Cherynobl and groundwater radionuclide transport...

[JPreisig@AOL.COM]

Hello radsafers.....


     From:   jpreisig@aol.com


     It has been interesting to read through about 50 e-mail (radsafe) 

messages

each day for the last two days.  August is here and the boss is on vacation.

Web it up, radsafe-wise......


     About truck radiation monitors...  I don't know about portable truck 

radiation

monitors, but Brookhaven does have a truck radiation monitoring station for

trucks entering (or exiting???) the laboratory.  Layendecker's HP division

probably has more information about it.


     Concerning melting cores (Cherynobl and TMI), there is an excellent

videotape shot of the internal damage to the Cherynobl reactor.

The core fuel/metal mixture appears to have flowed like molten lava.

H. Kahnhauser (UGH) at Brookhaven probably recalls the source of this

videotape.  Probably US Nuclear plants have sufficient concrete under the

reactor (50 feet +???) to stop the so-called China Syndrome.


     Even if the hot core material would reach the aquifer (not aquifier), 

not all

radionuclides would transport well from that point on.  From what I 

remember from Presto and other groundwater flow/transport computer

codes, radionuclides which transport at the rate water flows are:

H-3 (i.e. tritium), C-14, Tc-99, I-129 and Np-237.  Other radionuclides are

"retarded" with respect to water flow rates, i.e. they transport much more 

slowly

than water.  The physical parameters which describe the relative transport

rates are Kd values or the related parameter R (known as retardation 

factors---

a horrible name for something in our line of work).  More details on all this 

can be found in the Hydrogeology book by Freeze & Cherry and another

Hydrogeology book by De Marsily.  Fractured (rock) flow changes much of

what I have described in the previous paragraph.


     It is funny to see TMI documentaries resurface, as nuclear power is 

staging a comeback.  From what I have read here about coal plant emissions,

I think I'd rather live fairly close to a nuclear power plant.  The problem 

with 

reprocessing nuclear waste is that no-one in the USA really wants to

do it --- it's one of those tasks best left to others.


     When compared to fission, fusion still wins readily.  The major 

radio-nuclide in fusion is tritium, with its relatively innocuous half-life

of 12 years.  Maybe George W. should funnel some of the particle-beam 

money to places doing Fusion research, like Princeton U.  


     In the meantime, Brookhaven Lab. is running gold collisions at 100

GeV on 100 Gev (collision) energies (that's energy per nucleon or something

like that) at the Relativisitic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).  They will also be

running 100 GeV on 100 GeV proton collisions fairly soon.  Not bad for

an accelerator that was dead (ISABELLE) and came back to life

as RHIC.  RHIC is a very viable physics machine.  They claim to be 

looking for the quark-gluon plasma, but they could do so much more with this

accelerator.  Let's get to it.  The Large Hadron Collider (CERN) is still five

years off.  Brookhaven could create 5 Nobel Prize winning efforts in those

5 years.


     Well, I've said too much already.  Best wishes to Nisy Ipe in her new job

away from SLAC.  


                 STAY COOL!!!!!                       J.R. Preisig, Ph.D.


P.S.  RHIC at BNL has its web-page which shows some of its experimental

         results.  The experiments (not small ones) are Phenix, Star, Brahms

         and Phobos (I think).