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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, which released the isotope into soils and rivers in northeastern China.

The first part is more or less obvious, but I somehow fail to imagine how nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe can affect soils and rivers in any part of China (never mind the northeastern part)?

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Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants release iodine into the atmosphere. The prevailing wind direction at European latitudes is west to east, so when the iodine comes back down in rain, it'll likely do so over Russia (emptying into the Arctic Ocean), Central Asia (emptying into the Caspian Sea and various lakes) or Northeast Asia (emptying into the nortwestern Pacific Ocean, including the Yellow Sea.) This paper has an illustration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

It only makes sense if it means Russia/USSR doing the tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing on the Far East but rather strange to call it "in Europe".

Can't see any other country in Europe which could've caused it from that statement.

More likely central Asia which is where the USSR conducted most of its tests.

France and the UK did theirs overseas. Asian culprits might be India (unlikely), North Korea (unlikely), Pakistan (unlikely), Indonesia (unlikely) and PRC (highly likely).

This Chinese study says it was dispersed through global atmospheric circulation and mentions the liquid and gaseous discharge from nuclear facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) as sources. Russian tests are mentioned as well but they are apparently not the sole or primary source.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

This news shows the progresss by 2019, but couldn't find more recent updates.

https://www.nucnet.org/news/plans-progress-for-orano-to-buil...

This is the problem with the "nuclear is completely safe" people: there's only one biosphere, and anything you put in it eventually ends up very thinly spread everywhere.

I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.

The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.

Agreed, “perfectly safe” is nonsensical. Even wind turbines aren't “perfectly safe” either: https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/daring-rescue-of-enercon-w...

"10 people being killed by nuclear power is a tragedy. 5 million people being killed by coal mining and burning is a statistic." - Josef Stalin

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