Seawater/seafood monitoring?

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2012-04-09 16:00

So far, it appears that most of the post-Fukushima monitoring seems to be focused on traditional fallout detection, but I would suggest that another type of radiological hazard needs to be considered.

A group at UC Davis recently reported (Armstrong et al., "Uranyl peroxide enhanced nuclear fuel corrosion in seawater", PNAS 109:1874-1877) that the interaction between fuel rods and seawater can result in the formation of stable nano-scale uranium cages with the potential for being transported over long distances.

Given that Pacific Ocean currents would likely carry such substances from Fukushima to the west coast of North America, it would make sense to do radiological monitoring of seawater or marine organisms. I presume that large quantities of freshly-harvested marine organisms of various types are still used for dissection by students in the Biology 1 labs at Berkeley, so it shouldn't be too hard to find samples for an initial survey.

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Uranium in seawater

Submitted by bandstra on Tue, 2012-04-24 11:23.

There are already trace amounts of natural uranium in the oceans, to the tune of 3.3 parts per billion. This amounts to 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater, or 8×1015 uranium atoms in each liter of seawater. In fact, though there are only trace amounts of uranium, there is enough that scientists have been trying for decades to develop economical ways of extracting uranium from seawater to replace traditional uranium mining. Here's a recent news article about this type of research, as well as a seminal paper from 1964 by Davies et al. for more information.

The Armstrong et al. paper describes some exotic molecules that uranium can form under the conditions inside the Fukushima reactors. Given the presence of uranium in seawater naturally and the small amount of uranium that could have been dissolved to form these compounds, uranium will not be much of a radiological hazard — even if these compounds were formed and were released into the ocean.

Mark [BRAWM Team Member]

kelp

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2012-04-09 19:46.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/calif-kelp-radioactivity-s...