the Interior, Geological Survey, 1993. http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1993/0501/report.pdf

“Indigenous People and the Nuclear Age – USSR.” Critical Will

[argumate]

klakokum said: Fallout is world-wide. In 1974 I worked as a civilian on a National Defence project out of Tuktoyaktuk, NWT. My job was spectographic photography of ice core samples; the lines on the photos were measured to determine contents of the ice. Was sworn to 30 years of silence under The Official Secrets Act. The military objective was to verify claims made by the nuclear powers about their nuclear tests. All of them except the USA lied, on average reporting less than half ..2

klakokum said: than half their tests. The ice leaves a new layer every year. We went back 10,000 years. Two surprising results: A)there was a nuclear war circa 2112 bc B)official history is tests started 1940. But we found

klakokum said: tests from 1937 on with a plutonium signature only found from the plutonium found in Germany after the war i.e. Germany had the bomb? The civilian projects were two-fold A)industrial pollution was first earth-wide in 1840 and has increased every year since B)three widely-divergent First Nations have identical legends about a major fire throughout the western mountains of the americas. These three all had different calendars. Anthropologists sought to coordinate ..4

klakokum said: the calendars by establishing the date of the fire from Alaska to Chile. It was 610ad

klakokum said: To verify both the military and civilian timelines, we measured ash from known historic volcanic eruptions, confirming the known dates of Krakatoa and other major events. The big concern for the future now is: all plant life on the planet has traces of strontium. The higher up an animal is on the food-chain the higher the concentration in the animal will be. And since strontium is everywhere, we cannot provide a control group without strontium, to monitor the harmful eff

I'm sorry but you can't just drop the fact that there was a nuclear war in 2112 BC as a minor side detail

[jayykesley]

Hey I'm telling you things! Specifically about new nuclear reactor designs - the next set of technologies could involve melting the uranium, plutonium, or thorium in lithium/beryllium/fluoride salt mixtures and letting it all stew in a big, slow nuclear reaction! It'd use up more of the radioactive parts of the fuel than solid fuel designs (cause molecules can move around in liquid so unreacted molecules can get reacted with, bypassing the spent molecules that would have shielded them) which means our existing fuel "waste" could get used up (that's years of power!) and we could get more power out of existing fuel AND the waste from this would be like a tenth as dangerous! It's really miracle tech, except that molten uranium/fluoride/lithium/beryllium mixes are like the most dangerous stuff known to man 😅 we still need to invent a material that'll last longer inside this reactor than the glorified pencil lead we used when it was tested back in the 1970s. But I'm positive! This technology is really appealing to me personally and it shows a lot of promise as a technology that pollutes less than coal or gas plants (real technical source here)

that’s cool! so what you’re saying is we could potentially power the earth without nearly as much waste by using Super Dangerous Nuclear Soup 🥣

[fatehbaz]

In May 2019, workers at the Perma-Fix Northwest plant pulled a hunk of radioactive waste from a powerful kiln heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit – hot enough to ensconce the material in glass for eventual burial. [...] The workers let it cool – but not long enough – before setting it on a pallet. The residual heat caused the wood to burn. A crew from the plant sprayed chemicals on the fire before Richland firefighters arrived to finish that job. A Washington Department of Ecology inspector in a report noted that a fire alarm system was not operating that month and that the incident “could have been catastrophic.”

This was one of two fires at Perma-Fix in 2019 that were not publicly disclosed by the company or state regulators. It offers an unsettling example of how things can go wrong at the private facility that treats radioactive and hazardous materials trucked in from Hanford, the highly polluted federal site which produced plutonium for nuclear bombs, as well as waste from elsewhere in the U.S. and other countries.

Perma-Fix has thrived as a low-cost operator that, by virtue of its location just outside the federal Hanford site, is able to operate without labor unions and beyond federal oversight of the Department of Energy and the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which publishes weekly inspection reports. [...]

A new investigative report released exclusively to The Seattle Times by the nonprofit watchdog group Hanford Challenge documents the fires as well as other mishaps and compliance problems that the authors say “calls into question” the safety of sending Hanford’s wastes to Perma-Fix. [...] The new report documents two incidents when workers were significantly overexposed to radiation.

-------

Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Patrick Malone and Hal Bernton. “New investigative report documents fires, violations at company treating Hanford wastes.” The Seattle Times, republished in The Spokesman-Review. 27 November 2020.

-------

The Department of Energy has permanently canceled its award of a $13 billion contract for management of the Hanford tank farms over 10 years. [...] DOE plans to start over in 2021 with a new solicitation for proposals, or bids, that will expand the proposed contract to also include the initial operation of the $17 billion Hanford vitrification plant. [...] DOE has had a federal court-enforce deadline of the end of 2023 to start vitrifying some of the least radioactive of the 56 million gallons of waste held in underground tanks at the Hanford site [...].

The waste is left from the past production at the Eastern Washington nuclear reservation of two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War. [...]

DOE issued a request for bids on a 10-year Hanford Tank Closure Contract in early 2019 and awarded the contract in May 2020 to Hanford Works Restoration, a team that included BWXT of Lynchburg, Va., with Fluor Federal Services of Greenville, S.C. [...]. But the transition of work to Hanford Works Restoration was delayed as the contract award was appealed to the Government Accountability Office by losing bidders. [...] On Wednesday [23 December 2020], DOE’s Consolidated Business Center for Environmental Management informed contracting officers for Hanford that it had decided to cancel the request for bids issued nearly two years ago. [...] Two other large contracts awarded at Hanford will take full effect Jan. 24 [2021], ending a transition period from expiring contracts.

-------

Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Annette Cary. “$13 billion Hanford contract canceled. Feds to restart bidding process.” Tri-City Herald. 24 December 2020.

[tester2080]

Nuclear power is necessary to stop climate change. Here's why.

15/09/21

I'll be covering a few different concerns and topics related to nuclear energy, such as:

1. Safety

2. Efficiency

3. Waste

4. Feasibility

Safety: When people think about nuclear energy, they usually instantly think of accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima and the risks associated with a nuclear meltdown. This causes people to write of nuclear power as dangerous and not worth it. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, nuclear meltdowns, especially ones that end up doing any harm, are incredibly rare.

Apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident. Most of the serious radiological injuries and deaths that occur each year (2-4 deaths and many more exposures above regulatory limits) are the result of large uncontrolled radiation sources, such as abandoned medical or industrial equipment. (There have also been a number of accidents in experimental reactors and in one military plutonium-producing pile - at Windscale, UK, in 1957 - but none of these resulted in loss of life outside the actual plant, or long-term environmental contamination.

There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power - Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity. These are the only major accidents to have occurred in over 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 36 countries. [1] 2 major accidents in 18,500 reactor-years is incredibly low. Imagine if there was a single reactor built. If that had the same probability of meltdown as the average of all nuclear reactors so far, it would take 9,250 years for an accident to occur. The pyramids were built 4,691 years ago. If the Egyptians had built a modern nuclear reactor, it would likely still not have experienced a meltdown, and wouldn't for another 4,559 years. The FAA estimates there to be 25,506,000 flight hours per year [20]. In 2019 there were 86 plane crashes [21]. This works out to be around 3.37176 crashes per million flight hours. Comparatively, in total there have been 162,060,000 reactor hours and 2 main accidents. This works out to be 0.01234 accidents per million reactor hours or 273.24 times less likely for an accident to occur from a nuclear reactor than a plane per operating hour. Nuclear plants are similar to plane crashes in the way that they are incredibly rare, and therefore every accident sees major coverage. Just as you hear about every plane crash but not every car crash and therefore planes seem less safe than they are, you hear about every nuclear reactor accident but not every person who dies from fossil-fuel related pollution, or other deaths involved in the production of non-renewable energy, therefore making nuclear power seem less safe. Furthermore, the probability of a nuclear meltdown occurring is much higher when you include accidents, such as Chernobyl, which occurred in the 1980s, when safety was not as prioritised and therefore skews the current probability of a nuclear accident. It would be like including accidents from back in the 40s when assessing the probability of a plane crash nowadays. However, due to the low number of nuclear power plants and exceptionally low number of accidents, a more accurate figure is difficult to calculate. However, the risk of any nuclear accident occurring today is incredibly low.

Additionally, accidents are far from the only way producing power kills people. Air pollution, which largely comes from fossil fuels, kills over 5 million people a year, contributing to 9% of global deaths, and making it 4th highest contributor to deaths a year [2]. When you compare 5 million a year to the approximate 5,000 deaths overall from nuclear energy, the deaths from nuclear power seem incredibly low. Whilst obviously we must strive to reach 0 deaths, this is impossible with current technology. Air pollution resulting directly from fossil fuels is estimated to cause 4.5 million premature deaths a year [3]. The total electricity generation from fossil fuels is approximately 136,761TWh per year [4]. Given that (including accidents) nuclear power causes 0.07 deaths per TWh [1], if you replaced all fossil fuel electricity generation with nuclear power, approximately 9,573 people would die a year from all nuclear power related causes (mining, accidents, etc). This means that approximately 4.5 million people a year would not die that would have died had fossil fuels been used. That means that despite nuclear power being heavily opposed by the general public [5], the use of nuclear power would actively save millions of lives a year.

That brings us on to our next point. You may have looked at the safety graph and are thinking "well solar only kills 0.02 people/TWh and wind is only 0.04/TWh, compared to 0.07/TWh [1] - so why would we use nuclear? Why not just use solar and wind, after all, they kill less people." However, scaling up to a planetary (or even country-wide) level is really where ordinary renewables start to fail.

Solar and wind power alone can't scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany's concerted recent effort to add renewables-the most ambitious national effort so far-was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany's peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That's just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.

To put it another way, even if the world were as enthusiastic and technically capable as Germany at the height of its renewables buildup-and neither of these is even close to true in the great majority of countries-decarbonizing the world at that rate would take nearly 150 years. [6] The storage of all the renewable power would also be an issue Bill Gates, who has invested $1 billion in renewables, notes that "there's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables." [6] Our analysis demonstrates that realising nuclear energy's potential is essential to achieving a deeply decarbonised energy future in many regions of the world [7] While we are installing renewables at record speeds, at the same time the amount of fossil fuels we're burning for electricity still keeps rising year by year. Renewables have, so far, not been able to catch up with the demand for new electricity and so despite our progress, emissions from electricity are still rising world wide. [8] It becomes rather clear when you look at Germany, which has been actively removing nuclear power plants. Despite building huge amounts of renewable plants, they still get 49.5% of their energy from non-renewable sources [9]. Compare that to countries like "France and Sweden: In France, only around 10% comes from fossil fuels, while 67% comes from nuclear and 23% from renewables, primarily hydro [10]. In Sweden almost 30% comes from nuclear power, and almost 45% from hydro [11]. So we know that nuclear energy can work at scale."[12]. These countries clearly show how nuclear can be used alongside renewables to get the maximum benefit of both. Renewables on their own are not enough to power the entire grid, as they have periods where they must go offline. For example, wind and solar can only produce maximum power for 35.4% and 24.9% of the year respectively [13]. This means that the other 65+% of the time, energy must be taken out of batteries if we were to just use wind and solar. This is not feasible. However, compare those percentages to the incredibly high 92.5% of the year where nuclear power plants can produce maximum power [13]. Therefore, by having both nuclear and other renewables, nuclear can easily supplement the power generation when other renewables cannot. The only other power source close to nuclear's capacity factor is geothermal (74.3% [13]) however, that is not a feasible method of energy generation in most countries. Furthermore, nuclear plants are incredibly efficient. It is estimated that 1 pound of uranium can provide as much energy as 5,000 barrels of oil [24]. Regardless of how safe you believe nuclear power plants to be, if you want to stop climate change by powering the grid cleanly, they must be used.

When people think of nuclear reactors and the downsides, nuclear waste is a very common thing to be cited. However, 97% of the waste is low or intermediate level waste (90% and 7% respectively) and storage of it is not much of an issue [14]. The idea that we don't have any idea of what to do with the remaining 3% is untrue, "Safe methods for the final disposal of high-level radioactive waste are technically proven; the international consensus is that geological disposal is the best option."[15] "The concept of final storage in deep geological formations has become established as a means of safe radwaste management in order to ensure lasting protection against radioactive waste for people and for the environment. This method allows the radioactive waste to be kept away from human living environments in the long term - i.e. for many millennia." [16] "There is a common solution to the challenges of ensuring long term safety for spent fuel and of preventing weapon grade materials being illegally diverted and misused. Deep geologic repositories are the answer. The paper describes the specific engineering, geological, hydrogeological and geotechnical challenges involved at each phase in the development of a geologic repository." [17] In the incredibly rare scenario where there has been a leak, it has not caused any significant harm. In 2014 a leak was detected in a repository in New Mexico. 13 workers tested positive for radiation and even though every radiation level above zero is worth investigating, the radiation exposure was ten times less radiation than that delivered during a typical chest X-ray. [17] It is clear that safe storage of nuclear waste is not much of a problem, with the only issue being with potentially the amount of space it takes up, however, currently the amount of high level waste is "12,000 tonnes worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of a two-storey structure built on a basketball court or about 100 double-decker buses and is modest compared with other industrial wastes."[14]. A lot of this HLW can be reprocessed "As of 2013 approximately 370,000 tons have been generated worldwide since the first reactor was connected to the grid, of which roughly one third (124,000 tons) has been reprocessed" [18]. For example, "In France, where fuel is reprocessed, just 0.2% of all radioactive waste by volume is classified as high-level waste (HLW)" [15]. Additionally nuclear recycling [22] exists and could possibly be used to further reduce nuclear waste. However, costs for such reactors are high, and engineers in that area are rare. Additionally, there are fears about the plutonium created being used for weapons (although such a thing being successfully carried out is very unlikely) [23].

Despite the many recent breakthroughs in nuclear fusion [25][26] nuclear fusion is still likely at least 5 years away from reaching net energy output, and like 20 years away from feasibly being able to use it to power the entire grid. Whilst I wholeheartedly support the advent of nuclear fusion technology and development, and believe once it powers the entire grid we should start retiring nuclear fission plants. However, we cannot just hope that nuclear fusion or some other magic technology will swoop in and save us from climate change at the last second. We have already gone past the point of no return - at this stage we are simply attempting damage mitigation really

Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level. [27] Nuclear fission reactors are here now. They work. They can feasibly stop the effects of climate change. However, we must act now. We must stop decommissioning nuclear plants early, and try to rapidly build new ones. It is a race against time. As I have mentioned previously, renewables alone will not be enough. And I'm not going to argue that we should go entirely nuclear either. What we need is a mix of both. I have shown that nuclear power is safe, effective, and necessary. If we want to stop climate change, we cannot shy away from using one of the most powerful tools we have. Thank you for reading.

If you found this article changed your mind, or even perhaps just put you on the fence about nuclear energy, please share it or even just a summary of the points here, or in any of the sources listed, on any sort of platform you may have a following on. We must change the public perception of nuclear power for the better. We must save lives by reducing air pollution. We must save the planet. It is an immense challenge and we need as much public support of viable climate change prevention methods as possible.

If you have any questions or issues regarding this article, feel free to contact me at 0802retset@gmail.com and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx [2] https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution#air-pollution-is-one-of-the-world-s-leading-risk-factors-for-death [3] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-Price-of-Fossil-Fuels-full-report.pdf [4] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels [5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-opposition-to-nuclear-energy-production [6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-nuclear-energy-can-save-the-planet-11547225861?ns=prod/accounts-wsj [7] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-of-Nuclear-Energy-in-a-Carbon-Constrained-World.pdf [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-fossil-nuclear-renewables?stackMode=absolute&country=~OWID_WRL [9] https://strom-report.de/germany-power-generation-2020/ [10] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-fossil-nuclear-renewables?tab=chart&country=~FRA&region=World [11] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?tab=chart&stackMode=relative&time=earliest..latest&country=~SWE&region=World [12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ [13] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close [14] https://web.archive.org/web/20160313120210/http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx [15] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx [16] https://www.ensi.ch/en/waste-disposal/deep-geological-repository/ [17] https://onepetro.org/ISRMIS/proceedings-abstract/IS00/All-IS00/ISRM-IS-2000-015/50923 [18] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14778 [19] https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2019-11/World_Nuclear_Waste_Report_2019_Focus_Europe_0.pdf [20] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/ [21] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/02/plane-crash-deaths-rose-in-2020-despite-pandemic [22] https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html [23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion [24] https://web.archive.org/web/20140418044236/http://pandoraspromise.com/ [25] https://phys.org/news/2021-09-superconducting-magnet-magnetic-field-strength.html [26] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a37359406/nuclear-fusion-ignition-breakthrough/ [27] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

What was the full quote that pollution said? The one that ended with “but arsenic is forever”? (sorry for my bad English. English is not my first language)

Hiya :), 

the show:

It's not just nuclear destruction. It's chemical too. And my favourite standbysare all chemical. Say what you like, plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

the book:

It's not just the nuclear," Pollution said. "It's the chemical. Thousands of gallons of stuff in . . , little tanks all over the world. Beautiful liquids . . . with eighteen syllables in their names. And the . . . old standbys. Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever."