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Laws of physics must be rewritten: Mysterious sun particles alter radioactive decay on Earth
The scientific process, as any experienced researcher can attest, provides a kind of road map through the forest of the natural world. By developing hypotheses and designing methods by which to test them, we use the scientific process to make the abstract world more concrete.
Once we clarify our questions about matter, time, and reality, we can move forward from one conclusion to another in a logical attempt to answer them. But the path in front of us often extends into kind of fog, a compounding cloud of questions, with each conclusion often leading only to additional questions that multiply indefinitely.
And the path behind us can be equally shrouded. Sometimes generations of observations about the Read more…
1 BILLION BECQUERELS PER HOUR Emission of Radioactive Materials from Fukushima I Nuke Plant at the End of June
That’s an amazing reduction from the maximum emission of 2,000 terabecquerels per hour on March 15, it is actually one-2 millionth of the maximum, says TEPCO in the Reference No. 2 of the progress report on the “roadmap” to God knows where.
Is this number, 1 billion becquerels per hour emission, good? TEPCO’s Matsumoto, in the press conference on July 19, avoided the judgment, and said he didn’t know, but it was one-2 millionth of what it had been on March 15.
On closer reading of the document, though, I noticed one strange thing about this emission number. TEPCO is talking about the radiation emission measured in cesium (cesium-134 and -137), not in iodine equivalence.
To come up with the iodine-131 equivalence, you have to multiply cesium-134 Read more…
Straw Fed To Japanese Found To Be Radioactive
MINAMISOMA, JAPAN (BNO NEWS) — Japan’s nuclear crisis has spread to its cattle as high levels of radioactive cesium were detected at a farm in Fukushima, officials said Monday.
The radioactive cesium was found in straw fed to cattle at a farm in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture with an average of 75,000 becquerels of the radioactive isotope per kilogramme (2.25 pounds), which is about 56 times the allowable limit, Kyodo news agency reported.
According to officials, the contaminated straw was stored in an exposed area of the farm without roofs during the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that caused a series of explosions that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Furthermore, the farm is located in one of the high-risk areas of the region, and officials suspect the straw could be the radioactive source of contaminated beef that had been detected in meat shipped from that area.
The contaminated meat of eleven cows was detected in Tokyo, where the meat was shipped for processing. However, at the time of the shipment, the Read more…
Report: North Carolina nuclear facility with superheated uranium leaking ten gallons of radioactive cooling water per hour
A nuclear research reactor at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh, NC, was recently shut down after it was discovered that the plant has been leaking about ten gallons of nuclear cooling water per hour for at least the past week. Officials from the university, however, claim that the leak, which stems from the 15,000 gallons of water used to cool the superheated uranium reactor core, poses “no public health threat.”The announcement comes on the heels of several others involving US nuclear plants, including the potentially ill-fated Fort Calhoun Nuclear facility near Omaha, Neb. (http://www.naturalnews.com/032870_F…), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory that was threatened by wildfires last week (http://www.naturalnews.com/032871_w…). In the NC case, reports do Read more…Wildfire creeps closer to N.M. nuclear weapons laboratory
BY P. SOLOMON BANDA AND SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — The U.S. government sent a plane equipped with radiation monitors over the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory Wednesday as a 110-square-mile wildfire burned at its doorstep, putting thousands of scientific experiments on hold for days.
Lab authorities described the monitoring as a precaution, and they, along with outside experts on nuclear engineering, expressed confidence that the blaze would Read more…
Contaminated Fluid Spills From Japanese Nuclear Plant
Roughly 15 tons of radiation-tainted fluid has escaped into the earth from a container at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the nation’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said on Tuesday (see GSN, June 27).
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power indicated it was looking into the source of a container rupture, which was discovered on Tuesday and then patched, Reuters reported.
Plant personnel have battled to prevent radioactive contaminants from escaping the six-reactor Fukushima facility following a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan. Radiation releases on a level not seen since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster have already forced the evacuation of about 80,000 residents from a 12-mile ring around the facility.
Separately, workers on Tuesday resumed operation of equipment deployed recently at the site for treating contaminated liquid, Tokyo Electric Power representative Junichi Matsumoto said.
The firm has pumped water into the facility on an ongoing basis in an effort to cool components, resulting in Read more…
Washington State on Alert For Radioactive Material Smuggling
Law enforcement officials from port communities in Washington state on Tuesday received training in detecting smuggled radiation sources in accordance with federal efforts to prevent a potential nuclear or radiological “dirty bomb” attack, the Kitsap Sun reported (see GSN, June 21).
More than 20 first response entities in the Puget Sound region are using federal funds to acquire sensors to help them scan for radioactive materials that could be carried on boats moving through the waterway.
Bainbridge Island and Port Orchard police officers received training in the use of the detection equipment at the Port Orchard marina. Police vessels from the two jurisdictions have also been equipped with expensive high-tech neutron and gamma ray sensors.
The drill involved the placement of innocuous radioactive isotopes on board two ships. The police officers had to use their newly provided technology to locate the materials.
“The most critical part is detecting it,” said Tim Quinton, a project manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which provided one of the vessels used in Tuesday’s training.
Portable Radioactive Isotope Identification Devices, at a cost of $28,000 each, would then be used to identify the specific kind of source and how much radiation it was emitting.
Officers from the two agencies have also been provided with Personal Radiation Detectors that resemble pagers and come with a $2,400 price tag. Officers often use the devices while patrolling by land.
“Anything you can find on water, you could find on land, too,” said Port Orchard police Sgt. Trey Holden (Josh Farley, Kitsap Sun/Seattle Times, June 23).
Two New Elements Added To Periodic Table: Ununquadium And Ununhexium-Elements with Atomic Number 114 and 116
Two new elements have been added to the periodic table after a three-year review by the governing bodies of chemistry and physics.
The elements are currently unnamed, but they are both highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. The table is the official compedium of known elements, organised according to properties of their atomic structure.
Details have been published in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. The review was conducted by a joint working party of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
In recent years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of new chemical elements at positions 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 on the periodic table. The working party concluded that elements 114 and 116 fulfilled criteria for official inclusion in the table. The others, as yet, do not.
The new elements have temporary titles of ununquadium and ununhexium, but final names have Read more…
New leak seen at Japan quake-hit plant
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the plant, said on Thursday that up to 57 tons of contaminated water has leaked from a storage facility, Reuters reported.
The environmental group, Greenpeace, has criticized the Japanese government’s assessment of the contamination level, saying, “Radioactive hazards are not decreasing through dilution or dispersion of materials, but the radioactivity is instead accumulating in marine life.”
“Our data show that significant amounts of contamination continue to spread over great distances from the Fukushima nuclear plant,” the group added.
Greenpeace has also accused TEPCO of covering up the actual severity of the disaster in the Asian Read more…
Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too
Yesterday, TEPCO, the company responsible for running the Fukushima nuclear reactors, released a provisional analysis of the events that occurred in Unit 1, one of the reactors that was active when the tsunami struck. In five stark pages, the report lays out the impact of the tsunami on the facility: water levels that plunged below the bottom of the fuel, a complete meltdown of the nuclear fuel, and extensive damage to the reactor vessel.
The new analysis was enabled by the recent installation of air purifiers that let personnel reenter the reactor control room for the first time. Once inside, they were able to recalibrate some of the instruments that have been monitoring the reactor core; Read more…
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