
French institute suspects nuclear accident in Russia or Kazakhstan in September - kawera
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nuclearpower-accident/french-institute-suspects-nuclear-accident-in-russia-or-kazakhstan-in-september-idUSKBN1D92LJ
======
ajnin
Article on the IRSN website (in French) with a map of likely release locations
:
[http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...](http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20171109_Detection-
Ruthenium-106-en-france-et-en-europe-resultat-des-investigations-de-l-
IRSN.aspx)

~~~
Xophmeister
There's an English synopsis on their website, with the same map:
[http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection...](http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20171109_Detection-
of-Ruthenium-106-in-France-and-in-Europe-Results-of-IRSN-investigations.aspx)

------
juretriglav
Detected (and reported) in Slovenia on Oct 9 too:
[http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/](http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/article/12088/5981/)

Gone now:
[http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/selec...](http://www.ursjv.gov.si/si/info/novica/archive/2017/11/select/sporocilo_za_javnost/article/12088/5991/)

Sorry, both links in Slovene, but Google Translate can help.

------
phkahler
How can I detect nuclear fallout at home? It would be interesting to log
levels daily and then compare to incidents like this. In particular I'd like
to monitor the effect if/when North Korea does an atmospheric test.

~~~
jacquesm
Get a second hand (army surplus is a good source) Geiger counter with an
instrumentation output. You may have to do some conversion if your current
computer does not do RS232.

~~~
officemonkey
The problem is differentiation from background.

A release from NK or Russia, by the time it hits your Geiger counter, will
likely be so low that it will be lost in the noise of background radiation.
And local sources (such as radon gas) would mask anything but significant
nearby events.

The reason why France identified the release is because their detectors can
determine different radioisotopes.

It's a little like the difference between a photovoltaic cell and a camera.
Your Geiger counter can tell when the "light's on" (presence of radiation) but
it takes a different instrument to determine that it's Ruthenium 106.

~~~
jacquesm
GGP spoke about general levels, not specific elements, and yes, you are 100%
right, a Geiger counter is a pretty blunt instrument.

~~~
officemonkey
Even after Chernobyl and Fukushima, outside of the impacted area, there really
wasn't any detectable increase in background.

You're much more likely to get an increase in background going into your
basement (because of Radon daughters) than from an nuclear release halfway
around the planet.

------
gwbas1c
I wonder if the source of the accident is really aware of the accident?

Without knowing a lot of the details, is this something that could happen if a
naive, or lazy, employee just decided to incinerate waste? Is this something
that could happen if someone was goofing off? Is this something that could be
undetected, due to lack of monitoring equipment, at the source?

~~~
polack
USSR tried to keep Chernobyl blowing up a secret until caught and preassured
by Sweden to admit there was an accident. I really don't expect Russia to act
different today. Just look at the "we have nothing to do with it" handling
when Crimea was invaded.

~~~
fpoling
The Communist government even tried to hide the blow up from local population
exposing a lot of people to extra risk when trivial measures could have
minimized it.

In Minsk, Belarus my mother was warned by friends of friends that worked at a
research reactor. They spent few hours trying to identify a leak at their
facility as all Geiger counters showed a very high rise over the background
level.

Then they were reluctantly told that it was an accident in Chernobyl. Then
from the reading of the counters they realized how bad the accident must be
and asked all people they knew to stay in doors and close all windows.

------
koliber
I remember reading something similar about a year ago. Did anything come of
those reports?

~~~
yk
Last year was a release at a Norwegian research reactor. First of all, that
was an impressive feat of analytical chemistry, that they could detect a
fairly insignificant leak all over Europe.

[http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-
for...](http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Radioactive-release-for-
Norwegian-research-reactor-2510165.html)

------
foxyv
When I was working on my BS in Physics we measured Cesium-137 from nuclear
accidents and weapons testing. We wanted to see if we could detect any change
due to the release of material in Fukushima. We didn't see any change though
because we were using a pretty insensitive gamma spectroscopy method and the
increase was so small. I think they later found a small increase using a mass
spectrometer.

It's amazing that you can still detect the results of the Chernobyl disaster
on the opposite side of the world, decades later. That was one heck of a
meltdown!

------
rutheh
It would be interesting to log levels daily and then compare to incidents

------
goptimize
It would be sufficient for media to launch shitstorm again.

------
jmnicolas
Why do they warn us 2 weeks after the fact ?

Should I up my iodine intake or it's useless against ruthenium ?

edit : according to this article it started sept 29 :
[https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-
radioactivity-e...](https://phys.org/news/2017-10-spike-airborne-
radioactivity-europe.html)

~~~
cjslep
Unfortunately, the media and governments do a very poor job of outlining the
whys of radiation, and leave it a very scary boogeyman for concerned citizens.

Iodine pills don't magically protect people from radiation. Taking them
doesn't do anything to prevent nuclear decay from happening, doesn't grant
people superpowers to stand in a radioactive environment, and doesn't let you
lick fuel rods without consequence. In fact, taking them is to leverage the
chemical benefits of diffusion.

Before I dive right into it, let me mention that a few forms of radioactive
decay don't impact humans well. Alpha decays bounce off your clothing and
skin, and can only travel a few cm in air. Beta decays bounce off your skin,
or only make it so far into the already-dead skin cells, and don't travel very
far in air either [0]. Gammas (sunlight) are a different matter, as are
neutrons (from nuclear reactors). Hence, the sunscreen and the giant concrete
containment units. This all changes if you inhale/ingest radioactive isotopes,
and alphas suddenly become the most deadly (ask Alexander Litvinenko) and
betas are up there too. Iodine 129 is a beta emitter, a pile of which will
continue emitting radiation long after this generation of human beings are ash
and dust. Eating this stuff is like eating glass.

Back to the iodine pills: You take this pill because $GOV says so, and it
saturates your body (thyroid) with a stable isotope of iodine. It's like
taking a half-empty biological sandbox, and filling the rest of it up with
sand. The inner child that lives within us can continue playing safely as this
iodine doesn't decay. It means no new iodine 129 will be able to be retained
in your body, your body is already full of the stable stuff, so such a person
_will still ingest iodine 129_ , but _won 't retain it in their body for a
long period of time_.

However, failing to take an iodine pill beforehand will mean the sandbox is
half-empty when a nuclear fission accident releases iodine 129. This means
that sandbox will become (over time) quarter-sand and quarter-glass and still
half empty, due to the laws of diffusion. No inner child wants to play in that
box. And that means iodine 129 is sticking around inside the body, and in
particular the thyroid (which is an organ more sensitive to radiation than
others, for reasons I don't know since I'm an engineer not a doctor).

So, how does this stack up against ruthenium?

Your body doesn't use ruthenium in any significant way. It'll just pass it
right back out. You can think of it as your body being permanently on the
ruthenium pill. Yes, ruthenium 106 is a beta emitter exactly like iodine 129,
but with a much shorter half-life of around a year. It decays to Rhodium 106,
another beta emitter, which within a minute is already burned out into stable
palladium 106. So on the whole, the human body is going to have an extremely
tough time concentrating this stuff to dangerous levels inside of it.

So overall, your risk is not zero, but if you want to offset it I recommend
not taking an airplane the next time you otherwise would, as flying up at
cruising altitude in the atmosphere usually exposes you to more radiation than
ruthenium 106 scattered around the earth ever will.

I highly recommend playing with [1] for nuclide information and decay chains.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efgy1bV2aQo)

[1] [https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html](https://www-
nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html)

~~~
Tuna-Fish
You got the basics right, but i have to nitpick that I-129 is just not
biologically relevant. It's long (millions of years) half life means that it's
sufficiently inactive that you could replace all your iodine with it and
barely notice. Biologically relevant radioactive contaminants are the short-
lived ones, as activity is inversely proportional to half-life. In the case of
Iodine, the dangerous one is I-131, as it's short (8 days) half-life means
it's very radioactive, and it has a high biological uptake from the
environment.

~~~
disp1
I think that _you_ may have gotten the basics wrong here. 1 Bq of I-129 is
exactly same radioactivity as 1 Bq of I-131. Its definition is 1 decay per
second. The half-life tells how long you have to wait for a given atom to
decay, on average. It is not, as you imply, a biological risk factor.

Furthermore, the chemical process by which iodine is absorbed from the
bloodstream by the thyroid is unable to discriminate between isotopes. So
their biological relevance is actually identical.

If you want a quick and easy way to compare biological impact to the human
body for a given isotope, check out the US Federal Guidance Reports 11 & 12\.
They have done all the heavy lifting and for a lot of the real nasties, you
will actually find that the biological damage is chemical not radiological.

Interestingly, the limit for ingestion if I-129 intake is much lower
(indicating a higher biological impact) than I-131 (by a factor of six),
primarily BECAUSE it has a long half life. The half life is so long that the
clearance rate is basically the biological half-life. Where as the I-131 is so
short compared to the biological half-life so within a few months it is gone.

[https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-05/documents...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-05/documents/520-1-88-020.pdf)

~~~
cperciva
_1 Bq of I-129 is exactly same radioactivity as 1 Bq of I-131_

In terms of decays per second, sure. Those decays are somewhat less harmful
though -- I-131 has betas and gammas in the ~500 keV range, while I-129's
emissions are in the ~35 keV range.

But more importantly, 1 _mol_ of I-129 is far less harmful than 1 _mol_ of
I-131.

 _the limit for ingestion if I-129 intake is much lower (indicating a higher
biological impact) than I-131_

The annual limit for ingestion of I-129 is 0.2 MBq, compared to 1 MBq for
I-131. But given their vastly different half-lives, the annual ingestion limit
for I-129 is 30 mg, compared to 220 picograms for I-131.

~~~
disp1
I am not going to argue with you about this. I am a radiological scientist,
not a someone that has read up on Wikipedia.

No one measures radioactivity in moles.

The FGR11 limit on I-129 is 5 uCi and I-131 is 30 uCi, I know it is not the
latest and greatest, but the latest and greatest makes use of probabilistic
risk models to quantify the increase in chances of getting cancer. this is
less helpful in a discussion of personal danger rather than the collective
danger.

~~~
disp1
I take issue to the generalization that short half lives = more danger. That
is just not true. Tc-99m is used in diagnostic medicine, it has a half-life of
6 hrs. It does not have more risk than Sr-90 that has a half-life of 29 years.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
One mg of Sr-90 has an activity of ~140 uCi. One mg of Tc-99m has an activity
of ~5Ci. You probably understand the differences in the implications of
handling an amount of material that emits 140uCi compared to one that emits
5Ci.

In medical radiology, the amounts of radioactive isotopes are measured in Bq
because the samples are so heavily diluted that it's the only thing you can
sensibly measure. This easily hides the fact that when you are talking about
roughly equal amounts, Tc-99m is roughly 29 years/6 hours ~=40000 times more
dangerous than Sr-90. You just never use equal amounts, when you receive a
sample of Tc-99m it's about 40000 times smaller than the Sr-90 sample.

