Radioactive leak riddle: Now Team America sniffs Europe's skies for iodine isotope source The US military has sent one of its atmosphere-analyzing aircraft to Europe to hunt the source of a radioactive leak on the continent. Last week, the French nuclear watchdog the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) issued an alert after sensors in Norway, and then much of the rest of Europe, detected …
A current travelling up from Spain perhaps would account for the odd distribution pattern.
As for the source, if the wind is blowing from where I assume, didn't someone recently lose an off target submarine missile in the the general vicinity, Teresa May?
No need for the tinfoil hat, they only increase reception, but I do miss my snug jacket where the arms wrap around the back...
That test/debable took place off the coast of the USA and as it was a test, the missile was not loaded with real warheads (It would be stupid in case it failed and it actually did that)
Finally, the Half Life of this Isotope means that even said missile did carry Radioactive stuff, that time would have long passed as I seem to recall that the test actually took place last June.
Seems that I-131 is used for testing pipelines for leakage, a precaution taken after an earthquake in Italy, then one off Norway. Standard protocol. The bigger mystery is why this is being played up as yet another nefarious Russian cover up and not just ordinary "news".
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"why this is being played up as yet another nefarious Russian cover up"
I'm pretty sure it isn't, from TFA:
"But that seems unlikely, given the satellites and seismographs dedicated to watching for just such an occurrence."
(Also the lack of any other isotopes except iodine)
In People's Democratic Republic of North America, Phoenix is constant!
Since 1867, anyway.
Stupid name, trying too hard to be cool.
It'll be one of those computer-generated US military nomenclatures, following the adjective-noun pattern. I keep hoping that some bored grunt will add a few words of their own to the lists, so that we can look forward to a four-star general codenamed Strident Fuckwit and a black site called Farty Towels.
Just a suggestion, buds, just a suggestion.
Careful you'll panic politicians with such facts.
Which are available to anyone with access to a search engine.
You should have added that it's completely harmless without a large neutron source to irradiate it (small neutron sources being either very slow to make it radioactive or very complex to mfg).
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... leading some to assume that Russia may have broken the Test Ban Treaty ...
How could Russia break a treaty which has not entered into force?
According to the Wikipedia's article on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty:
As of 2016, eight Annex 2 states have not ratified the treaty: China, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the United States have signed but not ratified the Treaty; India, North Korea and Pakistan have not signed it.
First rule of modern "journalism" and modern "politics": Whatever happens: Russia.Or even better: Putin.
(Maybe because if you run it together, it gives "Prussia")
Even Trump has regressed to the mean. Nicky Haley seems to be as abysmally dumb and incompetent as Samantha Power, if not worse.
Now, here's the details from Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: Background and Current Developments - Mary Beth D. Nikitin, Specialist in Nonproliferation, September 1, 2016
Russia ratified the treaty on June 30, 2000. In September 2005, Russia reportedly stated that it intends to continue to observe the moratorium on testing until the CTBT enters into force as long as other nuclear powers do likewise, and expressed its hope that the nations that must ratify the treaty for it to enter into force will do so as soon as possible. In November 2007, according to Itar-Tass, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “confirmed Russia’s unchanging support for the treaty as one of the key elements of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and an effective nuclear arms limitation tool.” In September 2009, Dmitry Medvedev, president of the Russian Federation, said, “we need to encourage leading countries to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty as soon as possible in order to ensure its ultimate entry into force. That is very important. A Russian scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences raised the prospect of the CTBT’s collapse in an article of November 2010. Claiming that Britain and France have ratified the treaty but do not have a moratorium on testing, that the reverse is the case for China and the United States, that India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan have done neither, and that only Russia has ratified the treaty and has a moratorium on testing, he argued that:
"if the treaty has not been in force for fifteen years [i.e., since it was opened for signature in 1996], it is difficult for Russia to be the only nuclear power which complies with its terms and conditions in full. Russia’s official position is to support the CTBT’s entry into force. However, Russian experts tend to focus on the pessimistic scenarios of CTBT collapse. In the near future, Russia could face a difficult choice between the political dividends the CTBT affords and the military necessity to upgrade its nuclear.capabilities"
(This is going to take a bit to appear as evidence indicates that I'm currently on El Reg's Deplorables Watchlist)
Could it have had anything to do with Chernobyl and its brand new sarcophagus? I don't know, disturbing some previously inert fuel rods? Or one of those weird weather patterns depositing goodies from Fukushima?
This is highly unlikely. Both accidents occured sufficiently long ago to let the initial inventories of short-lives isotopes to decay. At this point, the short-lived isotopes can only come as a part of a radioactive decay chain of a longer-lived parent isotope. Assuming steady-state rate equations, the fraction of the short-lived isotope will be given by the ratio of the lifetimes, times the appropriate branching factor within the decay chain. This is likely to be minuscle.
I am afraid you are really looking for a high-flux neutron source here, most likely a reactor, but could also be a particle accelerator with an appropriate target.
Suggests that despite the opportunity for some tongue in cheek fun, this leak is probably exactly what the experts suggest: a fumble at a lab producing medical isotopes.
It couldn't be from an old sub wreck - graves like USS Thresher and USS Scorpion are routinely monitored and you wouldn't get isotopes like this coming up through 10,000 feet of ocean.
It's fun to speculate that Vlad The Emailer is brewing up some fresh polonium for his growing array of antagonists, but it won't wash I'm afraid. Distribution is wrong, and the signature doesn't fit.
I'll still look around for furtive-looking ubiytsy in badly cut box suits before tucking into my soup, though ...
Someone has just tested a small "dirty bomb". Probably with a few grams of material.
Now you've told them how far the contamination has spread.
Stock up on iodine tablets now - while you have the chance.
Remember the Windscale leak? Iodine sales were banned in Boots the next day to prevent people self-administering.
True - Observed but infrequent side effects of ingesting Potassium Iodide (KI)
include the following:
• Nausea
• Intestinal Upset
• Rashes
• Inflammation of the Salivary Glands
• Possible allergic reactions
NOTE: Potassium Iodide (KI) cannot protect the body from radioactive
elements other than radioactive iodine...
50g for a fiver off eBay, the protective dose is 100ug a day. So that's 500 doses stashed for when the big one goes up, and I'll watch out for that upset tummy.
if the big one goes off radioactive iodine will frankly be the least of your worries. Iodine is basically only of concern in a reactor incident like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or Fukushima. And it turns out the effects from that last one are probably negligible to none in terms of exposure to the general population.
The danger from A-bomb fallout is all the crud that got irradiated by hard Neutron radiation while getting sucked up in the blast. Very little Iodine there.
A dirty bomb -- assuming you're using the usual meaning of radioactive material spread by a conventional explosive -- would not do this. This isotope is created as a fission product, and has a half life of 8 days. Unless you yanked the fuel out of a reactor, slapped it into a bomb when it was still very "hot", and set it off within a fortnight or so, you wouldn't get a release like this.
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Ah, no, important distinction to make here, we don't hate the US itself, we just hate the idiots it breeds.
Plus, some of the people from the US (usually the ones who were sensible enough to put a few thousand miles between themselves and their birthplace) can actually be quite nice.
Generally any 'merkin (coincidentally, there recently seems to have been some confusion as to where they should be worn with a high profile blonde merkin wearer) who wants to 'MAGA' falls into the first category until they can prove they don't.
Nor Kaliningrad, Latvia or Estonia. But with the Polish readings being that much higher than those from other countries (by a factor of 10 or more) it is tempting to conclude that the source is somewhere in Poland.
Against that, of course, is the effect of wind dispersal, so we would need to know speed and direction over the preceeding few days, unless of course the source is still active.
Interesting that Poland has Belarus and Ukraine to its immediate East... or not, as the case may be.
Radioactive Iodine-131 is also used to treat Goiter, as well as some other Thyroid problems. My daughter-in-law has had the I-131 treatment. She was cautioned to not even attempt to enter the USA, since the radioactive I-131 in her would trigger the radiation sensors at the border, which would produce a most spectacular, but wholly undesired, response.
So, it's possible that a medical clinic had an accidental release, or, possibly, even a patient (The question to ask oneself is, when a patient has an I-131 treatment, where does the expelled I-131 go, if it hasn't decayed before it is expelled?).
The answer to where the I-131 goes from patienstthat hasn't decayed is that it goes into the toilet. This is why Nuclear medicine departents in hospitals have seperate patient toilets. However therapuetic or imaging doses are relatively tiny in this context.
My memory is that I-131 ia a beta emitter and also emits a gamma ray with an energy of around 364 keV and also a higher energy gamma ray but much less frequently. The problem from a health perspective would be ingesting the isotope due to the beta radiation and its natural concentration/accumulation in the thyroid. It is sometimes used for imaging in nuclear medicine but the high gamma ray energy means that the resolution is poor so I think I -123 is better although probably more expensive.
In the '80s I had a car accident that resulted in squidged kidneys among other things, they gave me a radio-active iodine shot and took a few X rays of various bits. A while before that I had worked at Windscale for a bit, so far I have no extra heads, superpowers nor have been stopped entering the US.
I can move around well in the dark though but I'm not sure if that is the glow or my excellent night vision.
What a load of bullshit about nothing. There is no possibility of this being a sign of any nuclear explosion or incident, Iodine 131 on its own without any other fission by-products is absolutely a sign of an accidental medical related release. The amounts detected are so miniscule that they are way below any threat level, even when measured on the banana scale.
On top of that, the monitoring aircraft regularly moves around and its arrival in the UK is quitre possibly unrelated to the I 131 detection.
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