Stop the Hogs!

Wal-Mart's glow-in-the-dark mystery

From: Gordon Edwards
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2009 11:24 AM
Subject: Toronto Star: Wal-Mart's glow-in-the-dark mystery

Friends:

Years ago it was recognized that the enormous build-up of tritium inside CANDU reactors was limiting the time that workers could work in areas that become contaminated with tritium. Tritium also contaminates the drinking water of nearby communities, posing health dangers to those who drink this water chronically. Tritium is notoriously difficult to contain, so it escapes into the environment in the form of radioactive steam and radioactive water effluents.

It cannot be removed from drinking water by water treatment plants.

As a partial attempt to limit these problems, a Tritium Removal Plant was built at Darlington, Ontario. It is designed to extract radioactive tritium from the non-radioactive heavy water that is used as a moderator in all CANDU reactors (and also in the NRU reactor at Chalk River).

Unfortunately, the decision was then made to try to market this unwanted radioactive waste byproduct of CANDU reactors. Two commercial enterprises, SRB Technologies at Pembroke Ontario and Shield Source in Peterborough Ontario, take the recovered tritium from the Tritium Removal Plant and incorporate the radioactive waste into a number of commercial products, including exit signs that do not require electricity because they are self-illuminating due to the radio-active disintegrations of the tritium atoms inside.

Several problems arise: (1) the main market for tritium is military, as it is used to increase the explosive power of nuclear weapons; (2) it has a 13-year half-life, which means the self-illuminating signs get dimmer and dimmer and may end up in landfills where the radioactive tritium becomes a source of radioactive contamination; (3) if the exit signs break druing a fire or for any other reason, firefighters or innocent bystanders can be exposed to quite a lot of radioactivity. Unfortunately our nuclear regulatory agency seems asleep at the switch when it comes to tritium....

This article details some problems that have recently come to light....

Gordon Edwards.

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Wal-Mart's glow-in-the-dark mystery

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/587906

Retail giant can't account for 15,800 of its exit signs that contain a potentially dangerous radioactive gas

Toronto Star, February 15, 2009 Tyler Hamilton

It began in late 2007 as a routine audit. Retail giant Wal-Mart noticed that some exit signs at the company's stores and warehouses had gone missing.

As the audit spread across Wal-Mart's U.S. operations, the mystery thickened. Stores from Arkansas to Washington began reporting missing signs. They numbered in the hundreds at first, then the thousands. Last month Wal-Mart disclosed that about 15,800 of its exit signs – a stunning 20 per cent of its total inventory – are lost, missing, or otherwise unaccounted for at 4,500 facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico.

Poor housekeeping, certainly, but what's the big deal?

In a word: radiation.

The signs contain tritium gas, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Tritium glows when it interacts with phosphor particles, a phenomenon that has led to the creation of glow-in-the-dark emergency exit signs.

It's estimated there are more than 2 million tritium-based exit signs in use across North America.

It turns out that Ontario-based companies SRB Technologies (Canada) Inc. of Pembroke and Shield Source Inc. of Peterborough have sold the lion's share of these signs, which use tritium produced as a by-product from the operation of Canadian-made Candu nuclear reactors.

The health effects of tritium exposure continue to be a hot topic of debate. It's not strong enough to penetrate the skin, and in low quantities regulators and industry groups say tritium is safe. But when inhaled or ingested it can cause permanent changes to cells and has been linked to genetic abnormalities, developmental and reproductive problems and other health issues such as cancer.

More: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/587906

February 15th, 2009

Dear Readers,

Wal-Mart has lost 15,800 tritium-based emergency-exit signs.

That's enough tritium to make more than a few dirty bombs. In fact, you can pretty easily make 15,800 dirty bombs with it. Okay, dirty grenades. Dirty little land mines. Poison gas bombs.

Most of these missing signs are probably being properly used, albeit in improper places -- as exit signs elsewhere, to comply with various fire safety laws. But some of them are undoubtedly being disposed of improperly, too.

No one knows where they all are. The Toronto Star published a very informative article today, with lots of good information about tritium generally (http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/587906 ). But its author has only written that tritium is "potentially dangerous."

Tritium -- radioactive hydrogen -- is very, very dangerous.

Hydrogen, element #1 in the Periodic Table, is the most common element in our bodies, on earth, and in the universe. But tritium has an extra two neutrons in its nucleus, in addition to the single proton all hydrogen has (some hydrogen has one neutron, which is called deuterium and is also stable, like normal hydrogen, which is the lightest, smallest element, and normally has no neutrons in its nucleus).

When tritium decays, on average 12.3 years after it happens to be created, it shoots off a beta particle, which is a high-speed electron. High speed means "a significant fraction of the speed of light." Beta particles are extremely dangerous little bullets, mainly because they have a charge of one negative electron volt.

Initially -- when it first escapes the nucleus of the radioactive hydrogen atom (which becomes a stable isotope of helium, with two protons and one neutron) -- the "beta particle" (the high-speed electron) is actually relatively harmless. It is very light compared to atoms, and very small, and moving so fast that its electrical charge does not have TIME as it passes things, to have much effect on anything it passes.

It is only when a beta particle SLOWS DOWN that it starts to hang around long enough to cause significant trouble. The slower the beta particle is when it passes things, the more TIME it has to knock other electrons off of atoms, thus ionizing them, or to spin the atoms of delicate protein molecules into unknown and useless configurations (perhaps these damaged proteins were "signal molecules" that control millions of other molecules in your body). All beta decay particles are dangerous, but the fact that tritium's beta particle is described by pro-nukers as "low-energy" doesn't make it less dangerous than any other beta decay particle.

Tritium is not merely "potentially dangerous." Tritium is one of the most dangerous substances on earth. It requires about 13,000,000,000 (13 billion) gallons of water to dilute the tritium released from a typical American nuclear power plant every year (about 1,000 Curies) to the current (outrageously too high) EPA standard of 20,000 picoCuries per liter of drinking water. Canadian CANDU reactors release about twenty times more tritium than American reactors, and could not operate under the tighter U.S. standards. If an American nuclear power plant releases even a gram (10,000 Curies) of tritium in a single year, they'd probably need a special permit (they'd get it).

And yet, we are told by pro-nukers only that tritium has "a low-energy beta decay" and that it is a "natural isotope already found on earth." They'll tell us that it is released only in "minute" quantities by nuclear power plants "during their routine operation." But every plant has years with excessive tritium releases -- perhaps 10 times the normal annual amount. No member of the public will be told, and the news media will not be issued a press release. Some of the data might eventually appear in some of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obscure, but publicly-accessible databases, usually months later, but the actual quantity of tritium released will only be estimated, because, inevitably, gauges don't work, records are lost, calibration wasn't done within the proper time limit, and, of course -- THE NEEDLES PEGGED DURING THE EVENT.

It happens all the time.

A better way to describe tritium than to call it "harmless" (as pro-nukers actually have been quoted in the papers as saying) would be to say this: Tritium is radioactive hydrogen, the most pervasive of all radioactive isotopes created in nuclear fission reactors. Tritium is rarely found in nature, but the world is flooded with it every day by nuclear reactors, especially the CANDU reactors. The nuclear industry knows there is NO WAY to prevent the release of most of this radioactive hydrogen, so they call its radioactive decay a "low energy beta decay" so the victim thinks it is harmless. It's 'low' only compared to other beta decays created by other fission products of reactors. Its energy can (and will) break thousands of bonds in your body. It's not 'low' energy at all compared to your biological structures (or to steel structures, for that matter), but the industry MUST lie about 'tritium' (radioactive hydrogen) to operate. Otherwise it would have to shut down. So it lies, without hesitation and in most cases, without the pro-nuker even understanding that something with a 'low energy beta decay' is actually MORE dangerous per unit of energy released! They really don't even know that. But ignorance does not excuse criminal behavior.

In the Star article, one spokesperson for Wal-Mart claims they will no longer use tritium-based exit signs, but another spokesperson waters that claim down significantly. Part of the problem is that fire regulations require self-lighted exit signs but don't also state that those signs must NOT be made with tritium. Ignorance about tritium pervades (although the spokesperson from Greenpeace Canada, quoted in the article, is eloquent).

When tritium escapes into the environment, it cannot be smelled or tasted, or seen. Tritium usually binds with oxygen, creating tritiated water -- "HTO" (and, very rarely, T2O). Different isotopes of an element are indistinguishable by biological systems (and very difficult to isolate). Tritium also binds with many other elements. No matter how tritium gets out of the reactor and into your body, it becomes part of the biosphere's inventory of poisons, which kills and debilitates, without compensation for the victims, or punishment for the perpetrators.

All countries which operate nuclear reactors turn a blind eye to the devastation caused by tritium. They have to, to continue releasing this deadly poison which they MUST do to operate. So, tritium's very limited service as a diagnostic tool in hospitals is touted, although in fact, tritium is NOT used if an alternative can be found, precisely because it is so "wicked."

Regulations regarding tritium are lax, enforcement is lax, permissible standards are lax, proper measurements of existing tritium "hot spots" are lax, and in every way, reasonable concern for the protection of life, especially infants, babies, fetuses, zygotes, sperm and egg, etc., is very, VERY lax.

Releasing tritium into the environment IS murder.

Sincerely

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

My 2007 essay on tritium:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environ ... tium/2007/
ItsAllAboutTheDNA.htm

My 2006 essay (includes a glossary and some background):
http://animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2006/
EPATritiumStandard.htm

My first tritium essay (2004):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2004/
TritiumComments%2020041223.htm

My Animated Periodic Table of the Elements:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/elearni ... cTable.swf

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