SMRs and AMRs

Monday, June 18, 2012

In California, bring a Geiger counter to the beach

A Radioactive Nightmare

By Michael Collin, VC Reporter
11 June 2012

Millions of Southern Californians and tourists seek the region's famous beaches to cool off in the sea breeze and frolic in the surf. Those iconic breezes, however, may be delivering something hotter than the white sands along the Pacific.

Buckyballs.

According to a recent U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and tough buckyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer balls.

Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.

High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County.

The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, separate from each other and using different procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA's radiation station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this reporter's detection location is near the West L.A. boundary.

Both stations registered over 5.3 times normal, though the methods of sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation while the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only, according to the government website.

(Continued here.)

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