General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen is ANY amount of plutonium not a threat to human health?
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/20/plutonium-detectedoutsidenewmexiconuclearwastefacility.htmlPlutonium detected half-mile outside New Mexico nuclear waste facility
Disclosure comes four days after leak at same underground storage repository; officials say no threat to human health.
February 20, 2014 11:00AM ET
Four days after a radiation alert shut the nations only underground nuclear waste facility, an independent monitoring center said Wednesday it found radioactive isotopes in an air sensor about a half mile from the southeastern New Mexico plant.
A filter from a monitor northwest of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad had trace amounts of plutonium and americium, said Russell Hardy, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center.
-
There is a lot more that needs to be known, Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, told local media.
The big problem is, does anybody really know what happened in the underground and how much was released or is continuing to be released? And, therefore, how much is being captured by the filters and how much is getting into the environment?
-
WIPP is the nations first and only deep geological nuclear facility. It takes plutonium-contaminated waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other defense projects, and buries it in rooms cut from underground salt beds.
..more..
packman
(16,296 posts)that plutonium is THE most deadly poisonous substance known - a pin head of the shit can kill you and the damn thing takes its time in doing it.
From Wikipedia - a bit about its dark history
"In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five micrograms of plutonium into hospital patients thought to be either terminally ill, or to have a life expectancy of less than ten years either due to age or chronic disease condition.[72] This was reduced to one microgram in July 1945 after animal studies found that the way plutonium distributed itself in bones was more dangerous than radium.[73] Many of these experiments resulted in strong mutation. Most of the subjects, Eileen Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.[74]
From 1945 to 1947, eighteen human test subjects were injected with plutonium without informed consent. The tests were used to create diagnostic tools to determine the uptake of plutonium in the body in order to develop safety standards for working with plutonium.[72] Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project continued into the 1970s. The Plutonium Files chronicles the lives of the subjects of the secret program by naming each person involved and discussing the ethical and medical research conducted in secret by the scientists and doctors. The episode is now considered to be a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath.[75]"
G_j
(40,372 posts)Sounds like a serious situation.