Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: Fukushima is Heating Pacific Ocean [View all]FBaggins
(28,678 posts)Let's look at what you added.
This nuclear heated water is now surface water. It may only be a few dozen meters in depth. The fact that it contains many radioactive compounds could be keeping it from mixing with the unpolluted colder seawater
No science has ever shown that radioactive elements keep water from mixing with other water. Which of course is ridiculous.
besides the fact that radiation still produces constant heat.
Let's look at just Cesium 137. The activity level of CS137 is a bit over 3 TBq/gram (look it up for yourself). That's 3 quadrillion Bq/kg. The estimated release to the ocean (of just CS137) was 3.6×1015 Bq. So even if that estimate is way off, we're talking about low-single-digits of kilograms. Take even the wildly inaccurate "four Chernobyls!!!" misreading of several months back and assume that it was actually true (and all ended up in the ocean)... and you're still talking just a few pounds of the stuff.
And you think that a few pounds of something (even if were constantly white hot) could heat up that much water by that amount? It could be antimatter and it wouldn't do that.