Comments on: Japan Nuclear Disaster Update # 37: Glow in the dark fish, and the meaning of “Power”

By: Lane Tschoepe

Lane Tschoepe — Mon, 27 May 2013 14:04:49 +0000

J’ai lu les blogs (comme celui-ci), pour diverses raisons. Je commente sur certains d’entre eux parce que:

By: John Pointer

John Pointer — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:50:35 +0000

Plant shit off because of quake vibration, not power loss -MSNBC Nightly News, Sept. 28
Not sure if you meant “Shut Off” or not (does it matter?)
Have you seen any articles in regards to the fuel rods having melted into the ground at Fukushima? Keep up the outstanding work.
JP

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:30:02 +0000

Sorry, I should have been more clear about the explosion. The question is weather or not the explosions at 1 and 3 damaged the reactor at 2.

Eric, right, I was thinking of strontium. Fluoride does something totally different.

By: Joffan

Joffan — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:14:13 +0000

While it’s always amusing to have an explosion video of a non-explosion, that particular video is of reactor building 3. Which I hope you already knew. Reactor building 2 wasn’t destroyed, of course, as the webcam will confirm.

I believe Timberwoof’s original point is that you repeatedly have “radio-nucleotide” in the first para where you mean “radionuclide”. (Perhaps you corrected one instance…)

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:46:36 +0000

Fluoride gets incorporated in tooth and bone because it substitutes for Calcium.

I’m not sure what you meant here. Fluoride would be a substitute for chloride (F and Cl are halogens, which prefer -1 as an ionic charge state), not for calcium, which prefers +2. However, the mechanism you specify works for strontium, which is directly below calcium in the periodic table. That is why Sr-90, a common fission product with a sufficiently long half-life to bioaccumulate, is a concern. I’m not sure about strontium’s toxicity otherwise, though in general most metals in and below that row of the periodic table are bad news.

Cesium and potassium are both alkali metals, so I see how that substitution might work, though since they are two rows apart (rubidium is in between) it may not go as smoothly as Sr for Ca or F for Cl. Metallic Cs is definitely more reactive (in that column the heavier elements are more reactive than the lighter ones), so it could be toxic by that route as well, not to mention the heavy metal issue.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:42:38 +0000

C12 and C13 are isotopes of each other. C13 and N14 are isotones. C-14 is a cosmogenic nuclide and radioactive isotope of C. YC-14, on the other hand, is an aircraft.

By: Timberwoof

Timberwoof — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:23:44 +0000

My turn to say oops. C14 and C13 are nuclides of C12. C14 is the radionuclide.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:08:47 +0000

Damn you autocorrect! I mean radioactive isotopes.

C-13 is not a radionuclide or a radioactive isotope, or even a radio-nucliotide. C-14 is a radioactive isotope of C.

By: Timberwoof

Timberwoof — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:56:45 +0000

Do you mean radionuclide or radio-nucleotide?

C-13 is a radionuclide (a radioactive isotope) of C-14, not a radio-nucleotide (a nucleotide containing one or more radioactive isotopes).