Iranian authorities are reporting no signs of off-site radiation or contamination in the wake of U.S. attacks on three of the country’s nuclear sites. […] That’s according to a statement put out by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Sunday. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the agency’s Director General, said that “as of this time, we don’t expect that there will be any health consequences for people or the environment outside the targeted sites.”
Oh good, jolly fucking day, no chernobyl. Send trump to the Hague still, fucking criminal.
Good, I guess. Also, fuck Trump.
These are enrichment sites. They wouldn’t release radiation.
I wouldn’t care about radiation. I’d care about aresolized uranium hexafluoride though. A toxic acidic reactive heavy metal gas? Delicious. It’s more dangerous than weapons grade uranium by a mile.
It won’t spread very far due to its density though. I wouldn’t like to be in the enrichment room itself if the bombing did rupture some active centrafuges but outside should be fine.
They often keep that shit in tanks outside, particularly depleted(figuring out what to do with depleted uranium hexafluoride is often a challenge and the US has a truly staggering amount of full tanks just sitting around waiting to leak). Once it hits air you get hydrofluoric acid gas which will spread thanks to the explosion and will kill you in small concentrations(as low as 30 ppm). It’s awful and blowing it up to spread it everywhere is even more awful. The only thing worse would be bombing a purex plutonium reprocessing plant. That is just as toxic in different ways but you can make the tanks go prompt critical thanks to changing it’s geometry and it has actual fission products you can spread around. Those reprocessing plants were a main plank in how north Korea got their bomb.
Enrichment means that they bring in some material with some amount of radioactivity, and they separate it into portions with more radioactivity and less radioactivity. At any given time materials with all three levels of radioactivity would be there, and could be released by a bombing.
*Three levels is a gross simplification, of course.
If theheadline is true, that might mean that the “bunker busters” didn’t reach the facility, but instead just shifted part of the mountain above it.
Uranium 235 isn’t very radioactive in the absence of a neutron flux. It’s fissile which means it will undergo a reaction when it absorbs a neutron and its fission products are radioactive but the biggest risk from handling uranium (below a critical mass) is its chemical toxicity rather than radioactivity (and that applies just as much to the non-fissile U238)
Thanks for the clarification. TIL!
Which means there was nothing to worry about there?
No. First, even enriched uranium is not particularly radioactive without human intervention (with a half-life of 704 million years). Second, the uranium stockpile may be buried under a mountain of rubble, rather than dispersed by the explosion. Third, who knows if the Iranian government is telling the truth; they have good reason to claim that their stockpile is intact even if it isn’t.
Uranium is, however, chemically toxic.
And it’s possible to remotely sense releases or radionuclides, assuming anyone with that capability is inclined to tell the truth.
I’ve read that the UN atomic energy commission has also said that they haven’t measured any increases in radiation, so it doesn’t look likely to me that Iran is hiding anything.
I also saw an article where they showed satellite images indicating that Iran may have evacuated a lot of materiel from Fordow shortly before the strikes.
