Scientists in Antinuclear Hellholes Develop a Means to Measure Tritiated Water Vapor in Nuclear Plants
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Development of a Novel Passive Monitoring Technique to Showcase the 3D Distribution of Tritiated Water (HTO) Vapor in Indoor Air of a Nuclear Facility Bin Feng, Martin Ibesich, Dieter Hainz, Daniel Waidhofer, Monika Veit-Öller, Clemens Trunner, Thomas Stummer, Michaela Foster, Markus Nemetz, Jan M. Welch, Mario Villa, Johannes H. Sterba, Andreas Musilek, Franz Renz, and Georg Steinhauser Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (48), 20024-20033.
The paper is free to read at the link.
The authors of this paper all reside in the officially antinuke countries of Austria and Germany, neither of which have any operating commercial nuclear plants, and both of which are dependent on fossil fuels, with vague and dishonest claims that they will someday, somehow at sometime energy be 100% so called "renewable energy." Twelve of the authors are from a facility that operates a very small TRIGA research reactor, a reactor type about which I'll briefly comment below, the only nuclear reactor in Austria, and two are from Germany.
Austria, a small country with a population of less than 10 million people is mountainous, and can generally rely on hydroelectricity, at least until the failure to address climate change destroys all of the Alpine glaciers, which it is doing. As an indication of the state of electricity in Austria, they announced a plan to reopen a coal plant that they shut when Putin stopped selling them dangerous natural gas: 'Unimaginable': Austria prepares to reopen coal power station.
The adjective applied by the journalist is hardly accurate. It takes no imagination to recognize reality: If anyone studies the carbon intensity of Europe regularly, as I do, one can see that the victory of the fear and ignorance perpetrated by antinukes - to my mind the intellectual equivalents of antivaxxers - leads to the embrace of dangerous fossil fuels.
As of this writing, a Sunday, at the Electricity Map, accessed at 12/17/2023 at 11:28 EST (US), the carbon intensity of Germany is 362 grams CO2/kWh, that of Austria 208 grams CO2/kWh, compared to France's 34 grams CO2/kWh. In the "percent talk" used by advocates of so called "renewable energy" to obscure its uselessness in addressing climate change, Germany's carbon intensity is 1065% higher than that of France, and Austria's 611% higher than that of France.
There were a lot of protests in Austria with respect to the Temelin reactors in the neighboring Czech Republic, which led to some Czech humorists, ten or so years ago, to found a website called Start Zentendorf. (The original website can be found by googling, the link to which I found it does not translate to DU.)
The Zwentendorf nuclear reactor in Austria was completed but never operated as the result of a narrowly approved plebiscite in 1978, in which the Austrians voted, with less than 51% of the vote, not to operate the plant. The humorists of course made the correct point that this was basically a decision to kill people with the use of fossil fuels, although the remarks about the fact that coal burning releases uranium aerosols to the air - which is a true statement - is somewhat disingenuous with respect to the claim that "Closed Zwentendorf" is making Europe radioactive.
Over in the Ennui and Excuses forum, one can locate a post by a fossil fuel salesperson, working to greenwash fossil fuels as "hydrogen," carrying on insipidly about the releases of tritiated water at the Fukushima plant, which has been going on for several months now, this without producing a single death or other environmental consequence. The coal and gas burned to power computers around the world to carry on about this nonevent - a nonevent in practical concerns - has killed more people than the tritiated water in the Pacific ocean ever will.
Graphic Account of the Fukushima Tritium Releases Now Underway: Science.
Fossil fuel advocates and promoters have a long history of opposing nuclear energy, and often use disingenuous rhetoric to obscure what they are doing.
The paper under discussion hints, albeit with some obscuration, on the real consequences of worrying about tritium, which is to generate fear and ignorance that kills people, since nuclear energy saves lives.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
That is at least how I, somewhat generously, interpret the bolded remarks - my bold - in the introduction to the paper.
...hence cause socioeconomic damage...
Opposing nuclear energy, when successful, kills people. Period. No debate. As I often remark, nuclear energy does not need to be risk free to be superior to everything else, it only needs to be superior to everything else, which it is.
Tritium is a low energy radionuclide, a pure beta emitter, and is widely used in research settings. As a pure beta emitter, radiation from it is not very penetrating and the health consequences, if they exist at all, are trivial, particular with respect to the huge death toll associated with fossil fuel waste, aka, "air pollution" and "climate change." Environmental concentrations of this nuclide peaked in 1963, around the time that the open air testing of thermonuclear weapons ceased. It has been falling since 1963. I note that 1963 was well before major commercial nuclear power plants became relatively common.
Tian, X.; Gong, Z.; Fu, L.; You, D.; Li, F.; Wang, Y.; Chen, Z.; Zhou, Y. Determination of Groundwater Recharge Mechanism Based on Environmental Isotopes in Chahannur Basin. Water 2023, 15, 180.
The note in the full text of the paper under discussion says tritium concentrations will rise, which is not clear to me as the nuclide is sensitive to Bateman equation type secular equilibrium. In any case, this is trivial. In the absence of a thermonuclear war or the development of fusion energy - which remains unlikely in any time frame that will matter - tritium concentrations remain trivial.
The authors work in a nuclear facility, the Triga research reactor zone. The Triga reactor was developed in the 1960's, inspired by the suggestion of Edwin Teller, and designed by Freeman Dyson.
When I asked Dyson about this bit of history when I met him, he denied that his work was all that essential: To him the design was fairly obvious. He modestly attributed the major development work to Massoud T. Simnad, a materials scientist to whom Dyson referred as a "chemist." This made me proud to be a chemist.
The authors of the paper, which again, can be read in full for free, measure tritium concentrations around their very old small reactor. If Austria ever becomes a sensible nation and responds favorably to the "demands" of the Czech humorists, and opens Zwentendorf - in other words if the Austrian public ever becomes concerned with the fate of humanity and the health of neighboring Europeans - they will almost certainly find lower - and even more trivial - concentrations of tritiated water in a large scale nuclear reactor that will be operating to save human lives.
Have a nice Sunday afternoon.