Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by mimixco on Sunday June 09, 2019 @01:08PM
(#20140394)
Plutonium, a byproduct of all nuclear reactors and part of their waste stream, is dangerous for 240,000 years.
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Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by strken on Sunday June 09, 2019 @01:29PM
(#20140517)
How much plutonium is likely to be released in a nuclear incident? I thought Three Mile Island and Chernobyl mostly released radioactive isotopes of iodine and a bunch of noble gasses, with cesium, plutonium, and strontium being present in smaller quantities and generally settling closer to the reactor.
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by wbl on Sunday June 09, 2019 @04:01PM
(#20141529)
Plutonium release is far less being less mobile and it doesn't have the biological issues strontium does.
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by dingaling on Sunday June 09, 2019 @01:52PM
(#20140660)
Not all reactors; fast neutron burner reactors output less Pu than they consume.
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by mimixco on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @01:37PM
(#20157602)
Those exist only on paper. I'm speaking of actual production reactors which create dangerous amounts of plutonium-laden waste that needs to be cooled, monitored, and protected from human intervention for hundreds of thousands of years -- a problem that we still have no way to solve.
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by antidesitter on Sunday June 09, 2019 @01:37PM
(#20140560)
Where did you get that number?
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by wahern on Sunday June 09, 2019 @10:30PM
(#20143418)
Seems like a typo. Half-life of Pu-239 is ~24,000 years, and of Pu-242 ~374,000 years.
I'm guessing Pu-239 was intended as 1) an extra "0" digit is the more likely typo, and 2) Pu-239 is (AFAIU) the principal Plutonium byproduct of typical Uranium fission reactors.
Re:Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
by mimixco on Monday June 10, 2019 @12:29PM
(#20148224)
Half life means that radioactivity is reduced by half, not eliminated. A single particle of plutonium is enough to cause cancer and kill a person. This is why nuclear fuel rod storage (the waste products) must be guarded for hundreds of thousands of years.