Reader's note: this is Iodine-129 (which is created in nuclear fission and has a very long half-life), NOT iodine-131 which has a half-life of 8 days and is a highly radioactive short-term fission product.
So it's understandable that Iodine-129 could be detected as a result of decades-old testing or other releases.
This is much less interesting than the headline suggests. 1.5 times background levels, of a single very long-lived isotope, is not much of an increase.
This doesn’t indicate that there has been a recent undisclosed accident or other newsworthy event as you might be imagining.
You are right that due to its very long life we cannot know when it has been produced, perhaps decades ago.
However the fact that only iodine was detected is to be expected, as the other radioactive products of nuclear fission are much less likely to form chemical compounds that are soluble in sea water, so they could be somewhere on the sea bottom.
> UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, which released the isotope into soils and rivers in northeastern China.
The first part is more or less obvious, but I somehow fail to imagine how nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe can affect soils and rivers in any part of China (never mind the northeastern part)?
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants release iodine into the atmosphere. The prevailing wind direction at European latitudes is west to east, so when the iodine comes back down in rain, it'll likely do so over Russia (emptying into the Arctic Ocean), Central Asia (emptying into the Caspian Sea and various lakes) or Northeast Asia (emptying into the nortwestern Pacific Ocean, including the Yellow Sea.) This paper has an illustration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
This Chinese study says it was dispersed through global atmospheric circulation and mentions the liquid and gaseous discharge from nuclear facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) as sources. Russian tests are mentioned as well but they are apparently not the sole or primary source.
More likely central Asia which is where the USSR conducted most of its tests.
France and the UK did theirs overseas. Asian culprits might be India (unlikely), North Korea (unlikely), Pakistan (unlikely), Indonesia (unlikely) and PRC (highly likely).
This is the problem with the "nuclear is completely safe" people: there's only one biosphere, and anything you put in it eventually ends up very thinly spread everywhere.
I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.
The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.
I'm sort of surprised that ecowarriors aren't dropping radio isotopes that are not actually that bad but would cause customer revulsion in places that are overfished.
I'm not sure to get. They say took decades for this particular pollution to reach the Philippines via ocean circulation systems but the images suggest it's coming from rivers. Is it possible that china is hiding something?
You'd see other isotopes if it was something recent. It's hard to hide things like this, see the Ruthenium plume that was detected over Europe in 2017 [0]. Radiation instruments are very sensitive!
Reader's note: this is Iodine-129 (which is created in nuclear fission and has a very long half-life), NOT iodine-131 which has a half-life of 8 days and is a highly radioactive short-term fission product.
So it's understandable that Iodine-129 could be detected as a result of decades-old testing or other releases.
This is much less interesting than the headline suggests. 1.5 times background levels, of a single very long-lived isotope, is not much of an increase.
This doesn’t indicate that there has been a recent undisclosed accident or other newsworthy event as you might be imagining.
It's a crappy title - the sea is full of vast amounts of radioactive elements.
You are right that due to its very long life we cannot know when it has been produced, perhaps decades ago.
However the fact that only iodine was detected is to be expected, as the other radioactive products of nuclear fission are much less likely to form chemical compounds that are soluble in sea water, so they could be somewhere on the sea bottom.
> UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, which released the isotope into soils and rivers in northeastern China.
The first part is more or less obvious, but I somehow fail to imagine how nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe can affect soils and rivers in any part of China (never mind the northeastern part)?
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants release iodine into the atmosphere. The prevailing wind direction at European latitudes is west to east, so when the iodine comes back down in rain, it'll likely do so over Russia (emptying into the Arctic Ocean), Central Asia (emptying into the Caspian Sea and various lakes) or Northeast Asia (emptying into the nortwestern Pacific Ocean, including the Yellow Sea.) This paper has an illustration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
It only makes sense if it means Russia/USSR doing the tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing on the Far East but rather strange to call it "in Europe".
Can't see any other country in Europe which could've caused it from that statement.
This Chinese study says it was dispersed through global atmospheric circulation and mentions the liquid and gaseous discharge from nuclear facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) as sources. Russian tests are mentioned as well but they are apparently not the sole or primary source.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
More likely central Asia which is where the USSR conducted most of its tests.
France and the UK did theirs overseas. Asian culprits might be India (unlikely), North Korea (unlikely), Pakistan (unlikely), Indonesia (unlikely) and PRC (highly likely).
This is the problem with the "nuclear is completely safe" people: there's only one biosphere, and anything you put in it eventually ends up very thinly spread everywhere.
I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.
The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.
This news shows the progresss by 2019, but couldn't find more recent updates.
https://www.nucnet.org/news/plans-progress-for-orano-to-buil...
I'm sort of surprised that ecowarriors aren't dropping radio isotopes that are not actually that bad but would cause customer revulsion in places that are overfished.
I'm not sure to get. They say took decades for this particular pollution to reach the Philippines via ocean circulation systems but the images suggest it's coming from rivers. Is it possible that china is hiding something?
You'd see other isotopes if it was something recent. It's hard to hide things like this, see the Ruthenium plume that was detected over Europe in 2017 [0]. Radiation instruments are very sensitive!
[0] https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/caused-plume-ra...
Which "the images" are you talking about? The article has exactly one image and it is an image of an island without any rivers.