Re:Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand
by whatshisface on Monday March 20, 2023 @04:49PM
(#35238477)
Nuclear plant tritiated water is not concentrated to saleable quantities. The expense is from concentrating it. Sadly that doesn't help when it's mixed into the groundwater when a concentrated leak and a diffuse leak would both mix in about the same way.
I was unable in a short google search to find any information on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be incredibly small.
Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans, runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ... substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That and time, the half life only being around a decade.
Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500 TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels. 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that large.
So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have much to worry about.