tellurium

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 2011-03-23 21:27

Hello:

I had a question about tellurium 132. I found this on google:
Tellurium 125, 128, 130125Te 127Te 128Te 129Te 130Te 131Te 132Te

Tellurium-132 and its daughter 132I are important in the first few days after a criticality. It was responsible for a large fraction of the dose inflicted on workers at Chernobyl in the first week.

The isobar forming 132Te/132I is: Tin-132 (half life 40 s) decaying to antimony-132 (half life 2.8 minutes) decaying to tellurium-132 (half life 3.2 days) decaying to iodine-132 (half life 2.3 hours) which decays to stable xenon-132.

The fact that tellurium has been detected here in California, is that evidence that it indeed came to a meltdown in Japan?
Or does telurium get produced in a normal reactor without meltdown?
Is it possible that the Japanese hide the fact that a melt down occured if tellurium indeed only appears in a meltdown? Also, I read about Xenon found in airsamples, did you find any in the water?

thank you.

Simone

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We do see Te-132 and the

Submitted by dchivers on Wed, 2011-03-23 23:31.

We do see Te-132 and the decay daughter of I-132 along with I-131, Cs-134, and Cs-137 in trace amounts. Just because we see Te-132, does not necessarily mean a core meltdown, but it does indicate a significant release of fission products from the fuel. Te-132 has a half life of about 3 days and therefore we know this is from one of the three operating reactors that were shutdown at the earthquake as opposed to the spent fuel pools which had been shutdown for greater than 100 days. When a reactor shuts down, the production of these nuclides cease and this kind of starts a clock where after a certain amount of time, certain nuclides decay away. Te-132 is one of these and so it gives us some indication of where the release came from. No data from our measurements point to a meltdown, however, I think the accepted assumption is that all three units at Fukushima have some sort of core damage. The extent of this damage is still unknown.