Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

Any ideas how that would work? Cesium isn't exactly chemically inert, you would have to keep it well separated from the water, and the effective range of gamma radiation in water couldn't be more than a few feet. How would you expose the wasteflow to gamma radiation without risking contaminating it with the isotope?

Sodium & potassium silicates & aluminosilicates are rock forming minerals with high melting points that are not very soluble in water except at very high temperatures. (Well above 100 °C)

I couldn't find cesium silicates listed in the CRC handbook, but I would expect them to have similar properties.

To be on the safe side we could clad cylinders or spheres of cesium silicate with stainless steel.

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Jim Baerg

What about when the Cesium decays to Barium?

Since the Barium isn't radioactive, I assume you're wondering if that would make the silicate more soluble.

Barium silicate is listed as being insoluble in water by the CRC Handbook.

I note that rather than having a nice crystal structure, these cesium silicate pellets would be a cesium silicate glass. This is much the same issue as the idea of turning all the fission product waste into a glass for underground disposal, except it's easier because you *know* the temperature is low & monitoring the water stream for leaks of radioactive material will be easier too.

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Jim Baerg

My concern is that turning a monovalent ion into a divalent ion could disrupt the material and cause it to solubilize, warp, or shed particles.

If the scheme will work, how much Cs137 would we need? I suspect we'd need rather a lot of it to do more than a handful of treatment plants.

A cautionary tale of Cs137....


See also text here.
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Using Cs137 to denature halocarbons wouldn't work anyway; They'd have to be very highly concentrated.

There may more demand for xenon than many people would expect, provided that it becomes plentiful and less expensive.

Argon is used between glass panes in high efficiency windows. Xenon would be more effective; it would be lost more slowly and transfer less heat by convection. For reasons that seem not to be totally understood, xenon is also a good anesthetic gas. There may also be other uses for it besides the more well-known ones, if there is enough available so that it is not too expensive.

While there is no doubt that Goiânia was a cluster f..k, in the broader picture of industrial pollution in Brazil it is a minuscule event. São Paulo's pollution is so bad its nickname is Cough city. It's pollution levels are fueled by poor infrastructure design and gasoline prices that are among the lowest in the world. A study by the University of São Paulo shows that 3500 people die in the city per year due to pollution related illnesses like respiratory diseases. The Goiânia accident killed 4, injured 28, and produced around 200 cases of detectable radiation poisoning.

The point here is that while Goiânia is held up as a horror story of the dangers of nuclear technology the fact of the matter is that the damage was limited, and the clean-up effective.