There is another twist to the production of I123 by Coronal Mass Ejection that is slightly more troubling. The threat is not directly from the solar proton bombardment of Xenon 133, but rather from the proton bombardment of its decay product- Cesium 133. Xenon 133 has a half life of 5 days; the Cesium 133 it produces is stable and could be floating around for a long time.
I am going to use the described scenario in a novel as a way to take out the thyroids of every mammal on the sun facing side of the planet. The reality might be less apocalyptic, but it sure could be ugly if Fukushima remains a long term Xenon 133 pump in a period of much greater solar activity.
Updated 4/4/11 , 3:30 am. I emailed a well known English astrophysicist about the matter, hopefully he will provided some input.
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ReplyDeleteBruce,
ReplyDeleteMy conjecture so far only looks at one element , there is lots of room for a real witch's brew of nuclear spallation interactions with the entire frappe of Fukushima fallout given a large enough Earth directed Coronal Mass Ejection.
I am working on a update which will layout the conjecture more completely. I am also working on estimating the labor content required for me to perform a rough order of magnitude radioactive yield simulation from scratch. The result would allow me to perform a better risk analysis. I had hoped someone with access to the right simulation tools and resources would have disproved my conjecture already; its a bit troubling that they haven't.