Comment by landl0rd
9 hours ago
Not really; strontium is quite common in the crust. In the oceans it occurs in the single-digit mg/L. This isn't a meaningful datapoint.
The entire article doesn't show particularly concerning findings and the protests read more like nimbyism than environmental concern. Industrial processes have some non-zero level of impact and complaining when someone runs one that's not very polluting at all is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it's just an attempt to outsource all the pollution to china, which is fine for many things (I'd rather they were polluted than us) but not critical minerals.
Yes just searched it and found:
While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium is not hazardous to health at low levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium
I guess I didn't realize that strontium had a stable naturally-occuring isotope.
There are only two elements below the actinides that have no stable isotopes (technetium and promethium).
I include bismuth as stable even though technically it is radioactive with an extraordinarily long half life.
Every element up to and including bismuth, excluding technetium and promethium, have stable primordial isotopes (i.e., have been on Earth since it was made), and in addition, thorium, uranium, and maybe plutonium (Pu-244 is on the very edge, so it's not clear if any primordial nuclei of it remain) also have primordial isotopes. Every element with bismuth or higher atomic number has no stable isotopes, and the elements from astatine through neptunium naturally occur largely via decay sequences of uranium or natural nuclear reactions in uranium ore.
Nuclear fission reactions tend to result in the daughter nuclei being considerably smaller than the mother nucleus--like a 70/30 or 60/40 split, which means that the fission products of uranium are firmly in the range of elements that have stable isotopes. (Although due to larger elements being richer in neutrons, most fission products have too many neutrons, hence undergo radioactive decay themselves).
Cesium too. Makes all sorts of cool fireworks happen.