Tritium in the Environment
Fri Jan 30 2009
Post a commentNot sure if this of particular interest to anyone other than myself, but it’s been in the news quite a bit these days:
MP raps Tories over leak at Chalk River nuclear plant
A spokesman for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Dale Coffin, said that on Dec. 5 a seal failed in the reactor and about 50 litres of heavy water spilled and was contained in stainless steel barrels of water.
Coffin said four litres evaporated up the stack, carrying what he called a minute amount of radioactive tritium. He said the amount was less than what AECL is required to report..
A few years ago I was actually hired on contract by a small Ottawa company to adapt some software and then subsequently setup an analysis of potential environmental impacts of Tritium in the environment. Though the approach I devised is generally applicable, the particular interest for this project was an analysis of the Chalk River NRU my client was conducting for yet another client (the wonderful world of consulting!). Tritium (which is simply a heavy isotope of Hydrogen) is a tricky thing, because it associates readily with oxygen to form tritiated water. So tracking releases in a model can be quite difficult when compared to more typical isotopes, and requires specialized models, with consideration of several ‘compartments’, including at least soil, water and air.
Jellyfish Rising Up
Thu Jan 29 2009
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As regular readers no doubt know, I’m often scouring television for documentaries on topics that may be of interest. Last night, I came across just such a show, this one a National Geographic production shown as a ‘Wild Docs’ feature on CBC, that I thought I’d share. The show in question is called Jellyfish Invasion, a rather sensationalist title, to be sure. Normally I find these things to be a red flag, but in this case the visuals and story kept me sufficiently interested to press on.
Does Ocean Fertilization Sequester Carbon?
Wed Jan 28 2009
Post a commentOcean fertilization: dead in the water?
The team observed that some 270 tonnes of iron triggered a two- to threefold increase in biological productivity over an area the size of Ireland. But sediment probes revealed that the export of carbon to the deep ocean was nowhere near as massive as the Kerguelen study, and lab experiments, had suggested.
Quoted
Tue Jan 27 2009
Post a comment— Richard P. Feynman, (1918-1988)If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
Linked
Sat Jan 24 2009
Post a commentWhat’s the downside to clean water? Dirty sludge?
A nationwide survey of sewage treatment plants shows that the sludge they produce–the residue from cleaning up wastewater–contains a wide variety of toxic metals, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other compounds, including some antibiotics in surprisingly high concentrations. That’s significant because every year more than half of the roughly 7 million metric tons of these so-called biosolids produced in the United States are applied as fertilizer to farm fields.
