Is a Half-life Better Than No Life?

How can something have half a life? In biology, something is either dead or alive. In the world of rocks and other non-living things, there is such a thing as having a half-life; elements that are radioactive have half-lives. 

An atom is the smallest form of an element such as gold, iodine or uranium. An atom is like a tiny solar system with a centre called a "nucleus" and tiny planets called "electrons" flying around it. Radioactive atoms change into other atoms; the rate at which they change is called a “half-life”. When there is a bunch of radioactive atoms together, the speed at which the element becomes something else is always the same for that particular element. 

The most common iodine released from a nuclear power plant accident, iodine-131, has a half-life of about eight days - 8.0197 days to be exact. Half of its radioactivity will be gone as half of the iodine changes into xenon in eight days. Half of the remaining iodine-131 changes in the next eight days and so on; it takes ten half-lives before the radioactive element is gone – so, for iodine-131, it takes eighty days (10 x 8.0197 = 80.197 days) before it has all changed into xenon-131. Xenon-131 cannot change back to Iodine-131.
In fact, since the change always involves the loss of atomic energy, however small, it is called "decay".

Half lives can be extremely short - iodine-109 has a half-life of 93.5 microseconds. That's short! One microsecond is one millionth of a second. On the other hand, iodine-129 has a half life of 15.7 million years.

Iodine-109 and iodine-129 are different isotopes of iodine. Isotopes are different kinds of the same element just as a terrier and a German shepherd are different kinds of dogs. There are 37 known isotopes of iodine; almost all of them products of nuclear nuclear reactors. Iodine-127 is the only iodine that is not radioactive. It is the one that is essential for healthy thyroids for healthy people. It is the one that should be taken immediately after a nuclear accident. The only other natural iodine is iodine-129, found normally in nature in very small amounts.

If iodine has an atomic weight of 131 and xenon has an atomic weight of 131, how do we know which is which? The atomic number, based on the number of protons in the nucleus, is different. Iodine’s atomic number is 53 while xenon has 54 protons in its nucleus. 
Each proton has a positive electrical charge. To maintain neutrality, the number of electrons in orbit around the nucleus will be the same.  All of the characteristics – colour, chemical reactivity, boiling point, freezing point and so on – of an element depend upon the number of protons in the nucleus. The atomic number is another way to name an element.

All of the iodines have 53 protons in their nuclei. The electrons flying around the nucleus are considered to be weightless. What makes the weights different (109, 131, 127, etc) are the number of neutrons in the nucleus. A neutron is "glue" to hold the nucleus together - it is made up of an electron and a proton so has the same weight as a proton. When iodine decays into xenon, it loses one of the electrons from the nucleus (and some energy). This leaves one more proton in the nucleus than before the decay. The atomic number goes from 53 to 54. Iodine has become a different element!

So, is a half life better than no life? Half lives are useful for dating the age of the universe, dead bodies, and for some industrial and medical purposes. In those cases, a half-life is a good thing. However, the vast majority of radioactive elements have entered the world through atomic bomb testing and nuclear power plant emissions (or accidents). Their half-lives are part of environmental pollution. Half-lives are not good things.

Remembering D-Day: It could be Nuclear this time

And learn from our past. Could the terrible loss of life and environmental destruction that was World War II been prevented? If we don‘t learn from our past, we are bound to repeat our mistakes; honouring the battle of D-Day and the men who lost their lives should include  answering the question, “how could it have been prevented?”

My aunt lost two sons in the war; she spent almost a decade depressively in mourning. She spoke resentfully of people who got rich during the war while she lost her children. 

So as the US and Russia face off over the Ukraine, what could we learn from World War II?

When someone, a leader or a country says that it wants world domination or implies that it is somehow “above the law”, they mean it! Hitler said it. Now the US says it. 

US exceptionalism was recognized as fact in the eighteenth century; unfortunately the more recent US leadership have mistaken exceptionalism for superiority. Paul Bolt, on taking his position as US representative to the UN said (and I paraphrase) that there wasn’t really a United Nations, the world was governed by one super-power and everyone else had to go along. In fact, the failure to understand the nature of US exceptionalism has lead to universal blindness about the invasions and bombings of more than seven different countries in the last century, the building of military bases in more than 25 countries, the surrounding of China, Russia and the Korean Peninsula – and acceptance of US hegemony at the UN Security Council. Finally, the United States does believe that it is above the law; it does not accept the existence of the International Criminal Court.

The US wealthy need have wars. They even support the use of drones so the sales of arms will continue but US citizens don’t actually have to get killed. Obama has made threats to Iran, Syria and now Russia – none of which have threatened the US. So the US is on a war path.

Why do we (the rest of the world) stand silent?

1. Denial:  We can’t believe that war will actually happen. Chamberlain so wanted to believe Hitler that he proudly referred to the “Munich Agreement” of 1938 which “gave” Czechoslovakia to Hitler, as a “Peace agreement”.

We can’t believe that there would be unscrupulous people in the arms industry who would lobby for war for their own profit – of course, that’s not what they say.  They say that the war is for “education for women”, saving “babies from being thrown out of their incubators” or “to establish democracy”.

We don't face the fact that the sales of arms is considered ethical; we can’t conceive that the arms profiteers don't realize that they carry a responsibility for arming terrorists, underground militia, or despotic governments – or draw a line between their profits and the deaths of very ordinary people.

2. Personal Gain: This played a role in the delay with which the US entered WWII. It plays a role among nations currently allied with the US; disagreeing with the US might mean imposition of some new sanctions, some passport hassle or trade issue. Additionally, of course, other countries may have arms industries equally eager to see a war break out. Canada could become very wealthy if a major war occurred in Eastern Europe.

3. Bad-mouthing the US: No one wants to be labeled as “anti-American” partly because the term “American” is equally applicable to Mexicans, Central and South Americans and partly because mostly we like the citizens of the United States even as their government doesn’t represent them on the world stage.

Even so, the United States is behaving like a big bully; it must accept the same rules as everyone else. Why is it in the Ukraine in the first place? Why is it leading the inflammatory remarks towards Russia? Why cannot world leaders become civilized and behave like adults, sit down at a table and start negotiating a peace process. It is the US that refuses to meet with Russia.

The fact that Russia and the United States both have nuclear weapons means that no one will be left unaffected if war occurs - we cannot afford to just watch the process - we need to be vocal. 

Taking out the Garbage: Nuclear Waste Disposal

“Let’s just put it back into the ground – isn’t that where it came from in the first place?”

The problem with radioactive waste is that no one knows what to do with it. “Spent fuel” is thousands of times more radioactive than before it entered the reactor as fuel.  As the “spent fuel” decays, it produces gasses and heat – the build-up of either can cause explosions. No one knows exactly how many new radioactive elements are in the waste nor do they know exactly how the decay will proceed. Radioactive decay is like a river flowing in one direction that cannot be stopped or dammed nor have its course changed. Each element eventually will reach a stable status, in the case of radioactive waste, about 250,000 years from now or more.

The fact that the nuclear industry has been looking for solutions to the waste problem for over fifty years doesn’t mean that they have found a solution. It means that they have done a lot of looking. Currently the Canadian "solution" for low and intermediate level waste is an "out of sight, out of mind" solution, a “Deep Geologic Repository” (DGR) which the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) claims will be monitored for a hundred years.  NWMO is continuing its search for a site for high level waste.

NWMO reassuringly states that waste will be safely surrounded by bedrock – seemingly unaware that bedrock is no longer bedrock when it is broken into and chopped up into caverns.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, after twenty years of preparation, was opened in 1999 to store nuclear weapons waste for 10,000 years. A mere fifteen years into operation, in February 2014, it spewed radioactivity into the atmosphere from storage areas located 2,130 feet underground.  Twenty-one workers were contaminated with plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,000 years) and americium-242 (half life of 141 years). Other workers were hampered in their search for the leak by the high radioactivity in the caverns.

The problem with a plan, any plan to contain the waste, is that radiation changes the atoms with which it comes in contact. Gamma rays can bump electrons out of nuclei turning an atom of iron or steel into something else. Alpha and beta particles can be absorbed by an atom of nickel turning it into something else – perhaps a radioactive gas? In any case, no container can be guaranteed to outlast the waste itself.

Since any waste depository will have the same result: unmonitored waste decaying its way through its containers to eventually contaminate the environment, in 1995 the US National Research Council introduced the concept of “Rolling Stewardship”, essentially continuing to do what is currently done but in a formal manner. Nuclear waste is monitored in above the ground containers, the responsibility for which is passed from one generation to another. The waste is immediately accessible should leaks occur but also in the event that new technology be found that would either harness its potential or somehow “neutralize” it. Generations of jobs would be assured. The problem of leaving a detailed message for our descendants – what language, what signs, etc – would be solved.  (more at http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/050/documents/p17520/95904E.pdf)

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization calls their plan “Adaptive Phase Management,” an admission that all is not known. It sounds a lot like “Rolling Stewardship”, adapting as they go along.

There are no examples of “Rolling Stewardship” just as there are not examples of successful Deep Geologic Repositories. As time goes on, one by one the DGR’s fail, the Carlsbad event being the most recent. Without planning to do so, rolling stewardship is happening. Already the generation that made the waste (and benefited from the nuclear power) has bequeathed it to another generation. It is time to quit wasting money looking for a DGR, admit that we are going to have to continue to monitor it in site and call it what it is - garbage for our descendants. What a way to be remembered!