Foreign Policy, which has a history of publishing scientific illiteracy - after all it was the first journal to publish the scientifically (and socially) illiterate fool Amory Lovins whose rhetoric helped drive climate change - is obviously jumping on this nonsense scare mongering based on public stupidity.
In another post, on the subject of rubidium, a naturally occurring element found in seawater, that like its congener potassium, is also radioactive, I pointed to the scale of this public stupidity, this appeal to fear and ignorance concerning Fukushima, this while the world burns from fossil fuel waste, waste that actually kills people: 19,000 people will die today from air pollution, fossil fuel waste, some of those deaths contributed by servers powered by fossil fuels and dedicated to disseminating fear and ignorance.
The post:
Low Impact Leaching of Rubidium from Mica Sources Preserving the Lamellar Structure of the Mica.
The relevant text:
I highlighted
seawater in the text above for a reason, which motivated me in a sense to have this paper catch my eye. Fossil fuel apologists/salespeople/salesbots, some of whom at a huge environmental expense, greenwash the fossil fuels by converting them to hydrogen and then claiming they're "green," - although hydrogen is an extremely dirty fuel - are carrying on insipidly about the release of slightly radioactive water at Fukushima, where the number of people killed by radioactivity releases from the big boogeyman there is essentially zero or close to zero.
Whenever I think of radioactivity in seawater, rubidium crops up in my mind just after uranium - which I believe should be recovered from seawater - and potassium.
The concentration of rubidium in seawater is about 125 micrograms per liter. There are 1000 liters in a cubic meter. The volume of the ocean is thought to be around 1.51 X 10^18 cubic meters. (cf. Korenaga, J. (2008),
Plate tectonics, flood basalts and the evolution of Earth’s oceans. Terra Nova, 20: 419-439. The specific activity of rubidium 87 is 3090 Bq/gram, or at 27.8%, for rubidium overall, 859 Bq/gram. It follows @3.7 X 10^10 Bq/curie that the radioactivity in the ocean from the trace element rubidium alone is 1.2 billion curies, never mind the much larger concentrations of potassium and the members of the uranium decay chain along with uranium itself.
All of the radioactivity released by the boogeyman at Fukushima, and not just the slightly radioactive water foolishly stored in tanks and wisely to be released but including that water, is trivial. The tanks contain 0.15 Terrabecquerel of radioactivity or about 4 curies.
This release will injure no one, but is definitely being hyped by appeal to fear and ignorance, clearly relished by fossil fuel salespeople/salesbots participating in the hydrogen bait and switch marketing game.
Of course the fossil fuel snake oil salespeople/salesbots playing bait and switch with hydrogen - requiring the wasting of the energy content of fossil fuels for marketing purposes - want to demonize nuclear energy. It is the only source of primary energy that exhibits the technical feasibility of driving their environmentally odious scheme out of business.
The fossil fuel industry has always opposed nuclear energy, very successfully indeed, this with slick bait and switch marketing, sequestration, wind, solar and like a rising and falling hydra cropping up uselessly decade after decade, hydrogen.
Over 80 million people died from air pollution since Fukushima, where the number of people killed by exposure to
radiation is either zero or vanishingly close to it.
19,000 people, of course, died from seawater in the Earthquake, but neither
Foreign Affairs or any of the morons who have been carrying on about Fukushima for the last 12 years have called for banning
coastal cities.
Illiteracy about the effects of radiation kills people.
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