from Hacker News

If I ingest a grain of sand size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No.4 core

by tomerds on 6/2/19, 6:52 PM with 77 comments

• by henearkr on 6/3/19, 7:26 AM

  I'm baffled at the fact that the answer is entirely about radioactivity. Rather than that, uranium in itself is highly toxic (I mean, chemically).

• by atemerev on 6/2/19, 8:53 PM

  This is purely hypothetical, as like he noticed, the fuel particle is not soluble in gastric acid. The damage would be much less than that.

  Inhaling the similar amount of finely powdered radioactive dust is another story, though.

• by remarkEon on 6/2/19, 8:19 PM

  >Me, riding the whole body counter in SP1430, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, after being inside the Unit 4 “Sarcophagus”

  What do people do who actually go inside the Sarcophagus these days? I assume there’s monitoring that needs to be done, but I also assume that you can monitor a lot of this remotely. Also, how much longer until Chernobyl is considered “safe”?

• by beaner on 6/2/19, 7:47 PM

  Couple naive questions:

  1. How does a piece of spent fuel end up in a "grassy bit of ground" outside the reactor? Thought it would have all melted in one big clump in the same spot?

  2. Why is Chernobyl still so dangerous if literally ingesting the spent fuel isn't super bad? Or is Chernobyl no longer dangerous?

• by ribalda on 6/2/19, 7:25 PM

  Good to know. I was worried for this girl :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y

• by roenxi on 6/2/19, 11:27 PM

  It is worth noting that there is almost literally no mention of potential health impacts; almost all the outcomes listed in the answer are regulatory.

  On the one hand, that might be good regulation - we don't want workers getting harmed. On the other hand, it serves as ongoing evidence that getting worried because a situation exceeds regulatory standards is foolish.

  Given how little attention he gives it the "marginally higher theoretical likelihood of later detriment such as cancer" turns out to be something trivial like less damage than done by drinking sugar water or not exercising.

• by kochikame on 6/3/19, 1:52 AM

  https://xkcd.com/radiation/

  This masterfully illustrates the relative risks of various sources of radiation, something that the typical person on the street knows almost nothing about but thinks they do

  I live in Japan and read up on this topic after the Fukushima disaster

• by JadeNB on 6/3/19, 12:25 AM

  I had a really hard time with the title displayed here, which is a truncated version of an already-confusing title on Quora. The actual title, with, I think, desireable punctuation included, is "If I ingest[ed] a grain-of-sand-size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 core, what would happen to my body?"

• by altmind on 6/3/19, 10:39 PM

  There are things much scarier and devastating than uranium. It took 10 micro-grams(10^-5 g) of Pu-210 to poison(ARS) Litvinenko. You cannot see that amount - so tiny it is. And the damage is almost 100% gamma rays - so its hard to detect and the damage is lowered when handling and maximal when ingested.

• by ianai on 6/2/19, 7:21 PM

  A discussion about the everyday occurrence of radioactive sources may be more productive.

• by exabrial on 6/2/19, 11:27 PM

  I left with more questions than answers...

• by jhallenworld on 6/3/19, 3:32 AM

  I've watched this interesting (but long) talk by Brian Sheron, retired director of Nuclear Regulatory Research:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI4TTaA7qM

  It gives me a better understanding of the risk of nuclear power, particularly for current US reactors, and what our regulatory agencies actually focus on: really it's on preventing direct radiation induced deaths, and not so much on property damage. So: It's not so much that accidents directly kill people, instead they kill the land. The idea is that loss of cooling incidents are contained for a significant amount of time- at least 8 hours. I'm dubious, but this is thought to be enough time to evacuate people from the land that will eventually become contaminated. Only when people move back do people die, and then only from increased cancer risk (Brian says this becomes an EPA problem). So now the land is lost, because who would move back? [of course this focuses only on deaths from radiation, and not for example, deaths caused by stress to elderly people forcibly relocated].

  I did not remember when people were evacuated after the Fukushima accident, but it was pretty quick, here is a timeline:

  https://www.oecd-nea.org/news/2011/NEWS-04.html

  There is another question I'm still trying to answer. If the final heat sink is lost (someone blows up a dam), can the reactor be shut down without incident, assuming no blackout? This would require that the decay heat is spread across a large enough surface area. I'm not sure if the containment building provides such an area (a 1000 MW reactor generates ~70 MW decay heat after shutdown). It reminds me that this is another area that NRC does not focus on: "terrorist attacks are a military problem".

  Edit: well I answered my own question from wikipedia entry on containment building: "While the containment plays a critical role in the most severe nuclear reactor accidents, it is only designed to contain or condense steam in the short term (for large break accidents) and long term heat removal still must be provided by other systems." So if the heat sink is a man-made lake held by dam, it's a big risk (of course dam loss would cause direct loss of life anyway). I was wondering about this because my inlaws live near Duke Energy's Oconee Nuclear Station, on man made Lake Keowee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee

• by lisper on 6/2/19, 7:18 PM

  Gotta love the conclusion:

  "In summary, it is preferable to not eat spent nuclear fuel."

• by HillaryBriss on 6/2/19, 7:16 PM

  really puts my mind at ease

• by soundpuppy on 6/2/19, 8:03 PM

  If we were to make an analogy between radiocative matter entering the body, and toxic information entering the mind, what metrics do we use to measure the dangerous effects of the information? How long it lasts or how deeply it can modify conscious/subconscious brain processes?