Extracting Radioactive Salt from Chernobyl Blueberries
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- Опубликовано: 28 июн 2024
- In this video we extract radioactive salts containing cesium-137 from blueberries grown near chernobyl.
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Cesium - 137 is a radioactive isotope and one of the major components of nuclear fission waste. The various nuclear weapons tests and nuclear reactor accidents has spread detectable amounts all over the world. I obtained some blueberries that originally came from europe and have detectable cesium content. but i wanted to quantify it accurately so to perform the analysis i concentrated the caesium into a few grams of salt by "digesting" the blueberries with sulfuric acid. The acid completely destroys all organic matter and leaves behind the sulfate salts of any remaining inorganic elements including caesium. Using the built-in detection and analysis functions of my radiacode i was able to determine the activity was 150Bq. Since i started with a 60g sample, this meant the bulk activity was 2500Bq/kg. For comparison, the maximum allowed activity for food in most countries is 100Bq/kg, so the blueberries exceeded that by 25 times.
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Anyone know where i can get any other foods or sources high in caesium-137? I'm trying to acquire more and the guy i got the blueberries from doesn't have anymore.
Try grocers in the Chernobyl area.
I’ve seen that some dried mushrooms collected from Europe have been shown to have cesium contamination.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imleria_badia
As I understand it, mushrooms from the area around Chernobyl are a good source of radionuclides. Since the contamination tends to be strongest at the surface, and the mycelium of mushrooms is generally quite shallow, they do a good job of concentrating surface contamination, when compared to plants with their deeper root structures.
West Coast strawberries.
To avoid anyone thinking otherwise, the "exhaust" from the cooling towers is nothing but water vapor. Unless something goes terribly wrong, no radiation leaves the reactor vessel.
Replying to boost this!
As he said, H3 and C14 leave as radioactive exhaust.
@@anluifbthey do in a burning substance, and maybe you weren't suggesting this, but to be clear there is nothing but water vapor escaping through those towers. Those towers cool the secondary cooling system, which is heated through a heat exchange with the primary. This steam has never been exposed to any radiation.
@@EnkiduAk When he's doing the sulfuric acid digestion, the water vapor and CO2 coming out of his reflux column are technically slightly radioactive.
@@anluifb ah, I understand now. I thought you might have been talking about the steam leaving the cooling towers.
Thought this was a NileRed video at first with a video title like this. Was pleasantly surprised it was you instead :D
same!!! i’m so excited to watch this lol
NileRed would eat the blueberries then extract the cesium from his pee 😂
NR is far, far better than NR
Nile hasn't done a video this interesting in years, maybe even in his entire life.
Most stuff he makes is just goofy.
Same
"2500 Bq/kg not great, not terrible"
Schrödinger: "Nice."
More like "curate's egg" it is good in parts.
Great stuff! I'd be interested in the protein analysis -- maybe test dog or cat food to see if their claims are correct.
>Chernobyl
>Nuclear weapons
>Radioactive blueberries
A non-processed banana measures about 18.4Bq. I bet if you repeat this with a banana, you'd get far more activity.
Uh, he got 2500 Bq/kg. Your banana weighs about 150g so that makes for ~123 Bq/kg, or 20 times less. (You're using a pretty high estimate too for the banana.)
Bananas wouldn't like the climate around Chernobyl, but a Chernobyl banana would have been cool...
@@zhoufang996 you're forgetting that this number is of the salt produced from the blueberries and not the blueberries themselves. If you were to do this process to bananas, you'd end up with a far more active salt.
@@Takyodor2 I suspect bananas are more radioactive than anything in Chernobyl, unless you somehow stumble onto ejected core material.
@Domi2gud Ejected core banana. Sounds like really hardcore science, or a band that old people hate.
wait, so your digestion apparatus has acid reflux?
😂
Ah, I see what you did there. Funny stuff 😂
Mine does too 😅
150Bq translates roughly to 50pg of Cs137
You were only 1.5 orders of magnitude off!
Enjoy your 4nCi sample!
thanks for calculating it! i REALLY suck at math :)
Awesome!
This video is fantastic for multiple reasons!
I've wanted a gamma spectrometer for a long time and was looking to build one. Then you did the video: Do your own Gamma Spectroscopy with the RadiaCode 103
That got me excited that I could get a reasonably priced gamma spectrometer with amazing software without building one.
Then this video!!
Another awesome RadiaCode experiment!
On top of that, the set up for digesting the blueberries has helped me with another project I've been working on.
A video two-fer!
I'm already a Patreon Patron, but this deserves a bump!!
Thanks so much!
👍
I've had the radiacode 101 and 102 for several years now, I absolutely love them and take one of them everywhere I go ❤❤
Found a rock a few cm under a walking trail that's 300 uSv/hour 😮
"I'm pretty sure I'm off by several orders of magnitude"
Best quote ever lol
Fantastic ! I have never seen a big bowl of berries vanish into thin air ! Especially by utilizing H2SO4.
Forbidden Blueberry Jam
Blueberry sulphate! Yummy chemistry.
Great video.
Yummy nuclear chemistry, you should also make some cake😉
Yellow cake you say ? 😂
This isn't nuclear chemistry. It's basically a worthless experiment in the decomposition of blueberries.
@alexbusinesman9429 😂
NurdRage my homie! Always glad to see your vids. Your videos are not only educational but also entertaining! ❤
I would love to see protein extraction. especially some of the proteins in dried meats.
Honestly all assaying is kinda awesome. Macronutrients, radioactive elements, refining, whatever!
Which actually might make a nice short series. Isolating Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrate content in a sample of food.
In 30 years, half of your Cs-137 source will be gone....
oh, no
I returned to my lab 700 million years later, half of my uranium is gone
Measuring protein content sounds super interesting! Would love to see that. Maybe testing that with deceptive packaged food items, the ones that like to tout how much protein is in them but overall the item is mostly junk and very little protein. Cliff bars maybe? Or 'healthy' cereals
I've been loving all the recent uploads
Got this in my recommended while eating blueberries. I live in 50 miles distance from Chernobyl, btw...
Here in the UK, Wales and the county of Cumbria had restrictions placed upon their movement of sheep due to the radioactive contamination from Chernobyl, given high ground seemed to attract the most of the fallout, and that's where farmers grazed their sheep, it's only in the past decade that the restrictions have been lifted, but monitoring still goes on, scary how far that dirty cloud travelled...
AWESOME TOPIC!
woohoo! thank you!
i've been watching you for years... you deserve far more subscribers
Flaw in measurement of berries at the beginning: they're inside a plastic bag. Alpha particles and beta-minus emissions cannot penetrate plastic in any appreciable level. Only gamma and positrons (via annihilation with an electron and emission of a gamma ray) can be detected.
Cesium-137 decays by beta-minus decay. Thus, you're not detecting the emission of these free high-energy electrons, which will constitute the bulk of the radiation emitted by Cs-137. .
What you're detecting through the bag is the SECONDARY decay of Ba-137m, a metastable barium isotope, the product of approximately 90% of Cs-137's decay, which then decays by gamma emission in approximately 3.5 minutes. 10% of Cs-137 forms stable Ba-137, and thus produces no secondary gamma emission at all. So, you likely have considerably more Cs-137 in the sample than you think. Maybe several-fold more.
Even so, there's still only a very tiny amount of Cs-137 present given the very low secondary gamma decay. But it's important in radiation quantification to know the exact details of these isotopes and how they decay, especially if your ultimate goal is extracting it.
Given that 1 gram of Cs-137 produced roughly 3.2 TRILLION bequerels of activity... ya definitely have only a few micrograms in there at most. You could try to precipitate it as the double salt cesium aluminum sulfate, which is one of the few cesium salts that's poorly soluble.
The radiacode itself is encased in a plastic shell, it won't detect alpha and beta particles anyway. So not taking it out of the bag isn't a flaw, i just didn't bother since it would have no effect.
It's already a well-known fact that Cs-137 in itself does not emit gamma rays, (it's listed right on the wikipedia page). But that gamma peak is attributed to Cs-137 precisely because the half-life of Ba-137m is so short. There is almost no other source of Ba-137m, natural or unnatural. So detecting it means its constantly being generated by Cs-137, since it doesn't last long. Thus in many gamma ray libraries that emission peak is listed under Cs-137 (as well as Ba-137m). If you want to say the library is wrong, sure... but it's not really useful to be that pedantic. Detecting it means there is Cs-137 present, even if it's not Cs-137 itself.
Also, If 95% of the Cs-137 decay leads into Ba-137m, then detection of Ba-137m is still a decent peg for Cs-137. Think about it this way: Let's say 95% of the Cs-137 emitted gamma rays itself directly, no intermediate, how would the signal activity change?... it wouldn't! We'd detect the exact same signal with direct decay as with intermediate decay. (Although in reality we'd have to wait for the intermediate to reach steady state... which we did!). So there is not "several fold more" Cs-137 than what the signal suggests, more like 5% more.
So for 3.2 trillion Bq of activity per gram, a rough calculation for 150 Bq shows we have about 50 picograms of Cs-137. That's nearly impossible to recover directly, even with an insoluble salt. How do you contain a grain that's just a few hundred picograms? But it can be sequestered in copper/nickel/iron ferrocyanides. I might do that in the future, but i'd still want more Cs-137 to work with, like maybe 3ng.
Beta goes through thin plastic bags in my experience.
Welcome back :)
phenomenal video, enjoyed it very much 🧡
Fun video. Curious about protein process also
Last autumn I collected mushrooms, dried them in oven and measured with Radiacode for 10 hours in lead shield. Cs137 and K peaks came out. Mushrooms collected in Latvia forest. Latvia was hit little bit by Chernobyl rain. I put a short on my channel
We're standing on the shoulders of a giant Nurd!
Awesome video 👍
Nice to learn that just sulphuric acid can eventually get rid of everything except the salts and and some of itself. Have you ever considered getting some lead (or a high Z material of your choice) shielding to clean up your gamma spectra and make the statistics gathering faster? From a cheap supplier lead won't break the bank, and since there's no need for extremely high sensitivity spectrometry, the trace presence of unstable Pb nuclei won't be a problem.
very interesting video! thank you
You should do a video on total kjeldahl nitrogen analysis. Though it definitely not as glamorous as measuring the radioactivity of blueberries
'unfortunately nuclear weapons are relatively uncontained'
indeed they are
I remember seeing dried mushrooms for sale that were raised near Chernobyl, just checked and they no longer are for sale. Really interesting experiment, and great idea for a cesium source on the cheap. Thanks!
Considering the frontline of the war went through the Chernobyl exclusion zone at one point, radioactivity doesn't need the only thing making commerce difficult.
Would love to see a video on protein analysis!
Outstanding!!!
Wow, was not expecting to see such a prominent peak from just 60g of berry. I'm actually building my own gamma spectrometer, the hardware is mostly done and tested. Still have a bunch of coding to do. I'm using a 3cc CsI(Tl) scintillator, so I may be able to achieve even better resolution.
cool. I want to see the measuring.
As a teen i was super obcessed with nuclear chemistry. Seeing the counts from radioactive material released during the Chernobyl incident is amazing.
It polluted like most of europe. We still have issues with overly radioactive cattle.
great vid
Please do the protein analysis video.
Very cool video! It would be great to see you determine the nitrogen (and consequent protein content) of certain samples using ye olde Kjeldahl method. Maybe something common like a whole mcdonalds hamburger? Could be a cool comparison with their values given. Keep it up!
I am interested in measurement of protein with the method you mentioned
I've seen something similar but with mushrooms grown in eastern europe, but that was sometime ago.
Interesting . THX
Yes. Protein analysis!
EPA 901 and EPA 402 describe the process for such analysis but their design for high accuracy gamma spectroscopy.. very nice work again! the mushroom RC sent me were a bit higher in Cs. you can also calculate the number of active atoms in your sample based on activity using A=λN...
Thanks I'll look them up!
the caption is wrong at 3:05 you say Sulfuric acid reaction where concentrated sulfuric (acid) and dehydrates sugar (into carbon).
thanks! fixed it
Would digestion with piranha solution not have been easier? Where you at the berries one by one until you see that more chemicals are required?
i tried it on a small scale but it wasn't completely effective, there was still material leftover. And i needed to boil the acid anyway. So might as well just do pure acid straight through. Also on a large scale there is a risk it could boil over and lose the sample. Since i can't get more sample i decided to use just the boiling acid for the video to make sure.
@@NurdRage yeah makes sense, thanks for the answer ☺️
Surely yes, I am interested in an method to measure protein content of a given sample by its acid digestion
Ask your grocer to give you blueberries that are going bad, for science? lol
Always interesting videos.
When taking in contamination, the dispersal through plant should likely depend on the amount it fruits and growth over time.
Perhaps a higher concentration would be found in some plant that takes longer to fruit and has much less growth and number of fruit.
most interesting video in a while!
A Kjeldahl method video would be great! Bonus points if you use the flask...
yeah the protein measurement using sulfuric acid would be interesting
Nurd , please make a video about this sample (time 5:03) preparation when you can 🙏
Look, NileGreen is posting again!
Those blueberrys look like they have allready been digested ....
Yes please protein content measuring video.
is the sulphuric acid - protein analysis method the same that the Chinese were using to use N as a proxy so that baby-formula could be "diluted" using melamine?
Radioactive blueberries... waaaaait a minute! Are you suuuuuure you just didn't pick these in New Jersey?
Could you next make the same analysis with Chernobyl mushrooms from hot zones ?
sure! i just have to get some. they're not exactly easy to acquire.
Bro why do you sound like you've been huffing xenon 😂
Hi Nurd, I've got a question that you probably could answer. How thick PTFE tape would you reccomend for joint sealing during sulfuric acid distillation? I've had some problems with a cheap product advertised as 100% PTFE as I've witnessed some degree of decomposition. The tape partially carbonized and I think some nasty fluorinated stuff was produced in result as the first water rich fractions were fuming a little and had a strongly irritating smell, which disappeared after neutralization of acidic solution with a base, which would be compatible with the presence of hydrofluoric acid contamination. I'm thinking about switching back to sulfuric acid as joint grease as I don't want to deal with fluorinated stuff which would damage the glassware over time and be a safety concern, but everyone reccomends the tape so I must be clearly doing something wrong.
Perhaps some Th, U chemistry in the near Future?
Can you detect the radioactivity of bismuth? Perhaps if you start with an intricate enough crystal to give it as much surface area as possible.
You should try repeating this with a locally sourced supply of blueberries, just for fun and sake of completeness.
Oh god yes
@NurdRage: I have three or four broken thoriated kerosene lamp mantles. They are certainly radioactive and I've always wanted to try some radiochemistry...but the thought of contamination terrifies me. I think I'll leave the radiochemstry to you. If you want them you can have them for free. I have no idea how to communicate with you privately though, so if you do want them I'll need help.
Thanks for the offer, I actually got some thorium here already so I won't need the mantles. but if you want to offload them, maybe check some radiation measuring forums and subreddits. The enthusiasts there might want them.
@@NurdRage Thanks for the tip, I'll check them out. Stay safe!
How do you tell apart the radioactivity of Cs-137 from the natural radioactivity of potassium (isotope K-40)? Can the Radiacode 103 detect both?
Yes, it's a gamma spectrometer, so you can measure the photon energy. The two isotopes are very distinct, so it's easy to tell.
@@NurdRage Ah, nice.
What about using piranha solution?
Or making charcoal from it before ?
i tried it on a small scale but it wasn't completely effective, there was still material leftover. And i needed to boil the acid anyway. So might as well just do pure acid straight through. Also on a large scale there is a risk it could boil over and lose the sample. Since i can't get more sample i decided to use just the boiling acid for the video to make sure.
Protein video plz!
Brazil nuts are suppose to have 1000 times the Radium concentration of other plants. Not sure if they do it for Cesium since it's in a different column in periodic table.☢
Chernobyl contaminated like all the dairy in Europe with cesium
I'm curious where you get those blueberries from?
Would the digestion step be possible at lower temperature with the adition of hidrogen peroxide? Or would It ned to be too concentrated to be worth?
yeah, it probably would work. But piranha solution can sometimes boil over by itself and i would need a LOT of it to completely digest the blueberries. Since i didn't want to run the risk of accidentally losing the sample in a boil over as i only had the 60g, i decided to just go with standard hot sulfuric acid digestion which is much more straightforward and stable, albeit extremely slow.
Caesalicious
Where did you get those blueberries?
Thanks for all your hard work. To me Fukushima was not really an accident. It was merely being stupid to keep a country on 2 incompatible power grids. If whole of Japan would have been on 60Hz then the savings could have finished the mitigation work on the Fukushima site and the issue would have never happened. We now have the debate in Australia where one decent new power station with some well planned DC grid could balance the country to the future until windmills finally get their real advantage. The real good engineers are truly underpaid. This became most evident on Volkswagen where paying big money to a top heavy company made them smart engineers to jump ship and work elsewhere. They had no money left to even properly measure simple gasses like Nox and opted to cheat instead.
You forgot to mention that having no manual overrides for any system in the entire facility (a result of the overwhelming hubris of engineers who think they can automate everything) was the reason the failire couldn't be stopped.
Nice, two of my favorite things in one video
fission and blueberries!
How does this digestion method compare to piranha solution?
This is slower, but more stable. Piranha can boil out of control,
You can actually order those radioisotope sample disks directly from Spectrum Techniques directly for about $60 a pop. They’re a bit old-school with their ordering process, but they’ll definitely sell to individuals. Send in a quote request and they’ll help you out within a couple days. Way better than that ultra overpriced reseller!
Would they sell to Canada?
what about potassium 40?
Try with mushrooms...
What percentage of the total cesium in the sample is likely to be cesium-137?
extremely tiny, like
Certainly different.
try this on some tobacco. i read that tobacco can absorb radiation from the atmosphere and is one of the reasons it's so bad for you. you could get turkish varieties that are usually grown in greese and compare them to american varieties. i've been making my own tobacco buying whole leaves online and doing a lot of research on it in general. you can get it really cheap on websites that sell whole leaves, it's not a tobacco product until you shred it
I suppose you could add hydrogen peroxide to accelerate the oxidation without adding extra residue to the final product
That's a good thought. In the patreon discussions it was also brought up, and Nurdrage shared that it was tried and didn't have a significant effect.
So what you're saying is that you made blueberry sulfate? :D
Wouldn't collecting "a few Kg of cesium infused salts" get you on a list somewhere? You probably don't want zapping with a MiB neuralyzer... Thanks for the videos.
probably, although as long as i'm under the exemption limit, they probably won't go after me too hard. Maybe a sternly worded letter not to keep messing with it.
That digestion procedure needed some H2O2 to help it destroy all carbon there.
i tried it on a small scale but it wasn't completely effective, there was still material leftover. And i needed to boil the acid anyway. So might as well just do pure acid straight through. Also on a large scale there is a risk it could boil over and lose the sample. Since i can't get more sample i decided to use just the boiling acid for the video to make sure.
@@NurdRage Needs at least 30% H2O2 though. And concentrated H2SO3.
As said before, it was not completely effective, so I just went with acid digestion only for the video.
Piranha solution would work, but messy
Next time try bananas.
why did you add hydrogen peroxide to sulfuric acid ?
I didn't
Hey, come to Kiev, i know the places where we can get you a lot of samples!
Once i was even offered a job in the company witch does this, but i passed.
R.I.P. by FAB3000
Hey Nurdrage, this July 4 is the 90th anniversary of the loss of Marie Curie. I was thinking as a tribute, could you extract polonium from household dust? Apparently radon around the house will settle as polonium in dust.
I like this idea but it's basically unfeasible unfortunately. The radon (Rn222) Half-Life is only about 3 days to which it decays to polonium but that isotope decays away in minutes. If you follow the U238 decay chain, you'll see the problem quickly. All of the polonium isotopes decay very quickly, as do several others. There is however near the end of the decay chain Po210 with a 138-day half-life. That would be perfect, except for the fact that it's generated by a very severely rate limiting step. Even though there are multiple paths through the decay chain, any paths that lead to PO210, must go through Pb210, and it has about a 22-year half-life. With that slow of a decay it will vastly limit how much Po210 you're going to see. Given Putin's penchant for using Po210 to remove people he doesn't like, this is probably a good thing that you can't just simply make a good quantity of it in your basement.
@@LFTRnow How about extracting the lead-210 then? At least you can detect it's there.
Actually second Nerdrage beat you by several seconds.
But why did you make radioactive salt
To make radioactive pretzels
Omega Mart!