Mysterious Spike In Radioactivity Over Northern Europe, Accident At Russian Nuclear Plant Suspected (ibtimes.com) 204
An anonymous reader quotes the International Business Times:
Watchdog agencies last week detected an increase in radioactivity levels in the atmosphere over northern Europe, suggesting a potential damage at a nuclear plant. Authorities noted the possibility that the spike may be the result of accidental release of radioactive material from one of the nuclear plants in Russia, but a spokesman denied any problems with the Russian power plants.
Several Scandinavian watchdog agencies detected elevated levels of radionuclides cesium-134, cesium -137 and ruthenium-103 over parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic. Although the levels are not considered harmful to human health and the environment, radionuclides are artificial, unstable byproducts of nuclear fission, suggesting that the sudden increase in levels may have resulted from a damage in a nuclear power plant.
According to the Associated Press, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority noted Tuesday (June 24) that locating the origin of the radionuclides is "not possible" but by Friday, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands announced that calculations revealed that the radionuclides may actually have come from the direction of Western Russia...
In 1986, it was a similar detection in Sweden that contributed to the reveal that a disaster had occurred in Chernobyl.
Several Scandinavian watchdog agencies detected elevated levels of radionuclides cesium-134, cesium -137 and ruthenium-103 over parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic. Although the levels are not considered harmful to human health and the environment, radionuclides are artificial, unstable byproducts of nuclear fission, suggesting that the sudden increase in levels may have resulted from a damage in a nuclear power plant.
According to the Associated Press, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority noted Tuesday (June 24) that locating the origin of the radionuclides is "not possible" but by Friday, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands announced that calculations revealed that the radionuclides may actually have come from the direction of Western Russia...
In 1986, it was a similar detection in Sweden that contributed to the reveal that a disaster had occurred in Chernobyl.
You get it today (Score:2, Funny)
Authorities noted the possibility that the spike may be the result of accidental release of radioactive material from one of the nuclear plants in Russia, but a spokesman denied any problems with the Russian power plants.
Tomorrow's headline Spokesman for Russian Power Plants falls from window.
Re:You get it today (Score:5, Informative)
following accident in Russia:
step 1: deny it
step 2: get confirmation
step 3: continue to deny it
step 4: get innundated with external evidence you cannot suppress
step 5: continue to deny it
(1-2 months later)
step 6: admit a "minor incident" has occurred, regardless of severity, impact, or loss of life
yup, nothing unusual here....
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It was just some vodka, don't worry.
Re:You get it today (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually Russian doctrine, linked to the ideas of Vladislav Surkov. The idea is to send out conflicting statements, so that the general public doesn't know what to believe anymore. The same thing happened with MH17.
Adam Curtis made an insightfull short video [youtu.be] on this. He called the effect it's designed to have on people "oh dearism" - as in "oh dear, I don't know what to believe anymore".
The short term goal is to create a sense of apathy and powerlessness amongst the general public.
The long term goal is to chip away at the idea that any truth can be found at all, thus chipping away at the ideals and fruits of the Enlightenment.
If rival societies like the United States of America and Europe slowly shift towards tribalism and polarisation, this benefits Russia.
I've summarized it before as "if you can't beat them, confuse them".
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The reality is likely a cover-up, Really, modern nuclear reactors shouldn't melt down. Old reactors certainly can. New designs are foolproof to prevent meltdowns, including already melted fuel.
Re:You get it today (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: You get it today (Score:2)
Indeed. I immediately thought that Russia could from time to time release a well-chosen mix of radionuclides just to wreak confusion. They're considered bad guys by default, so why not act like it.
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Trump read that book and claimed it as his.
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"but a spokesman denied any problems with the Russian power plants."
To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies -- Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Re: You get it today (Score:2)
Got more stories which have never happened?
Re:You get it today (Score:5, Informative)
If you take the Russians/Former Russian Countries out of the mix, then yes, it is extremely safe. Can we help that the Russians are too poor and desperate to take the necessary care to avoid accidents like we can?
In the USA we've only had ONE serious accident in nearly 50 years of commercial operation. That one accident didn't hurt anybody in a measurable way except for the financial fallout for the operator who couldn't use the plant anymore and had to manage the clean up for decades.
Other than TMI, the USA's record is one to envy. Yes, we've had our problems, a couple of leaks, some equipment failures and damage, but with one notable exception nothing serious has happened here. We are risk adverse, we don't take chances, both from a regulatory and civil liability set of rules.
The Russians take risks we would not even consider. Their safety record is thus horrible in comparison. It is not surprising they have more serious accidents. They don't have the rules, enforcement or the threat of civil litigation. But they do have a need for power and a willingness to take huge risks to get it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That's not including the half-dozen or so nuclear bombs that were lost/accidentally dropped on US soil and foreign soil.
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That's not including the half-dozen or so nuclear bombs that were lost/accidentally dropped on US soil and foreign soil.
And why would you include anything to do with nuclear weapons, when we are talking about nuclear power plants? That is, unless you are intentionally trying to blur the lines between the two in order to create FUD...
Oh wait, that's exactly what you are doing. This can also be evidenced by the links you provided.
In your three links, only one has anything to do with operation of a reactor, which happened to be an experimental reactor built in the late 50s that nobody in their right mind would build today, us
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You're quite wrong that America has only had 1 serious nuclear accident.
He'd be quite right in the context of an operating power plant, which is kind of what everyone here except for you seems to be talking about.
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If it wasn't for the containment dome, TMI would have definitely been a chernobyl-level accident.
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So except for all the differences, TMI and Chernobyl were the *exact same thing*!
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If it wasn't for the containment dome, TMI would have definitely been a chernobyl-level accident.
So you are saying if it wasn't for the extra safety precautions used in the US, the US would have had a Chernobyl-level accident? Yeah I guess that is true, but that simply goes to proving the US has never had a Chernobyl-level accident and that is precisely because of the extra safety precautions used in the US.
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Look at Fukushima. Those were US designed reactors, They weren't particularly unique, and didn't even have much hardening against earthquakes (they were a design primarily used in the US midwest, where earthquakes aren't re
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"The earthquake destroyed the reactors cooling system."
Nope
The reactor SCRAMed during the quake and shut down perfectly normally
"That the tsunami killed the emergency cooling is true, but it had not helped anyway."
Nope
The cooling system was working perfectly well up until the point that the batteries gave out.
The tsunami wrecked the generators POWERING the emergency cooling system - generators that GE engineers pointed out DURING CONSTRUCTION were vulnerable to tsunamis and _must_ be relocated - guess when
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Re: You get it today (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus the little fact that the reactors at TMI had a negative void coefficient, so boiling of coolant causes a loss of reactivity. The RBMK reactors at Chernobyl use a positive void coefficient, so turning water into steam causes the reactivity to increase. Hotter it gets, the more steam you get, the more neutrons get absorbed, the more fissioning, more heat, more steam, more neutrons, etc. until the whole thing cracks open from steam pressure in a large bang that spreads radioactive shit around the area.
Even as bad as that was, it was the subsequent graphite fire that made Chernobyl what it was - a nuclear furnace open to the atmosphere spewing fission products in a smoke plume into the upper atmosphere. The massive power output of the runaway reactor caused the heat necessary to burn nuclear graphite, and the vertical construction of the reactor caused a chimney affect to keep the heat high enough to sustain combustion - other graphite moderated reactors such as the N-reactor at Hanford used horizontal pressure tubes which even in an extremely low probability accident would not have sustained enough heat to combust the graphite due to graphite's thermal conductivity.
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I mean, I donâ(TM)t disagree that most people are that stupid, what with the left erasing all the history books and all, but come on.
LOL. You can't tell the difference between a history book and a statue, and you want to call other people stupid? Nobody is saying we can't learn about the bad parts of our history. They're saying we shouldn't CELEBRATE them by erecting monuments to it. So please let me know what history books the left are erasing (other than the ones that call slaves "workers").
Re: You get it today (Score:4, Interesting)
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They're pulling the Confederate Battle Flag from the Mississippi state flag, not Texas.
(not a fan of Texas, Mississippi or the Confederacy, just proving a correction...)
Um, no. The line star state (Score:3)
This is the Texas flag, and has been since 1839:
https://www.britannica.com/top... [britannica.com]
It I modeled after the American flag, except instead of 13 stripes it has two, and instead of 50 stars it has one. That's why it's called the lone star flag and the lone star state.
Where ever you've been getting your news ...
Well maybe try ABC News next time.
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I'm getting my nuclear accidents mixed up. TMI cooked itself and blew all it's coolant out. It's SL-1 i was thinking of. That blew it's top in a chernobyl-like fashion, so much so it pinned a man to the containment building roof.
So you are comparing an INES level 4 incident which killed three military personnel with an INES level 7 incident that killed dozens immediately and dispersed a dangerous level of radiation across Europe? Just looking at economic damage alone you would be comparing about $20 million [wikipedia.org] to over $200 billion [archive.org]. But hey, that is only about 4 orders of magnitude difference; basically negligible. Not much difference than comparing the height of the tallest skyscrapers every built to the height of my 4 year old.
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It was the containment building, and the containment building alone, that stopped it being as bad as it could have been. Just because the US enclosed it under a pile of concrete doesn't mean the actual accident wasn't as serious.
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"You designed backup systems to contain bad things, but those don't count."
Let's just stipulate that doing anything to contain the uranium, such as jacketing it in a zirconium tube, is a wuss' way to run a nuclear reactor instead of simply throwing uranium into pools of water. They
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What you're saying is the difference between the Trinity test and the detonation of Little Boy. One killed a lot of people and demolished lots of buildings, one didn't. Both made a tremendous boom though.
Yes, the US has conducted nuclear explosions of the same scale and greater than that of Little Boy and Fat Man. That is a correct statement.
But the US has not attacked a nation with nuclear weapons on the same scale of Little Boy and Fat Man. Claiming that would be a false statement.
The original context of your comment was that the US has had an accident of the same scale as Chernobyl. That is a false statement.
To use another stretched analogy, take two accidents where a gun misfires. One hits a bystander a
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It was a Dirty Bomba.
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Certainly not the best choice of language, but there did need to be something there to illustrate the OP wasn't just wrong but colossally wrong. To the level that no level headed person with any knowledge of the incident would make those comments.
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If I'm not mistaken this cultural difference in risk taking can be traced back to the Japan. After World War II, their products were crap while at the same time they were open for suggestions in the humble way that those that loose a war may be. This resulted in their "total quality" system, which was in part influenced by some Americans - Deming and Juran.
At the same time, the United States Department of Defense had introduced the MIL-Q-9858 standard, if I'm not mistaken in part due to an increase in priva
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The people who used to live in Fukushima Japan certainly would disagree that our existing technology is safe. There is a similar reactor near Miami that was in the bull's eye of a hurricane and storm surge. Precautions are now taken to prevent a calamity like Fukushima near Miami, but we cannot afford to let our guard down in an era of
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Tomorrow's headline Spokesman for Russian Power Plants falls from window.
Uh oh, spontaneous defenestration is highly contagious.
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Only in Prague.
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It's probably Sosnovy Bor reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look at the map, spot on the middle of the yellow sphere is Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant in Leningrad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They are decomissioning some of the RBMK reactors so perhaps there was a oopsie at the work site and something was spilled?
Re:It's probably Sosnovy Bor reactor (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at the map, spot on the middle of the yellow sphere is Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant in Leningrad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They are decomissioning some of the RBMK reactors so perhaps there was a oopsie at the work site and something was spilled?
It is Leningrad power station in Sosnovy Bor.
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good working theory - that plant's track record is not great either - multiple releases and cover-ups...
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Would the source be spot in the middle, or would it be slightly upwind?
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That is highly dependent on wind patterns and source dispersion. Closer to the ground wind is quite chaotic so over any considerable time the centre makes a lot of sense. If on the other hand you're measuring the high upper atmosphere then global wind patterns there are very stable.
Re:It's probably Sosnovy Bor reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no expert on this, but like most people here I have studied Fukushima and Tsjernobyl rather extensive.
I believe these isotopes must have comes from inside a (recently) active reactor core. And not just anywhere in the reactor, but inside the fuel rods that are normally constructed in such a way that their contents don't leak out. They have come out in sufficient quantities for them to be detectable very far away. This does not sound like an oopsie during decomissioning. Not someone accidentally dropping a fuel rod (which would typically only be handled indoors anyway) but more something much more violent like an explosion or an emergency pressure valve on an active reactor being triggered. Something that was capable of getting these isotopes high into the atmosphere. This could be a proper meltdown...
The only odd thing is that Russia explicitly denies this. I wouldn't expect them to do that this time if it were about a nuclear power plant... perhaps a nuclear reactor on a military vessel blew up?
Re:It's probably Sosnovy Bor reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
Ruthenium is a platinum group metal - so is chemically quite inert, is very dense and has an exceedingly high melting point. It is not expected to become airborne easily. Although particles were ejected from the chernobyl accident and small numbers of particles were found up to 100 km away, the range was very limited compared to other isotopes like cesium which were found thousands of km away in comparatively large quantities.
In contrast, the detections here are of exceedingly low concentrations - not consistent with micrometer-scale ruthenium particles. So, the assumption is that a different chemical form of ruthenium is probably the cause.
Ruthenium does have an interesting compound - ruthenium tetroxide, which like the closely related compound osmium tetroxide, is highly volatile. However, due to the inertness of ruthenium, this compound is normally only produced under strongly oxidising conditions (such as in the presence of concentrated nitric acid). This is not a feature of power reactors, but is a feature of nuclear fuel reprocessing or chemical processing for manufacture of radiochemicals. A large airborne ruthenium release in 2017 was never formally traced, but strong circumstantial evidence points towards an accident at a (notoriously polluting) Russian radiochemical plant during the manufacture of a unique and very difficult radioactive source intended for a scientific experiment.
The short half life of Ru103 is also interesting - because nuclear fuel reprocessing is generally only performed on fuel which has been aged for long enough that the Ru103 has completely decayed. The presumed Russian 2017 release didn't release much Ru103, even though the special source could only be produced by reprocessing of unusually "young" nuclear fuel.
The presence of Ru103, suggests that the processing was done on very fresh material - which is unlikely to be nuclear fuel for reprocessing. Instead, it is more likely to be dedicated fission targets intended for production of short half life isotopes - the main one being Tc99m for medical use, for which the main source is fission of U235, with subsequent chemical processing.
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Russia is not a monolythic borg unit. It's possible something happened at the Leningrad plant and local management denies it to the local administration who don't take responisility and pass on the denial to Moscow. Then Moscow starts to doublecheck but in the meantime they have to say something.
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Yes. However, after I commented I Googled a bit more and find more recent occassions of unexplained radio active clouds from Russia that could later be traced to specific locations. It seems like contrary to my assumption, denying is still the modus operandi.
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There was a major oil leak in Russia very recently and the damage is extensive because the authorities kept quiet about it to moscow
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an emergency pressure valve on an active reactor being triggered
Oh no, the corn! Paul Newman's gonna have ma legs broke! [youtube.com]
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Soviet, Chernobyl is located in Ukraine. Even Gorbachev didn't hear of the severity of the situation at first.
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Probably not.
Ruthenium-103 has a half life of 30 days.
Decomissioning work happens once those kind of short-life materials have disappeared.
the man in 7G messed up again (Score:2)
the man in 7G messed up again
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Most nuclear accidents happen during handling of harzardous material so that is a quite likely scenario.
There is no Leningrad (Score:2)
If you look at the map, spot on the middle of the yellow sphere is Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant in Leningrad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They are decomissioning some of the RBMK reactors so perhaps there was a oopsie at the work site and something was spilled?
It's been renamed back to Saint Petersburg for a long time now. Why on earth are you people still saying Leningrad?
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There was Iodine-131 in the detected elements. It has a very short half life, and by the time you can actually move any fuel elements from a reactor you've shut down, all the iodine-131 is gone.
The presence of iodine points towards something that has been in criticality quite recently.
Its 2020 (Score:2)
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Maybe we'll get lucky and 2 disasters will cancel each other out, like a meteor plugging Yellowstone up right at eruption.
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Godzilla's European Vacation
coming soon...
3.6 roentgen (Score:5, Funny)
Not great, not terrible
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Haha... the maximum reading on the old radiation monitors...
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I once had a job where we measured all of our Licensed sources once a month, and recorded the value.
I didn't notice the problem until I did a spreadsheet, and noticed a Na22 source listed wasn't changing value over a 10 year period...
Of our 30 some odd sources, only 5 had changed at all in the last 20 years I had a log for.
The well counter was pegged at maximum; wrong instrument for that test. :)
Satellites + radioactivity (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
No, the radiation isn't visible.
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Cesium-137's beta radiation will be 99.91% reduced by air after about 50m. The rest of the particles release are on the same order of magnitude of energy (and thus reduction).
The real risk in ingesting the radioactive material. Your body uses Cesium to transmit electric signals between cells (like potassium)
Incorrect date (Score:3)
"According to the Associated Press, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority noted Tuesday (June 24)"
Tuesday June 23rd, or Wednesday June 24th.
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Re: Incorrect date (Score:2)
24th in Sweden still Tuesday in the USA?
RadMon (Score:3)
Interesting that the RadMon website at https://radmon.org/index.php [radmon.org] doesn't show anything, I'm not sure how the RadMon sensors work, but if they're strictly ground based, they might not detect an atmospheric plume.
But you'd think that a power station or a submarine would have vented at or near ground level. Maybe they got that nuclear powered rocket to work?
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A few dozen people across Europe with some homebrew stuff they stuck on windowsills?
Not surprising at all.
Some of them are literally "homemade gieger counter with Arduino inside my apartment" and things like that. A £50 kit off Amazon that probably couldn't measure the vast majority of radiation anyway, and certainly not once put indoors. If that picks up stuff, you have bigger things to worry about that what Russia are doing.
And none of them are within 100 miles of the suspected leak.
Crowdsou
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Thus the real concern here is the health and safety of the people who are much closer to this release, not the effect on the people, animals and plan
Old Joke (Score:5, Funny)
Question for great Radio Yerevan: Could the catastrophe of Chernobyl have been avoided?
Answer by great Radio Yerevan: In principle, yes, but the Swedes tattled.
BBC link to denial (Score:3)
Russia denies its nuclear plants are source of radiation leak https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]
Re: BBC link to denial (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice quote from the Russians....
"No leaks have been reported."
Not "No leaks have occurred."
Nor "No accidents have happened."
Nor many other possible statements indicating no trouble or incidents.
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Don't apply conspiracy to what can also be explained by accurate statements. The language used does not at all narrow down or even raise suspicion on any of the following outcomes:
a) nothing happened.
b) something happened, but the locals didn't inform the government.
c) something happened, the government was informed and is covering it up.
I mean it's Russia so it makes sense to default to 3, but the language used would also make sense if it came from the pope. Never promise something that can bite you, and n
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That would make sense if we didn't have any history.
We have history. We know what happened the last time the Russians had a nuclear incident - they denied anything happened. The time before that, they denied anything happened.
As a result, the current denials don't mean much.
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And there are people here who want every country to have nuclear power. This is why that can never, will never happen. We can't trust the ones who already have it, we don't want more of this kind of thing.
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What's the point to even mention the best estalished serial liars?
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Well, it came out of *somebody's* reactor fairly recently. Ruthenium 103 has a half life of 39 days.
It could be helpful in a destructive way. (Score:2)
Nothing out of the ordinary (Score:2)
An interview in local Finnish news with the head of laboratory in the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority says that releases like this happen usually a few times every year. The statement didn't discuss whether the levels seen this time were also usual, but it does seem to imply it. It was also said that most times the source of the release does not get identified.
So there's no real major news here, stuff like this seems to happen every now and then.
Re:Nothing out of the ordinary (Score:4, Insightful)
Which should be even more worrying - because then it either shouldn't be raising any alerts at all, or someone is regularly dumping radioactive material somewhere.
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An interview in local Finnish news with the head of laboratory in the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority says that releases like this happen usually a few times every year. The statement didn't discuss whether the levels seen this time were also usual, but it does seem to imply it. It was also said that most times the source of the release does not get identified. So there's no real major news here, stuff like this seems to happen every now and then.
Got a link to the local Finnish news article?
Those aren’t mine (Score:5, Funny)
“Those radionuclides aren’t ours”, the Russian spokesperson says. “We don’t know where they came from”.
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they don't care about nuclear or media (Score:2)
Even in the one case where the media says something true.
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Yup. Russians likely compromised RNC leadership too.
With their greed and kinks and attitudes towards sex, they are so damn easy to compromise.
President Trump is obviously compromised. We need to tear into his finances the instant he's out of office.
Can you imagine the scandal of a U.S. president seeking asylum in Russia?
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Remind me again whose supporters were still demanding an investigation of Hillary and chanting "lock her up!" after she lost?
Also, the you're going to lose unless your party appeals to me, even though I'd never actually vote Democrat argument is tired and stupid. They're not playing to your seats, in the same way the Republican Party still has fucking homophobia as part of their official platform [gop.com]. Both parties have voter demographics they can afford to lose, in the same way that Starbucks doesn't care if
Re: Can't wait for Trump to side with Russia... (Score:2)
You would fit perfect here in Sweden were your stupidity would be the norm and the deaths even higher.
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Stockholm is a really great place for practising your Russian--I heard at least one or two people speaking it almost every day when I lived there.
Re: Can't wait for Trump to side with Russia... (Score:2)
Rent-free.
Blows my mind.
Re: Can't wait for Trump to side with Russia... (Score:3)
The staff been doing that 2x a day with Trump. Atleast Biden won't fire you for it.
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Which would still be preferred to the current occupant who is more concerned with his golf game and vanity of not wearing masks than thousands of citizens being hospitalized every day. Or if you prefer, he's too concerned with keeping military bases named after traitors and seditionists rather than using this opportunity to honor people that deserve it. Or too concerned with keeping statues of the same traitors and seditionists in a thinly veiled "support" of white privilege and racist agenda to curry fav
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Please show any significant voter fraud in any of the multiple states that are vote-by-mail only.
I won't wait for your response, because I already know the answer - there isn't any. But go ahead and keep parroting that bullshit excuse, because the real reason that the Republicans are against vote-by-mail is because the President's approval rating is in the fucking toilet. The more ballots that get handed in, the more probability of a vote being against him. Suppression of voter turnout is their only hope
nuclear in general is good thing (Score:3)
This is a viewpoint by someone with an opinion without facts, nuclear is the safest form of power generation. The main problem with nuclear was that they were built to produce bombs grade material quickly, power was always an afterthought. Humanity can't get by on the vagaries of wind and solar. The major crisis of our time is climate change, while wind and solar provide a nice cheap source of power they can't supply base load, we are homo-energenis, defined by an increasing energy footprint and that footp
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...Their byproducts often react in unpredictable ways and their disposal is a political and technical nightmare. in the late stages of their life, they increasingly operate at an economic loss...
Yes, and if it were not for ridiculous politics and fearmongering, we might have been able to progress modern nuclear reactor deployment.
How far do you think we would get, if politics basically demanded we "solve" the fossil fuel crisis, by mandating that all modern cars keep their internal combustion engine, while labeling all alternative solutions "dangerous" and "costly"? That's kinda how we've managed to piss away decades of nuclear reactor design, and basically shit all over that entire model for mode
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You forgot Hanford.