In September, a cloud of ruthenium-106 spread over Europe. Ruthenium-106 is used in nuclear medicine, and it is extracted from used nuclear reactor fuel. The amounts were tiny – one of the things about radioactive materials is that they can be detected at very, very low concentrations.
There are many atmospheric sampling stations around Europe, and their readings were mapped. The top graphic is the result. The center of the cloud was between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River. The amounts over Europe were not dangerous to health, but the amounts closer to the source might have been. Ruthenium was no longer detected in France after October 13.
The center of the cloud suggests a leak at the Mayak plant near Ozersk, once known as Chelyabinsk-40, one of the Soviet Union’s (and now Russia’s) secret nuclear weapons cities. The plant reprocesses nuclear fuel and has contributed enormous amounts of pollution to surrounding areas. At one time, they just ran the wastes into the nearby lake and river.
The fact that only ruthenium-106 was detected tells us something about what must have happened. If the release had been at a reactor or reprocessing plant, other radionuclides would have been detected as well. The release most likely was from the part of the plant after the reprocessing, where the ruthenium-106 is prepared for medical uses.
Radioisotopes are generally handled in a contained system, with air circulated and filtered before it is released. Most likely a filter broke down. The amount released, as estimated from the atmospheric measurements is between a third of a gram and a gram. The news release gives this in teraBecquerels, which sounds OMG GIGANTIC. I hate Becquerels and think they should never be used in this sort of news release. One Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. There are many more than tera atoms in, say, a teaspoonful of material, so you get GIGANTIC numbers for even a small amount of material if you use Becquerels. (Conversion via here and here.)
That said, a release like this of radioactive material is never good. Some cleanup may be warranted in the immediate area of the release, and food grown in the area may be dangerous to eat. So it would be good to know more about it from the organization where the release occurred.
Silence.
Rosatom, which now operates Mayak, says they are unaware of an accident. The Russian government has said nothing. Mayak is the only likely source of the plume, unless there is another storage or processing site for ruthenium-106 nearby. People at the plant where it occurred must be aware of the breach. The Russian meterological service reports detecting high levels of ruthenium-106 in the Ural Mountains in the same time period. One of the weather stations is about 20 miles from Mayak. The fact that ruthenium-106 is no longer being detected in France indicates that those people have fixed the breach.
It took the Soviet government three days to acknowledge that the Chernobyl reactor had blown up in 1986, while radiation levels climbed over Europe and officials in other countries noted that something was very wrong. That delay was part of what convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to change the way the government operated.
This accident is a infinitesimal echo of Chernobyl. But the Russian government seems to have gone back to the old Soviet ways.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.
TenguPhule
Seems?
Ten Bears
How about some as detailed information about the failed Japanese reactors? There’s a real derth of it out there.
Cheryl Rofer
@Ten Bears: Do you mean Fukushima? There’s a ton of it if you want to search. The latest is that a robot has found the melted fuel.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Ten Bears:
Yes, Fukushima seems to have slipped down the memory hole to some degree.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Cheryl Rofer:
I got a lot of my Fukushima news from Science Friday but haven’t caught Ira in a while. I need to make a point to do so. Such a valuable and entertaining resource!
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
OT: Mugabe and Charlie Rose are OUT.
Keith G
Saw the headline and figured this was about the Supreme Court.
trollhattan
Thanks for answering the Bat signal, Cheryl! Was very curious about this in part from the echoes of Chernobyl implicit in the “Leak? What leak? We don’t got no stinkin’ leak!” official pronouncements.
Is Rosatom another playing piece for the oligarchy?
Calouste
@TenguPhule: It’s hard to distinguish their accidental backsliding into Soviet ways from their intentional goal of going back to the Tsarist ways. Who knows how the Tsars would have reacted if they had nuclear plants?
david
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
#MugabeResigns is on par with “Bobby’s gittin’ hitched to Sissy Jo”… you know there has to be a shotgun involved.
Gravenstone
@Cermet: You wanna dial down the ad hominem a touch there, chief? You’re as bad as Uncle Cosmo and his “zero to frothing vitriol in five syllables or less” routine.
Major Major Major Major
Thanks Cheryl, I was hoping you’d write about this!
Cermet
@West of the Rockies (been a while): What HAS slipped – one of the melted reactors was also loaded with a 7% mix of plutonium – that little detail has been ignored for some time and is extremely important to remember. Lets see, useless for breeding more fuel, and useless to really improve a reactor’s output at that level – why would the Japanese want to use, handle, and process plutonium …why? Oh, yes, have the ability to create a weapon rapidly.
Cermet
@Gravenstone: OK, I am sorry and withdraw the stupid comment (mine.) Can’t remove but will request that – ok?
Ten Bears
Thank you Dr Rofer.
@Cermet: Would you care to step outside?
Spanky
And the WaPo piggybacks on Cheryl’s post:
Cheryl Rofer
@Cermet: Deleted it for you.
Archon
@Cermet:
I mean having the ability to build nukes very quickly is literally called the “Japan option”.
rp
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended embattled Alabama Republican Roy Moore, all but endorsing the Senate candidate who has been accused of sexual assault.
“He denies it. Look, he denies it,” Trump said of Moore. “If you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours. He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen. And look, you have to look at him also.”
Several women have come forward and accused Moore of pursuing romantic relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, and several others also have accused him of assault.
He has denied the allegations.
The President also expressed vehement opposition to Doug Jones, the Democrat in the race and Moore’s only major opponent.
“We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones. I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on military,” Trump said. “I can tell you for a fact we do not need somebody who’s going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad for the military, bad for the Second Amendment.”
zhena gogolia
@rp:
The Franken thing was a setup.
Gravenstone
@Cermet: Appreciated. I know we’re all more or less on edge here with all the stupidity running rampant in the wild, but snapping at each other over what amounts to simple questions really isn’t going to help anyone.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@rp:
So what if he denies it? There’s a lot of evidence that he’s a fucking pervert that preyed on underage girls. That’s disgusting.
But we do need a pedophilic fascist? And sorry Trump, but what about your record on “the military” on “crime” and on the “border”. The wall is never going to get built, you fucking traitorous loser and your tomahawk missiles didn’t do jack shit in Syria. Nobody outside your cult actually likes you and your Asia trip was a failure because you suck up to foreign leaders when they flatter you. Death can’t come fast enough for you.
J R in WV
@rp:
So Trump thinks a former prosecutor who convicted KKKlansmen of murdering 4 little girls by bombing a church… that guy is soft on crime?
I would say the former prosecutor who declined to file charges for civil rights violations would be the guy who is soft on crime… but different people have different concepts of crime. Obviously Trump and “judge” Moore don’t think killing little girls is a crime – if they aren’t white republican girls. A pair of Monsters there.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@J R in WV:
Trump would love to give those klansmen Presidential Medals of Freedom. He’s a huge piece of shit who can’t die soon enough.
J R in WV
Cheryl,
Thanks for the additional info on the Ruthenium-106 leak. I had no idea elements could have so many different isotopes with so many variations on half-life, which I got from a previous article. I hadn’t heard that there was a former Soviet plant right where the highest concentration of radioactive pollution was found.
The link to the Fukushima was also informative. I hadn’t heard plutonium was present at the Fukushima meltdown site, quite interesting. I have always expected the Japanese were able to build special weapons quickly, who can blame them with their direct experience of being attacked with atomic weapons. I also hadn’t heard that the ability to create nuclear weapons quickly was called the Japan Option, makes sense, though.
Thanks all for the informative comments, also too.
Robert Sneddon
@Archon: Japan has a sodium-cooled breeder reactor at Monju. It’s been a problematic dog of a reactor with all sorts of really bad accidents and engineering problems but it’s been kept financed by the Japanese government even while it is shut down. Japan has a commercial fuel reprocessing line at Rokkaisho based on a PUREX-style prototype line built a while back that can extract Pu from spent fuel, including short-cycled fuel from the Monju breeder to give them pure forms of weapons-grade Pu-239. They also have an ICBM in prototype form, the Epsilon solid-fuel satellite launcher which can be fired by a very small crew and could carry a nuclear warhead to anywhere on the planet.
On the other hand everything nuclear in Japan is under an IAEA inspection regime and they signed and ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty back in the 1970s.
Mnemosyne
@J R in WV:
“Bad on crime” = “doesn’t treat all Black people like criminals.”
HTH.
Cheryl Rofer
@J R in WV: There is always some plutonium in reactor fuel, building up to about 5%. It comes from neutron capture by the uranium-238. One of the Fukushima reactors had fuel that is a mix of uranium and plutonium, with the plutonium at about 5% to start. So not too different from most power reactors.
Japan has been stockpiling plutonium for years. It drives China crazy because it could be made into bombs. The US tries, from time to time, to get Japan to give it up. Certainly not gonna happen under the present US administration. This is a slightly different issue from the plutonium in reactors, although Japan’s cover story is that it plans to use all that plutonium in power reactors. Which is not impossible.
@Robert Sneddon: The Non-Proliferation Treaty and IAEA inspection are the way we know Japan isn’t making bombs. This kind of agreement is ultimately the only defense against lots of countries making lots of bombs. Which is why the Iran nuclear agreement is so important.
Mike J
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Still waiting for his downside of the polio vaccine story. His bullshit “everything has a good side and a bad side” is as stupid as “Republicans and Democrats are exactly alike.” Speaking of which, when politics does come up, he resolutely refuses to clearly state what the issue is. “Congress” is stripping funding for something good, but never “Republicans”. If you relied on SciFri for news, you would be less well informed after listening than before.
Robert Sneddon
@Cermet: Japan got a bunch of fuel reprocessed by Britain and, I think, France a while back. They had a British-designed Magnox reactor at Tokai running for several decades with Britain supplying its rather specialised fuel rods (magnesium alloy casings around uranium oxide fuel hence Magnox). The deal was that Japan accepted the reprocessed fuel, vitrified waste and the plutonium which was in the spent fuel. They like a number of other nuclear power operators have tested mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel formulations using reprocessed fuel plutonium plus enriched uranium rather than simple enriched uranium. There’s nothing sinister about MOX, even the US looked at trying it out but the plant to make MOX in the US is in financial limbo, over budget, incomplete and with no customers for its final product.
Robert Sneddon
@Cheryl Rofer: The US actually “loaned” Japan some weapons-grade Pu-239 a long time ago. The Japanese government were quite reluctant to give it back when the Americans asked for it to be returned but they eventually did so. From memory it didn’t add up to enough to make even a single weapon but it would have been useful for all sorts of nuclear weapons research by itself.
Stockpiling spent-fuel Pu from BWRs and LWRs is not a proliferation problem unless someone comes up with a workable method of separating weapons-grade Pu-239 from “spoiler” Pu-240 and Pu-241 — given that most isotopic analyses can’t differentiate between Pu-239 and Pu-240 meaning that most pollution reports group those isotopes together indicates that is not going to be the easiest thing in the world to do. Having a breeder reactor is the easier solution to making pure forms of Pu-239 (as was the old Magnox reactor at Tokai which had the capability to short-cycle individual fuel rods if no-one was looking).
Japan could trivially put together a weapons-grade uranium enrichment line if they wanted to. They even have a technology to recover uranium from seawater in useful quantities although it costs a lot more than buying yellowcake on the open market today.
Cheryl Rofer
@Robert Sneddon: I have to disagree. Reactor-grade plutonium can be used for nuclear weapons. There’s a fair bit about this on the Web now, but I’ll just link to a paper by Carson Mark, who was the head of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos. There’s a fair bit available from the Nuclear Policy Education Center, too. I’m not going to comment any further on how, just saying that if Carson Mark said it, I believe it.
Calouste
@rp: IIRC in some interpretations of Sharia law, the word of a men is worth the word of two women. Looks like in shitgibbon law, the word of a man is worth the word of at least six women (or however many we are up to now).
NotMax
@Ten Bears
For Fukushima news and updates, have for years now used this site as a go-to. (URL slightly changed a short while back from the original.)
Cheryl, any comment about the gross design failure of safety mitigation (fire door) at Turkey Point?
JGabriel
@Donald Trump via rp:
Then why don’t you resign?
Cheryl Rofer
@NotMax: I haven’t followed the issues at Turkey Point so can’t comment.
hellslittlestangel
I think his time in the KGB convinced Putin that the only thing wrong with Soviet rule was the ideology. Police state, propaganda, autocracy, oppression — they were all good, but didn’t really blossom until they were freed from the constraint of sincerely held political ideals.
NotMax
Topic related:
Informative ‘what we glean’ rundown about whose finger(s) are on which nuclear buttons ’round the world.
Fieldstone
When I first read about his radioactivity release and saw the map produced by the French nuclear safety institute, I immediately thought it is probably Mayak.
The Mayak nuclear facility has been associated with 3 of the 5 worst nuclear plant disasters of all time, the other 2 being Chernobyl and Fukuskima.
1. Starting in the 1940s and lasting for many years, plant managers secretly dumped highly radioactive nuclear waste into several lakes near the plant and the Techa River, significantly contaminating all of these waterways and exposing thousands of villagers who lived along the river to radioactivity. One of the lakes was used as open-loop coolant source for the nuclear plant!
2. In 1957, an underground storage tank filled with radioactive materials (and ammonium nitrate — a bomb making material, among other things) overheated and blew up, creating a cloud of radioactive material that drifted for over 200 miles and contaminated 20,000 mi2 of land. The Soviet authorities quietly evacuated many villages downwind from the explosion, though not for some time after the event. The radioactivity deposited from this explosion can still be detected today, 60 years later, as the East Urals Radioactive Trace. Until Chernobyl in 1986, this was the worst nuclear disaster of any kind.
3. Karachay Lake sat near the Mayak plant and was used as a dump for highly radioactive waste that needed to be cooled, until the storage tank explosion caused a reevaluation of long-term nuclear containment strategies. In the late 1960s, a drought hit the region, causing the lake to dry up, and the radioactive waste at the bottom of the lake dried up also. The resulting radioactive dust was blown for great distances, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to radioactivity. Eventually the lake was filled to prevent further spread of contamination via dust, first with concrete blocks, then with earth.
All of these incidents were kept secret for a long time, and I’m not completely sure what the Soviet/Russian authorities have ever officially admitted, so it’s not a great stretch to think that a similar lack of transparency is in effect here. Thankfully, the amount of radioactive material released this fall is much smaller than these 3 previous incidents.
Robert Sneddon
@Cheryl Rofer: I read some suggestions back in the day that the North Korean’s first crude and ineffective weapons tests were carried out with reactor-grade Pu which is why they fizzled. It’s a lot easier to make a weapon with purer forms of Pu-239 (including “small ball” devices) if the nation-state is willing to put in the comparatively small investment of building a Sellafield-style reactor to short-cycle U-238 “pins” to produce pure forms of Pu-239, probably what the North Koreans have done since their first nuclear tests. The reactor-grade Pu bomb designs I’ve seen described are quite hairy by comparison and difficult to weaponise due to very high radioactivity levels and matching high temperatures (Pu-241, about 12% of spent fuel residual Pu has a half-life of 17 years compared to Pu-239’s 24,000 years).
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@hellslittlestangel:
That was the game plan of the Inner Party in 1984. Orwell was very prophetic. That and the SU was very much like that in Orwell’s time.
Cheryl Rofer
@Robert Sneddon: The thinking now is that North Korea went directly to more advanced bomb designs and didn’t do them well in the first test. They have a Sellafield-type reactor that they built in the early 1980s. So they’ve probably had bomb-grade plutonium all along. Designs for reactor-grade plutonium are indeed more complex, but Japan’s scientists and engineers can figure that out.
Greenergood
@Spanky: I remember the ‘harmless’ radioactive cloud that ‘drifted’ over from Cherobyl, that afftected milk and sheep here in Scotland, for YEARS, and still isn’t really finished. Every time people here read stories like this, we start to shudder. Cannot imagine what farmers in Japan must be thinking re: Fukushima. The reassuring messages are just what they were then: bullcrap.
There is no acceptable level of radioactivity anywhere. The smallest amounts of radioactivity will affect someone, especially young children, or some species of mammal or fish that we eat – there is NO escaping from radioactivity. We’ve been told now that 1 out of 2 people will have a cancer, and that’s because people are living longer. Could it be that the ratio is escalating because of the food we eat (depleted of minerals), the water we drink (often highly polluted) and the air we breathe (no one in this world is absent Strontium in their bones post 1900s air-based nuclear testing), but we are told our cancers occur because we’re too fat and we’re not active enough and we smoke and drink and eat too much sugar/high corn syrup.
There are many things we can do as individuals to change our ‘lifestyle’ but meanwhille the EPA rips up the laws that could protect us from contamination – and millions of us go to bed thinking ‘if I’ve got cancer, it’s my own fault’ which is exactly what the bastards want us to believe … cause then it ain’t got anything to do with them and they can just keep on making paycheck …(sorry, a bit furious tonight)
Cheryl Rofer
@Greenergood: I know that it’s easy to think about Chernobyl when you see news like this. But this is millions of times smaller. That’s one of the reasons I hate Becquerels as units – they always give such big numbers that I know I can’t grasp them.
The earth is radioactive, and leaving for another planet won’t get you away from radioactivity. We are bombarded from space as well. The natural rate of cancer seems to be that 40% of the population will get it and 20% will die from it. That may or may not be from radioactivity. There are many possibilities, like natural carcinogens in foods, cells going bad from old age, and the reasons you scoff at. Industrial society has added to those causes, but it’s pretty much impossible to tease the effects out because of the nature of statistics and the many contributing causes.
Trump and his people are indeed ripping up the EPA. We’ve got to get them out as soon as we can and resist them until then.
Rich Webb
Bah! REMs and RADs were good enough for Rickover and they’re good enough for me. All this fancy dancy gray sieves with bechamel stuff. Grumble grumble.
Also, too, the Curie-meter-REM rule is handy. Is there an SI equivalent?
Cheryl Rofer
I am not familiar with the Curie-meter-REM rule.
J R in WV
What an interesting thread of commentary!
Again, thanks all~!
Robert Sneddon
@Cheryl Rofer: The Japanese have all the tools to produce pure Pu-239 to hand so they don’t need to build a reactor-fuel variant weapon if they decide to build nukes of their own. It’s even possible they made their own Pu-239 using the British-designed Magnox reactor at Tokai I mentioned earlier — it’s putatively a dual-use design capable of refuelling on the fly like the classic RMBK-4 design that blew up at Chernobyl, although the Magnox and its derivative the AGR doesn’t have a positive void coefficient. I’ve seen suggestions that the US tested at least one weapon and maybe two using Pu-239 derived from a British Magnox reactor. For the Japanese to have made pure Pu-239 that way would have involved bypassing IAEA inspections and bodyswerving the NPT though.
Ten Bears
Had to reassess: lost a degree of credibility regardless that I am familiar with who you are and what you do from a different venue (and that is all that can be said about that).
My suggestion was this kind of reporting about the atmospheric and Pacific fallout of which very little information has actually made it out there into the public. I know all about the damned robots. That’s “over there”. What I and no doubt a sizable population would like to see is more information about what’s in the air, the water. Here.
I was one of those born mid-fifties with a third thumb. I’ve forgotten more than most smart asses. BJ has never ranked high on my list of credible. You could change that.
Rich Webb
@Cheryl Rofer:
It’s one of the thumb rules from back in the day. One curie of Cobalt-60 at a distance of 1 meter results in a dose rate of 1 REM per hour. Mostly used when the ORSE Board came to visit. ;-)
Cheryl Rofer
@Robert Sneddon: I agree with you, especially the last. The stockpile of reactor plutonium is a public way of reminding the world, particularly China, that Japan could build a nuclear weapon if it wanted to. I doubt they’ve violated their obligations under the NPT.
@Rich Webb: Thanks!
SteverinoCT
@Greenergood:
I was on a boomer in Holy Loch, Scotland, during the Chernobyl event. The news and tabloids when we went to town were frightening.
The only practical effect on us was we had to scrub our shoes before we were allowed belowdecks; the radiation we would spread would interfere with the routine sweeps by the nukes for leaks.
As a “coner” I got a minuscule amount of radiation over my career.
Robert Sneddon
@SteverinoCT: Humanity has got very VERY good at detecting and identifying very small amounts of radioactive materials. At the same time people run around with their hair on fire about anthropomorphic releases of radioactive materials from nuclear sites they are blase about the massive releases of radioactives from, say, coal-burning in power stations as well as the large amounts of naturally occurring radiation already around us (seawater, for example is over 10,000 Bq per cubic metre almost all from naturally occurring K-40).
The panic in the US about the giant cloud of intensely radioactive material coming to the west Coast from Fukushima is a worked example — close monitoring revealed nothing much, in the end. This didn’t stop the panic merchants crying doom, doom and thrice doom! at every opportunity.