Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years (phys.org)
117 points by geox 4 days ago
bad_username 4 days ago
"Stable" here means mechanically stable (they don't fall apart as quickly as was expected), not radiologically stable (the radioactive elements, of course, still decay at their normal rate).
wjnc 3 hours ago
Thank you! Geigerclickbate?
eqvinox 4 days ago
The headline sounds weirdly positive... but it's "stable" as in [ed.: ecologically] "long-lived". Very much not a good thing.
timr 8 hours ago
It means "mechanically stable", which could be either good or bad depending on the question, but is generally a limited good thing.
At the least, it means these particular compounds aren't quickly breaking down into ever-smaller nano-particles that can be absorbed into living things.
kitchi 7 hours ago
This is tangentially related to the article, but it's interesting that the phrase "unexpectedly stable" triggers positive connotations. It did for me as well.
But the phrase is actually neutral, it's not making any claims if stability is a good or bad thing in this context, neither about "unexpected" stability. But given the larger context of language we read it as positive.
boxed 8 hours ago
I think they mean that the fuel rods are not breaking down, aka leaching into the environment, as fast. That's a good thing.
db48x 4 hours ago
It’s hard to call them “rods” at this point, since they melted and then cooled into tiny metallic droplets and shards after they were ejected in the explosion.
Mutjake 4 days ago
For radionuclides more long-livd means less radioactive per unit of time, though. Of course uranium compounds can be toxic in the chemical sense as well, but I’m unsure if uranium compounds make it to the top threats in that list compared to e.g. arsenic and lead.
Of course radioactivity needs to be respected, and the exclusion zone is there for a reason due to factors such as hot spots.
eqvinox 4 days ago
This is "long-lived" in the ecological sense, not radiological. The grains of uranium oxide dust remain grains of uranium oxide dust, rather than breaking apart. If you ingest a few molecules of uranium oxide, it pretty much doesn't matter, you're fine¹. Ingest these dust particles, not so much. It's a question of concentration, and it seems that it's not diluting out naturally.
¹ humans contain, on average, 90µg of uranium. [https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/DU_Eng.pdf]
(P.S.: the radiological stability and lifetime of uranium doesn't make much sense to question; the dust flakes aren't large & concentrated enough to significantly shorten their half-life due to their own neutron emissions cascading and this isn't what the study was researching. Note the article talks about weathering: "It remains largely unclear why these particles weather at different rates in their environment.")
readthenotes1 4 days ago
40 years and counting, vs 1 year for Hiroshima
dwroberts an hour ago
It was a power plant full of fuel, why is this surprising?
wat10000 8 hours ago
190 tons of nuclear fuel, vs 64 kilograms.
antonvs 4 days ago
Basically, nuclear bombs are much safer than nuclear power plants.
LtdJorge 4 hours ago
Much safer than newly built reactors using decades old designs for making Plutonium used as power generators, with every safety feature forcefully disabled and during a drill to investigate the feasibility of a condition live, the effects of which weren’t known by any operator and the drill hadn’t been tested in an offline experiment before nor was it even simulated. Then, maybe.
bawolff 26 minutes ago
Nuclear bombs are meant to go boom. Any part that doesn't go boom is waste whose weight could be better allocated to making it have a bigger boom.
Foskya 4 days ago
next step: use nukes as an energy source