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The CNSC continues to explain radiation in simpler terms. The Radiation and Health video takes you beyond the tiny world of the atom to explore sources of radiation, the concept of dose, and how radiation affects the body and health. Want to learn more about nuclear safety?

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Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission - CNSC

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The Japanese government says 20 workers at the disabled Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant have been decontaminated after exposure to radioactive material.

Dozens more, at least, have reportedly been decontaminated within the 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant after Geiger counters picked up evidence of radiation exposure.

That made us wonder just how someone gets decontaminated from radiation - which, after all, is invisible, odorless, tasteless and generally insidious. Most people think of it as "rays," which is partially correct.

The answer might surprise you.

"Decontamination is very simple," says Dr. Eric Toner of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, who has studied what might happen in the wake of a terrorist's "dirty bomb" attack.

"As a rule of thumb, 80 percent of decontamination is removing your clothes," says Toner, an emergency physician. "And 95 percent is removing your clothes and taking a shower - if possible, shampooing your hair. That's all that's involved. No fancy chemicals."

That's because radiation is carried on dust particles. "The air isn't radioactive, but small dust particles are," Toner explains. "You're essentially washing off the dust."

So a rain is a good thing at the time of, or after, a radiation leak. Rain washes the dust from the air, diluting it in runoff. (Yes, the runoff would be radioactive, but diluted - and presumably, the ground would also be getting radiation exposure already.)

Dry air, when dust gets kicked up in the air and disbursed over longer distances, is bad.

By the way, the dusty clothes can often be decontaminated simply by washing them, but it depends on the amount of radiation detected. "If you have reason to think they're heavily contaminated, they should be disposed of properly," Toner says. That means put in a plastic bag and, if possible, taking them to authorities for disposal.
All this raises another question - how to decide if somebody needs to be decontaminated.
At a place like the Fukushima power plant, where workers wear dosimeters that constantly record exposure and the environment is being continually monitored for radioactivity levels, the decision is clear-cut.

But it's far less so out among the general public. In a situation like the current one, there's a profound lack of information on radiation levels at different distances from the power plant and how they might be fluctuating over time.

In an emergency room or post-disaster setting, Toner says doctors would usually use a Geiger counter to screen people - before decontamination, to see if they've had any detectable exposure to start with, and afterward, to see if they still have traces of radioactive dust.

There is a lot of Geiger-countering going on in northern Japan right now - as most TV-watchers know by now. But using Geiger counter readings, given in "counts-per-minute," or cpm, is not necessarily a great way to know if you need decontamination. Or whether it's time to start taking potassium iodide pills to protect against thyroid cancer.

Steve Herman knows about that. He's a correspondent for Voice of America who got a Geiger counter scan Thursday in Koriyama, a town 37 miles from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant as the crow flies.

"My body 1,500 cpm, my boots 3,000 cpm. Another reporter: 10,000 cpm on her shoes," Herman tweeted.

What to make of those readings? It's hard to know.

"It is really hard to interpret Geiger counter cpm's," Toner says. "They vary from machine to machine. For example, they depend on the size of the probe - the bigger the probe, the more counts detected. And each machine must be calibrated against a known source (of radiation). Translating the cpm's to an actual exposure does take a health physicist."

In addition, Geiger counter readings don't tell you a thing about the type of radiation a person may be exposed to - whether it's a fairly weak and short-lived isotope that doesn't pose a health risk, a form of radioactive iodine that signals the need to take protective tablets, or a more sinister isotope, such as cesium-137, that can raise long-term health risks if it gets inside the body.

And this is the most worrisome form of contamination - internal contamination. The bad stuff on skin and clothes is easily washed off. But once radiactice particles get inside the body - through breathing in, but more importantly from ingestion - it can remain in tissues, possibly wreaking submicroscopic havoc, for a lifetime.

That's why Thursday, Japanese authorities activated provisions of its Food Sanitation Act, which allows the government to test food for radioactive contamination and pull it from the market.

Experts say it was the Soviet Union's failure to do that, for many weeks after the 1986 Chernobyl power plant disaster, that caused most of the health consequences - which continue to this day.

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Decontamination After Radiation Exposure: Simpler Than You May Think

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The Japanese government says 20 workers at the disabled Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant have been decontaminated after exposure to radioactive material. Dozens more, at least, have reportedly been decontaminated within the 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant after Geiger counters picked up evidence of radiation exposure.

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decon decontamination self-decon dirty bomb dirty bombs nuclear blast nuclear blasts radioactive terrorism chemical terrorism radiation radiological terrorism wmd weapons of mass destruction

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centers for disease control and prevention

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CDC Radiation Emergencies | How to Self-Decontaminate After a Radiation Emergency

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Information on how to self-decontaminate after a radiation emergency. Provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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Scientists Are Using Sunflowers To Clean Up Nuclear Radiation

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After the Hiroshima, Fukushima, and Chernobyl nuclear disasters, fields of sunflowers were planted across the affected landscapes to help absorb toxic

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A video description of a Nuclear Reactor's problem explained.

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Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Problem Explained (CNN)

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Some Different Types of Nuclear Problems... 

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Some Different Types of Nuclear Problems... 

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- Nuclear Reactors
- Nuclear Power
- Nuclear Wastes
- Nuclear Power Plants

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Hola. Here's a video from "what is is" about the "Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Solution." (Does anyone remember that?) From what we can tell the Ministry of Propaganda (U.S. Corporate Media) have forgotten about it, as has most of the public we suspect.

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Another video but, this includes both problems and solutions for Nuclear Power

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This is a documentary about nuclear energy highlighting what it is, problems with it, and some solutions. I made this in Intro to Field Production with Kailey Partin for our final project during the spring of 2011.

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Watch this interesting video that shows possible solutions towards fixing/preventing nuclear waste.

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Public Limited Company for Radioactive Waste Management

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Glass Offers Improved Means of Storing Nuclear Waste

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Nuclear Power Needed To Slow Climate Change

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The New Solution To Our Nuclear Waste Problem

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According to some scientists, we must begin using more nuclear power in order to prevent global warming from accelerating. But that creates a huge nuclear waste problem. But scientists at the University of Sheffield think they might have found a very unique way of handing it that could make nuclear waste a problem of the past.

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An interesting picture of nuclear danger descriptions... 

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An interesting picture of nuclear danger descriptions... 

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:P

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A nuclear waste storage facility deep in the bedrock below Finland is the subject of a feature-length documentary called Into Eternity.

Around the world, nuclear power plants are churning out high-level radioactive waste at a rate of knots. It's estimated that about 250,000 tonnes of the material is currently in interim storage, submerged in huge tanks of water in facilities that keep it safe -- temporarily.

But there's very little agreement on what to do with the stuff long-term, as it will remain a danger for around 100,000 years -- almost as long as humans have existed, and far longer than we've been using tools. There have been a few proposals, including the possibility of loading it into a rocket and shooting it into the Sun, or sinking it to the bottom of the sea. But the most likely seems to be storage in deep geological repositories.

There are 10 or so of these repositories bored into the bedrock around the world, in the USA, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, France, Canada, Belgium and Finland. Finnish law dictates that all nuclear waste produced in the country must be disposed of in the country too, so the government is constructing a facility called Onkalo, located near the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant.

Onkalo consists of a massive warren of underground tunnels, half a kilometre below the Earth's surface, which is expected to be completed in 2020. It will be progressively filled with waste over a period of about 100 years until 2120, when it'll be backfilled and sealed for the next 100,000 years.

It's also the subject of a feature-length documentary called Into Eternity, from a Danish director named Michael Madsen. Into Eternity is an intriguing, unsettling and thought-provoking look at the project, with in-depth interviews with a number of key figures involved in the project, such as Timo &Auml;ik&auml;s, Onkalo's executive vice-president of engineering; Wandla Paile, the chief radiologist at Finland's radiation and nuclear safety authority; and Carl Reinhold Br&aring;kenhielm, a member of Sweden's national council for nuclear waste.

The cinematography is superb, and those who enjoy seeing inside post-industrial structures are in for a treat. There's plenty of footage of existing temporary storage sites, with spent fuel being loaded into tubes underwater. There's also lots of camera-time for the tunnel itself, the blasting process, and the dormitories where the workers blasting their way through the rock live.

One theme running throughout the 75-minute documentary is that of how to get our children's children's children's children to stay away. If the human race survives for another 100,000 years, it's unlikely to remain in the same state, and if we're having trouble reading the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians from just 3,000 years ago, the odds of our descendants being able to understand any warnings we leave are low.

Even leaving aside language barriers, there's a big question mark over whether future generations will have the knowledge to understand nuclear waste's silent but deadly threat. The dark ages following the decline of the Roman Empire may well be repeated in the future, and there's no guarantee that our descendants will be able to comprehend what radiation is.

As a result, there's a divide in the documentary between those who believe that it's best to leave warnings, and those who believe that it should go unmarked and forgotten. Proponents of the latter approach argue that any signs on the surface will foster humanity's insatiable curiosity, but those who favour warning signs argue that there's a good chance of it being found anyway, so it's better to give some indication that it might not be a good idea to go down there.

Despite the documentary's rather weighty subject matter, there's humour. At one point, one of the interviewees wonders out loud whether they'll get to the bottom and break into a cavern containing hundreds of canisters of nuclear waste from a prior civilisation that had gone hitherto undiscovered.

But one particularly chilling moment occurs near the end of the documentary, when all the people interviewed are asked to send a message to anyone who might find the facility in the future. Each stares into the camera for a few moments, trying to reconcile in their head exactly what that future might entail, and then intones a warning to turn around, go back where they came, and never, ever, enter Onkalo.

Into Eternity will be arriving in cinemas across Britain at the end of October. The trailer is embedded below, and we've put together a delightful photo gallery for your perusal too. Go check it out.

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Where do you put 250,000 tonnes of nuclear waste?

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A nuclear waste storage facility deep in the bedrock below Finland is the subject of a feature-length documentary called Into Eternity. Around the world, nuclear power plants are churning out high-level radioactive waste at a rate of knots.

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Low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) consists of items that have come in contact with radioactive materials, such as gloves, personal protective clothing, tools, water purification filters and resins, plant hardware, and wastes from reactor cooling-water cleanup systems. It generally has levels of radioactivity that decay to background radioactivity levels in less than 500 years. About 95 percent decays to background levels within 100 years or less.

The NRC has adopted a waste classification system for low-level radioactive waste based on its potential hazards, and has specified disposal and waste form requirements for each of the general classes of waste: Class A, Class B and Class C waste. Although the classification of waste can be complex, Class A waste generally contains lower concentrations of long half-lived radioactive material than Class B and C wastes. For more information see the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Active low-level waste licensed disposal facilities include the following:

Barnwell, located in Barnwell, SC. Previously, Barnwell accepted waste from all U.S. generators. As of July 2008, Barnwell only accepts waste from the Atlantic Compact States (Connecticut, New Jersey, and South Carolina). Barnwell is licensed by the State of South Carolina to receive all classes of LLRW.

Compact Waste Facility, located in Andrews County, TX. Waste Control Specialists LLC operates the Compact Waste Facility site. The site is owned and licensed by the state of Texas and is able to receive all classes of LLRW.

Energy Solutions, located in Clive, UT. Energy Solutions accepts waste from all regions of the United States. It is licensed by the State of Utah for Class A waste only.

Hanford, located in Hanford, WA. Hanford accepts waste from the Northwest and Rocky Mountain compacts. Hanford is licensed by the State of Washington to receive all classes of LLRW.

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Nuclear Waste Amounts & On-Site Storage - Nuclear Energy Institute

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Low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) consists of items that have come in contact with radioactive materials, such as gloves, personal protective clothing, tools, water purification filters and resins, plant hardware, and wastes from reactor cooling-water cleanup systems. It generally has levels of radioactivity that decay to background radioactivity levels in less than 500 years.

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A map with examples of Nuclear Power Plants around the world.

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This map shows different amounts of Nuclear Fuel stored in the U.S. in 2011 (measured in Metric Tons).

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Possible nuclear power generation for Pakistan

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THE ENERGY crisis is wavering human development and is indeed a matter of life and death. Due to electricity short fall the daily life has come to a standstill. Even more worryingly the shortage is endangering the future economic and social prospects of the country, putting its very fabric under strain.

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The waste generated by nuclear power remains dangerous for many years--so we must make wise decisions about how to handle and dispose of it.