Nuclear Waste Dumped and Discharged into the Oceans

Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare is a chilling 2009 documentary about the nuclear industry and what it does with radioactive waste. Much of that radioactive waste is dumped straight into the ocean.

This documentary exposes the dumping and discharging of more than 100,000 tons of radioactive nuclear material into the oceans by France, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, Switzerland and the United States of America. Great Britain is responsible for 80 per cent of the radioactive nuclear waste dumped and discharged into the oceans.

Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30.17 years. It is a radioactive isotope of caesium which is formed as one of the more common fission products by the nuclear fission of Uranium-235 and other fissonable isotopes in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.

Caesium-137 and Caesium-134 were found in blue fin tuna caught in the ocean near San Diego, California. Read the full article here.

Caesium-137 reacts with water producing a water-soluble compound (caesium hydroxide), and the biological behavior of caesium is similar to that of potassium and rubidium. After entering the body, caesium gets more or less uniformly distributed throughout the body, with higher concentration in muscle tissues and lower in bones. Experiments with dogs showed that a single dose of 3800 μCi/kg (140 MBq/kg, or approximately 44 μg/kg) is lethal within three weeks.

Uranium Alpha 238 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Uranium Alpha 234 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 245,000 years.

Uranium-235 has a half-life of 703.8 million years.

Plutonium-239 is an isotope of plutonium. Plutonium-239 is the primary fissile isotope used for the production of nuclear weapons, although uranium-235 has also been used and is currently the secondary isotope. Plutonium-239 is also one of the three main isotopes demonstrated usable as fuel in nuclear reactors, along with uranium-235 and uranium-233. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years.

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Storing nuclear waste a $24-billion problem
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 | 4:33 PM ET Brian Kemp, CBC News

There are two million high-level radioactive fuel bundles sitting at temporary storage sites in Canada, as the Nuclear Waste Management Organization wrestles with the mandate of finding a community to host a central storage facility for the waste for perhaps tens of thousands of years.

Throw in the fact that the cost of storing this nuclear waste could be up to $24 billion — a figure that will likely rise — and environmental groups are dead set against a central facility, and it shapes up to be a challenge of colossal proportions.

The process of finding a site to bury the high-level spent fuel has dragged on for decades as reactors keep churning out more spent bundles.

Read the full article here.

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Searching the Deep Web

By Patricia Jordan

The Deep Web is estimated to be 500 times larger than the surface web. It contains information that is buried within databases on dynamically generated websites. This untapped information is not available on static web pages and cannot be retrieved by traditional search engines like Yahoo! and Google. The crawler programs used by Yahoo! and Google access information on the surface web, but are unable to penetrate databases that are designed to respond to specific typed queries. Those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically from a specific search.



Here are a few websites that will assist you to search the Deep Web.

• ArchivesCanada.ca is a gateway to archival resources found in more than 800 repositories across Canada.
• CollectionsCanada.gc.ca is an online resource containing the collections and services of Library and Archives Canada.
• CompletePlanet.com provides access to more than 70,000 searchable databases and specialty search engines.
• HeinOnline.org provides content that spans multiple library collections with more than 50 million pages of research material available to subscribers in more than 150 countries.
• LibrarySpot.com contains a collection of databases, online libraries, references and other resources.
• OSTI uses federated searching on a cascading suite of products: Worldwidescience.org for worldwide science information, Science.gov for US federal science and ScienceAccelerator.gov which unifies OSTIs web products.
• WorldCat.org connects to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries.
• The World Digital Library (wdl.org/en provides free access in multilingual format to significant materials from countries and cultures worldwide.