In a rough transcript of the above video; Dr. Caldicott MD (a pediatrician) reports that radioactive tritium is highly carcinogenic, which means it is causing cancers. The cancer rate goes up in children the closer they live to nuclear power plants. These nuclear plants regularly release all kinds of cancer causing radioactive materials, including argon, tritium and many others.
She says we are all physicians on a dying planet. We need to explain to Joe six pack and Mrs Brown what is going on. The average person does not understand that we can all be vaporized in a nuclear war today, with no chance of saying anything about it.
“Radiological research has found a correlation between tritium and cumulative genetic injury. (21) There was found in successive generations a reduction in relative brain weight, reduction in litter size, and increased reabsorption of embryos. Correlations have been found in epidemiological research between tritium and Down’s Syndrome. Associations have also been found between low-level radiation and Down’s Syndrome.” http://www.ipsecinfo.org/Tritium.htm
Just like plutonium, “tritium is essential to the construction of boosted-fission nuclear weapons. A boosted weapon contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the gases being heated and compressed by the detonation of a plutonium or uranium device. The D-T mixture is heated to a temperature and pressure such that thermonuclear fusion occurs. This process releases a flood of 14 MeV neutrons which cause additional fissions in the device, greatly increasing its efficiency.” Nuclear plants are nothing more than nuclear weapon production factories. http://www.wcpeace.org/tritium.htm
NASA is monitoring radioactive tritium as well. They say that; “radioactive tritium became a perfect marker for tracking ocean water. Scientists sampling North Atlantic water found that tritium released into the atmosphere before the 1962 nuclear test ban treaty, mixed downward by 1973. By 1980, the same tritium had moved into deep areas off Florida. The water had taken about 20 years to travel 3000 miles (4800 km) through the sea at an average speed of less than half a mile a day, about half the speed of a snail §.”
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/oceanography_currents_3.html
“Radioactive and cancer causing Tritium has leaked from three-quarters of United States commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.
And the number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licences of more reactors across the US.
Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to US Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of AP’s year-long examination of safety issues at ageing nuclear power plants.
Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard – sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.
While most leaks have been found within plant boundaries, some have migrated offsite, but none is known to have reached public water supplies.
At three sites – two in Illinois and one in Minnesota – leaks have contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes but not at levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding a bay on the Atlantic Ocean.
The US Environmental Protection Agency says tritium should measure no more than 20,000 picocuries per litre in drinking water.
It also estimates seven of 200,000 people who drink such water for decades will develop cancer.
The tritium leaks have also spurred doubts among independent engineers about the reliability of emergency safety systems at the 104 nuclear reactors situated on the 65 sites.
However, federal and industry officials say the radioactive tritium leaks pose no health or safety threat. Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute, said impacts were “next to zero”.
Corrosion has occurred for decades along the hard-to-reach, wet underbellies of the reactors – generally built in a burst of construction during the 1960s and 1970s. An industry document said 38 leaks from underground piping had been found between 2000 and 2009 with nearly two-thirds of those being reported during the past five years.
Subsurface water not only rusts underground pipes but attacks other buried components, including electrical cables that carry signals to control operations.
A 2008 NRC staff memo reported industry data showing 83 failed cables between 21 and 30 years of service – but only 40 within their first 10 years of service.
AP found the leaks sometimes go undiscovered for years. Many of the pipes or tanks have been patched, and contaminated soil and water have been removed in some places. Mistakes and defective material have contributed to some leaks but corrosion is the main cause. And, safety engineers say, the rash of leaks suggest nuclear operators are hard put to maintain the decades-old systems.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September that more than 400 known radioactive leaks of all kinds of substances had occurred over the history of the US industry.
Nuclear engineer Bill Corcoran said that since much of the piping was inaccessible and carried cooling water, the worry was if the pipes leaked there could be a meltdown.
Mario Bonaca, a former member of the NRC’s advisory committee on Reactor Safeguards, said: “Any leak is a problem because you have the leak itself – but it also says something about the piping. Evidently something has to be done.”
An NRC taskforce on tritium leaks last year dismissed the danger to public health. Instead, its report called the leaks “a challenging issue from the perspective of communications around environmental protection” but admitted they had “impacted public confidence”.
The industry has also been trying to stop the leaks by drilling more monitoring wells and replacing old piping. So far, 66 reactors have been approved for 20-year extensions to their original 40-year licenses, with 16 more extensions pending.
Regulators and industry have also worked in concert to loosen safety standards to keep the plants operating.” Source; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo1Kqez3fUU
What does Radioactive Tritium Decay Into?
Wikipedia reports that Tritium decays into antineutrons. An antineutron is the antiparticle of the neutron with symbol n. It differs from the neutron only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign. It has the same mass as the neutron, and no net electric charge, but has opposite baryon number (+1 for neutron, −1 for the antineutron). This is because the antineutron is composed of antiquarks, while neutrons are composed of quarks. In particular, the antineutron consists of one up antiquark and two down antiquarks.
Since the antineutron is electrically neutral, it cannot easily be observed directly. Instead, the products of its annihilation with ordinary matter are observed. In theory, a free antineutron should decay into anantiproton, a positron and a neutrino in a process analogous to the beta decay of free neutrons. There are theoretical proposals that neutron–antineutron oscillations exist, a process which would occur only if there is an undiscovered physical process that violates baryon number conservation.[1][2][3]
The antineutron was discovered in proton–proton collisions at the Bevatron (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) by Bruce Cork in 1956, one year after the antiproton was discovered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-neutron
Radioactive Tritium decays into anti-neutrons… this may not be something people understand, but our bet is that the consequences are not healthy for human beings, and that it is more than likely anti-life.
Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, which allows it to readily bind to hydroxyl radicals, forming tritiated water (HTO), and to carbon atoms. It is a beta radiation emitter.
Radioactive Tritium Regulatory limits
The legal limits for radioactive Tritium in drinking water vary from country-to-country and from continent-to-continent. Some figures are given below.
European Union: 100 Bq/l
United States: 740 Bq/L (Safe Drinking Water Act)
Canada: 7,000 Bq/l
World Health Organization: 10,000 Bq/l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
Radioactive Tritium Paint, Vials and Lights
GTLS or Tritium Vials are generic names for devices that use Radioactive Tritium to glow without any external power sourc. It may be present in target indicators, business signs, rifle sights and other applications such as aircraft instrument panels.
Radium and Tritium Paint
Radium was used as luminous paint until the 1960’s when severe health consequences were ‘discovered’ among workers applying the radioactive paint to watch dials. Then Tritium was substituted for Radium, and it was used from the 1960’s until the 1990’s.
Health Issues
Breathing in or ingesting the dust from tritium or radium containing items may result in bone diseases and many other forms of cancer. See the Radium girls article link below.
Radium Girls & Radium Dials; Ottowa Illinois, Death City; via A Green Road Blog
While in the stratosphere (post-test period), the tritium interacted with and oxidized to water molecules and was present in much of the rapidly produced rainfall. Most of the bomb tritiated water (HTO) throughout the atmosphere can enter the ocean through the following processes: a) precipitation, b) vapor exchange, and c) river runoff . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
In a 1998 study, tritium concentrations in surface seawater and atmospheric water vapor (10 meters above the surface) were sampled at the following locations: the Sulu Sea, the Fremantle Bay, the Bay of Bengal, the Penang Bay, and the Strait of Malacca.[22] Results indicated that the tritium concentration in surface seawater was highest at the Fremantle Bay (approximately 0.40 Bq/liter), which could be accredited to the mixing of runoff of freshwater from nearby lands due to large amounts found in coastal waters.[22] Typically, lower concentrations were found between 35 and 45 degrees south latitude and near the equator. Results also indicated that (in general) tritium has decreased over the years (up to 1997) due to the physical decay of bomb tritium in the Indian Ocean. As for water vapor, the tritium concentration was approximately one order of magnitude greater than surface seawater concentrations (ranging from 0.46 to 1.15 Bq/liter).[22]
The impacts of the nuclear fallout were even felt in the United States throughout the Mississippi River System. In a 2004 study, several rivers were taken into account during the examination of tritium concentrations (starting in the 1960s) throughout the Mississippi River Basin: Ohio River (largest input to the Mississippi River flow), Missouri River, and Arkansas River.[24] The largest tritium concentrations were found in 1963 at all the sampled locations throughout these rivers and correlate well with the peak concentrations in precipitation due to the nuclear bomb tests in 1962. The overall highest concentrations occurred in the Missouri River (1963) and were greater than 1,200 TU while the lowest concentrations were found in the Arkansas River (never greater than 850 TU and less than 10 TU in the mid-1980s).[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
As for the mass flux of tritium through the main stem of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, data indicated that approximately 780 grams of tritium has flowed out of the River and into the Gulf between 1961 and 1997.[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
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Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous;via A Green Road Blog
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/primer-in-art-of-deception-cult-of.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/14-nuclear-reactors-at-4-japan-sites.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/tepco-loses-insurance-coverage-for-all.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/hanford-lethal-and-leaking-race-to.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-happens-to-nuclear-waste-in-your.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/04/radioactive-nuclear-spent-fuel-storage.html
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/03/anti-nuclear-music-and-songs-around.html
Anti-Nuclear Poetry ByOr-Well; via A Green Road Blog
AGR Free Press 