I once wrote a diary here called Japanese Nuclear Reactor Earthquake Story Changes. Everyone in Japan Will Die... in direct response to a now deleted hysteric diary claiming that the earthquake that struck the Japanese city of Kashiwazaki, where the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plants were in operation, was a terrible energy disaster. It wasn't. Compared to most earthquakes, it wasn't even a terrible building disaster, although some people were, in fact, killed by falling buildings in that earthquake, leading to ZERO hysterical calls to ban buildings.
The number of people killed or injured by the nuclear plant was, ironically enough, ZERO, which is the same as the number of people killed in the United States in the last 50 years from the storage of used nuclear fuel.
None of these facts, however, are likely to get people to stop having hysterical reactions when the word "uranium" is said, which explains how Dick Cheney was able to inspire a vast number of Americans to applaud insanely as he set his country off on a lemming like mission of murder in Iraq.
So let me say, "uranium."
I noted that the number of people who would get hysterical over the deaths owing to the use of dangerous fossil fuels to replace the lost power at the nuclear plant would be ZERO, and as I predicted, this has been the case, although dangerous fossil fuel plants kill people during normal operations, while the Japanese nuclear plant killed zero people in extreme circumstances.
And that says all you need to know about the stupidity of the whole situation.
The paper I am reporting on tonight in this brief thrown out diary is from the journal Science of the Total Environment and the authors are N. Yamaguchi, A. Kawisaki, and I Iiyama Sci. Tot. Environ. 407, (2009) 1383-1390 and it is entitled, provocatively enough, "Distribution of uranium in soil components of agricultural fields after long-term application of phosphate fertilizers."
Now, you may ask, how does all this uranium in Japanese fields tie into the Japanese nuclear energy program, and the answer would be not at all. It turns out that uranium is a widely distributed element on earth, about as common as tin, and one of the places the concentration of it is highest, owing to the chemistry of the element is in fertilizer. Most phosphate fertilizers, excepting that which originates from bird droppings and sewage treatment plants, contain uranium, and have always contained uranium. In fact, depending on uranium's price, all phosphate fertilizers can be considered low grade uranium ores.
And let's have the Japanese authors discuss the situation:
Intensive use of phosphate fertilizers has been one of the distinctive features of Japanese agriculture. This is partly because almost half of the upland field soil in Japan is volcanic ash soil (Andosols) containing large amounts of amorphous minerals such as allophane and imogolite that have high adsorption ability for phosphate; thus, the phosphate availability of Andosols is extremely low (Nanzyo et al., 1993). Phosphate fertilizers contain appreciable amounts of U as an impurity (Mortivedt and Beaton, 1995; Raven and Loeppert, 1997; McBride and Spiers, 2001). On the basis of the U concentration in phosphate fertilizers, McBride and Spiers (2001) estimated that 50 years of the application of a specific phosphate fertilizer (e.g., 100 kg ha−1 year−1 as P2O5) would lead to the addition of 2.4 kg of U per hectare to the topsoil,
Wow. 2.4 kg per hectare!
The objectives of this study were to investigate the major soil components that act as pools of phosphate fertilizer-derived U and evaluate the effects of different agricultural practices on the distribution of U in soil. The concentration and chemical speciation of U in agricultural soil will provide important information when considering the potential threat of agricultural food-derived U to human health.
This leaves open the question of whether it is better to starve or to eat in Japan.
Let's see...
To
determine the total U concentration (Ut) in soil, 0.2 g of air dried soil was digested with amixture of HNO3, HClO4, and HF in a Teflon beaker by heating at 393 K or by using a microwave digester (Multiwave 3000; PerkinElmer).
Don't do this at home by the way, this is very, very, very, very, very nasty chemistry. I get scared just reading about it.
Here's what this extremely dangerous procedure revealed:
The Ut in the control site soil (without phosphate fertilization) ranged from 1.11 to 1.76 mg kg−1. The Ut in soil obtained from fields with long-term application of NPK and NPK+compost was clearly higher (1.57–5.55 mg kg−1) than that in the control site soil (Table 1). The increase in Ut (ΔUt) due to the application of the phosphate fertilizer or both the phosphate fertilizer and compost was calculated by subtracting the Ut in the control site soil from that of the NPK or NPK+compost site soil. The ΔUt was the lowest at site III with a value of 0.261 mg kg−1 and the highest at site IV with a value ranging from 2.7 to 5.4 mg kg−1. Long-term application of phosphate fertilizers increases the concentration of U in agricultural soil, as reported previously (Rothbaum et al., 1979; Takeda et al., 2006; Stojanović et al., 2006; Taylor, 2007). Our result suggested that the U derived as an impurity from the phosphate fertilizer remained in the surface soil of the investigated fields.
And now the conclusions:
The U concentration in soil was increased due to the longterm application of the phosphate fertilizer. The fertilizer derived U was either incorporated into the soil organic matter, adsorbed, or precipitated with poorly crystalline Fe-/Al-bearing minerals in the surface soil of agricultural fields. Soil organic matter appeared to be a more important pool of U in the upland field and pasture soil, whereas poorly crystalline Fe minerals were more important U pools in the paddy field soil that underwent alternating changes in redox conditions.
This suggests that eating rice in Japan is bad for you and will make you into a mutant.
Oh, and by the way, much of the phosphate in the US comes from Florida, from phosphate mines and from time to time, depending on uranium prices, the extraction of uranium from this phosphate is considered. Currently this uranium is not extracted and is thus dumped on your food supply.