The radioactive core is moving and will eventually be in contact with the water. It may already be. Does anyone know?[1]
If a dump of water used for cooling is a concern (and it is for me personally and I am open to learning it is not), is our situation not far more grave given eventual contact with the water and this source multiplied by however many world water cycles of contact will occur over the crazy long half life that hot core has?
[1] I saw some discussion on this early on and struggle to find it and or current info I trust today. Hoping others here know more.
To answer your question. The risk is minimal to nonexistent.
Tritium, the thing ONE of the scientists is concerned about, is an isotope of hydrogen. It's barely radioactive, and it has half life of about 12 years. You may know it as the stuff that illuminates watch faces and sights. It's used in many other industrial applications and as far as radioactive elements goes
If you read the actual article you may see it's classic fear mongering:
The panel of multi-disciplinary scientists, hired by the intergovernmental Pacific Islands Forum, has not found conclusive evidence that the discharge would be entirely safe, and one marine biologist fears contamination could affect the food system.
TL;DR:
They couldn't say something could happen, so they said that they can't conclude nothing will happen. Which is exactly what everybody knew before. One of them said that something COULD happen, but he doesn't know how.
A high number of decays per second per gram yes (it's a light element with short half-life) so a small amount of mass gives a lot of activity. The total activity of tritium in the stored water is a few hundred TBq (i.e. a few grams of tritium in all those thousands of tonnes of water).
GP was probably referring to the low energy of the decay (18 keV per decay) which is much lower than other common radionuclides found in waste. For example, Cs-137 releases 600 keV per decay, and Sr-90 releases 576 keV followed by 2274 keV. Tritium is a much lower energy decay, per atom.
Water which ... is nuclear waste as it is from a nuclear power plant that had a core meltdown? Of course wastewater would have been more specific, but in the end they ARE dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.
Nuclear waterwaste != nuclear waste. Water cannot be radioactive, and in fact water is a fantastic insulator for radiation. The water had contaminates in it and the argument is whether or not the current level of contaminates is safe.
The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.
To start, seawater has more things than water. Both Hydrogen and Oxygen have isotopes that can decay and emit radioactivity, so yes, water can definitely be radioactive, by definition. For a relatively short time because is not plutonium of course, but it can be.
And, unlike Plutonium, the problem is that life beings are mostly made of water and we didn't coevolved with a such rare element as tritium is in nature. Water is freely allowed to enter and travel and has granted access to every part of the human body. We trade a big danger for other, but this does not mean that radioactive water can't harm us.
Tritium has a biological half-life in humans of 8 days. It's not a "big danger". Japan has gone out of their way to take all the precautions here, but since it's nuclear you know somebody is going to raise a stink anyway.
While water is indeed a fantastic radiation shield, tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and quite capable of replacing normal hydrogen in a water molecule, so even pure water can absolutely be radioactive.
It’s one of the least dangerous radioisotopes out there, so I’m not particularly fussed, but it is incorrect to say water can’t be radioactive.
In this case, the water is radioactive. They are talking about releasing water in which a small fraction of the molecules are composed of Hydrogen, Tritium and Oxygen (HTO), rather than ordinary H20. HTO acts chemically just like H20, and is literally radioactive water.
Well, it's a mixture of water and radioactive isotopes. The million tons of water isn't a danger to the Pacific Ocean, but the stuff it's mixed with may or may not be.
If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.
The information is wrong. The article is talking about waste water that has a total of 2.1 g of pure tritium diluted in 860,000 m3 of stored water.
The legal limit for tritium emissions for a nuclear plant in the US is a total of 0.2kg per year according to NRC. A metric ton is 1000kg. In order to get a million tons you would need 5x10^9 nuclear plants all releasing their maximum amount of tritium. If the amount would then be as diluted as in the article, ie 860,000 tons water for every 2.1 gram, you would then need 4*10^18 tons of water. There isn't enough water on earth to do so.
Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible case, this water will do less harm than what the other industries are releasing routinely, including water treatment plants. If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.
People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution, because we are irrationaly overestimating the dangers of nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity. These deaths are SOLELY a consequence of fear-based decision making. I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start evaluating the consequences of different scenarios with a scientific approach and stop taking decisions based on feelings.
Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.
That seems like an odd request. Something that is safe diluted across an entire ocean may not be safe to drink. In fact, regular seawater isn't all that great for you.
It's the released water not the seawater. That causes
vomiting, delirium, and hallucinations :-)
“A Japanese official said it’s okay if you drink this water,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news briefing. “Then please drink it.”
The poster you asked is not that Japanese official. They just said dumping it was not a concern. Posting someone else's claim and asking them if they're ready to "back their claim" is disingenuous.
I realize that, and I would imagine everybody else in this thread.
That was why, to try to avoid sounding disingenuous, I tried to apologize upfront for the question, and recognized and appreciated the poster qualifications.
I was trying to qualify what safe means in this context. A bit like when talking for example to an aircraft manufacturer CEO, for example as in:
1) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly" ...type of safe
OR
2) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly, I will do a weekly
trip on it with my family" ...type of safe
This argument is not useful. #1 and #2 differ based on the disposition of the CEO. A stupid, or not good at thinking about statistics and risks, CEO will happily get on a plane to get a bigger bonus, even if it's not that safe.
You're probably thinking of getting a speck of a radioactive metal (like Uranium or Plutonium) in your lungs. That gets stuck there, the body has no mechanisms to eliminate it, and it will keep emitting gamma rays all your life.
Tritium is very different. It is an isotope of Hydrogen, and a water molecule containing one atom of Tritium is fairly indistinguishable from any other water molecule. The most important thing is that it has no reason to stick to any other Tritium from that glass that you drank. It will spread throughout your body. Like all other water molecules, it will probably be out of your body in a mater of days. Tritium's half life is 12 years, so the vast, super vast majority of all the Tritium you'd drink with that glass of water will be long gone before it has a chance to decay.
But even if some of these atoms decay, their decay is a beta particle (an electron, and if you really care one antineutrino as well, although that antineutrino will probably travel through a few galaxies before it interacts with anything). The beta particle is not very damaging (compare that with the gamma rays emitted by Plutonium). For sure a single one is not damaging at all. Now, in contrast with the speck of the radioactive metal above, this beta particle will not be followed by others like it, because the Tritium that emitted it doesn't have any other Tritiums next to it.
Hmm, if people were worried about ingestion I was certain it had to be alpha particles. I stand corrected.
I’m not sure how much the half life matters a lot if you ingest a lot. To be fair, kinda unlikely from drinking water, but might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life (but then, it’s probably already doing that now for much larger quantities).
Either way, I suppose the 3 X-rays I had today completely obviate any relevance of the tritium.
> might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life
Unless fish have some mechanism for selectively keeping tritium (which might be very useful) or don't replace their water, there's no way for a fish to "[gather] Tritium its whole life".
Notwithstanding your qualifications, this reply is a bit off the mark. The tritium in that vial is indeed no danger, the beta decay of the tritium won't get past the vial itself. Tritium ingested is indeed a danger, however, because once in the body, the water molecules that carry the tritium can and will go anywhere in the body. Most will be excreted in the urine, but some will some will end up in cell nuclei, where their low energy beta decay can and does do real damage to DNA.
Note that I am not arguing that the tritium releases proposed in Japan are dangerous. They are far below any theshold for risk that should concern us. But that's because the concentration is so low, not because ingested tritiated water isn't potentially dangerous.
Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen.
His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
I know very little, but the amount of tritium involved likely decays into a trivial amount of helium. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that there is 2.1 g of Tritium in 860,000 cubic meters of water.
Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
“HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
> Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
"A factory worker ingested tritium over 7.4 years. His exposure dose was estimated at 3–6 Sv. He developed isochromic anemia, and subsequently died of pancytopenia"
At a dose factor of 0.000018 mSv/kBq for tritiated water, you would get a 3 Sv dose from "only" 1/5000 of the water.
Drinking (or inhaling) 50,000 gallons of the (undiluted, so best case in terms of volume) water from storage tanks would probably get you with kidney failure somewhat before the tritium does.
Tritiated water isn't particularly bioaccumulative: chemically, it's water and acts like it. The body doesn't preferentially retain tritium compared to normally hydrogen, so it doesn't concentrate in tissues like, say, dioxins or mercury. It can be incorporated into tissue, but not preferentially to normal hydrogen.
Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.
Indeed. I was assuming that the comment I was replying to was referring to helium in general because they were not more specific, and the normal form is ⁴He — we’re not filling party balloons with it.
But what's the alternative? You want any random idiot to have a voice? I'd assume there are more un-educated idiots than educated ones - your personal issue is not getting the credential to prove your worth.
It is without doubt a critical gaps in information. We need to know first how much radionuclides already exist in the ocean (per volume), and where those comes from. All combustion and mining release to some degree radioactive isotopes into the environment, and much of it ends up sooner or later into the ocean.
A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.
More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.
How did you arrive at that number? Going by one of the comments in this thread it would be 760 TBq of tritium, which would require 76,000,000 m^3 of water to get below the 10 Bg/m^3 limit of the world health organization.
(granted I don't know where the 760 TBq figure came from either, I'm just trying to get some clarity)
The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"
Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).
> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90,
TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of
high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water
> nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
> At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).
That's the issue with "safe" - it's difficult to capture in a single factor like number of accidents and for this factor, the distribution of the metric is very different.
Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: It's not black and white unfortunately, and it's both a technological and societal effort to make nuclear power safe.
> Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
Very unlikely. In this case 'the market' is not WallStreetBets, it's experts around the world who do nothing else but assess and estimate the risks.
There are two explanations I can think of:
> Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
This may be one reason. The risk of a 'meltdown' is actually so high cost but very low risk, that the corresponding distribution has no first moment. The 'expected cost' is infinite. I've heard folks use it as a real-world example of a Cauchy-type distribution, for more info see [1].
Another explanation might be that there is some sort of recency bias. But that would mean the cost was estimated correctly for the past - which is not what you would want to hear either.
You make a good point that externalities for fossil fuels are not priced in either, but that doesn't explain the phenomenon here. And I'm not arguing for or against the use of nuclear power - societies have already agreed to socialise the cost. I'm pointing out it's not as black and white ("nuclear power is and has always been safe") as some HN commenters may think.
That is correct - if we were to price in "cancer" for coal maybe indeed coal may not be economic anymore.
But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?
I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.
> If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
You have completely missed my point. Every time you drive to work or flush your toilet you make an impact to the environment. How do you justify this action? Is it ok because you think that the impact to the environment is small? Will the end result of your action be a "massive destruction of the ecosphere"? Maybe it will be, but you have no other choice in life than evaluate all impacts and improve where you can and where it matters most.
I think, I understood you very well. The flushing of the toilet is of course also a liability. But my point is, nevertheless to take it serious, even though its impact might be small. I think we should not only focus on where it matters the most, and ignore the rest, but try to improve the situation across the board, including the smaller things.
The problem is that people think there is a lack of proportionality until they discover that there reall isn't. That happend again and again. And this is the reason why an ecologically sensible society fights on all fronts. There are reaons why you are not allowed to flash anything down the toilet, there is ongoing research how to improve wastewater management, etc., etc.
To get back to the original issue: the OP told us that the dumping of Tritium does less harm than other discharge and thus we should look elsewhere for improvements. As I understand this sentence, he means we should not worry about it at all. This is out of proportion: he could have claimed that we should worry less about it, but it does not follow, that we should totally ignore it.
> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution.
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
When you burn a tree, everything that's released into the atmosphere is something the tree absorbed from the atmosphere as it grew. So it's plus minus zero in terms of pollution.
When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.
> Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."
The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.
Let's not forget the simple logistical difficulty of using biomass. It is not as energy dense, which makes moving its own weight around more expensive too.
"The net energy ratio between energy output and input was 10.41.. Energy used for hauling hog fuel represented the largest part (36.27%) of the total energy input. The net energy ratio decreased 0.11 with each additional transportation mile
the net energy ratios reported here were on the high end of this range as energy
input for possible active drying, storage, and final delivery was not included.
" [0]
"The energy content was taken at 137,000 BTUs per gallon for diesel, and
125,000 BTUs per gallon for gasoline (Adams 1983)...
output: the mean HHV ranged from 8,946 to 9,105 BTUs/pound
" [0]
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds, so it seems like pound-for-pound (pine-tree) biomass is less than half as productive as gasoline.*
Honestly, I was expecting worse. But over doubling energy costs isn't negligible, especially for poorer countries.
*this is at a glance work, not an actual deep dive
[0] Net energy output from harvesting small-diameter trees using a mechanized system
Fei Pan
Han-Sup Han
Leonard R. Johnson
FOREST PRODUCTS JOURNAL VOL. 58, NO. 1/2
William J. Elliot
I've never actually sat down and worked it out, but it seems to me that this is more of a political buoy than legitimately optimized.
Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".
And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.
You're quite right that wood biomass is not fully carbon-neutral when fossil fuels are expended in harvesting it and transporting it.
UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.
> Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
They can only do so if we help them. Providing the technology FOR FREE.
Human race is slowly outgrowing the concept of money. Current system does not fit into the future we have ahead of us. And quite a bit of high profile ppl see that and are afraid of losing power.
> Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions
Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.
Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Keep in mind that this is really just a nicer-sounding way of saying that we get xxx-xxxx (can't be arsed to do the half-life based math at the moment) years worth of equivalent C02 warming in just 8 years. Given how global warming is accelerating toward/through various points-of-no-return, stopping to point out that it's 'only' 8 years is doing a disservice to the efforts of communicating the danger of our current situation.
Well, one reason is that a lot of people casually assume that the baseline level of radiation in the natural environment is 0.0000000...., but it's not.
Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.
Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.
Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.
No one really does make decisions like that though. The world is not a lab where you can control all the variables. Nor can anyone have the breadth of knowledge to understand all relevant research. We just adopt a set of heuristics based on our own experience and understanding.
And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.
Nuclear is like a religious thing. No one is actually looking at facts and science, they just have belief that this is a solution or the problem. Look how conclusions from an expert panel are shrugged at as "nuclear is obviously the only right solution", no one cares whether those conclusion are based on science or not.
Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.
There is sure a lot of water in the ocean, but it's still possible to poison stuff locally, wherever you drop the stuff is going to have higher concentration, at least for a short while.
>The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
And in order to come to any of those conclusions you have to get independent experts to perform a review. Your comment is an emotional defence of your own heuristics. Science requires verification.
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
To note, one of groups like Greenpeace’s argument is that gov. and TEPCO are straight bullshitting the waste water composition [0]
It usually would fall in conspiracy theory territory, expect TEPCO did bullshit their facts and numbers at several critical occasions already, and the gov stays in lockstep with TEPCO.
They are dumping 1 Million metric tons of water over a period of 30 years.
Even if China allow them to dump the water into the Gobi desert, it'd still cost billions of dollar to build and operate the pipeline. It'd never happen.
True but at this point it's not just a Japanese problem but a world wide one, if they dump it in the ocean, it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it. It reminds me of the WW2 boats that are still in the Oceans leaking toxic products and nobody wants to pay to take them out.
Just to be clear, they are dumping a few grams of a relatively benign element which is regularly & safely discharged into the ocean during the normal operations of nuclear facilities worldwide, diluted in an extremely large volume of seawater.
"it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it" is not supported by any science, it's just fear, the same fear that leads us to keep running coal power plants that kill people on a daily basis.
Nah, global warming due to CO2 is a world wide problem; this is, at best, a regional issue, since the water will be so diluted once it reach the other side of the ocean. Most likely, that this won't be an issue at all.
Before anyone responds or makes a judgement, they should give a single minute of their lives to reading about tritium, the isotope ONE of the scientist is concerned about. Wikipedia[0] will do the trick if you have no other options.
4 years ago (2018/8/20’s public hearing)[0], one of the subject was how that “Tritium water” also contained strontium and cobalt, and what to do about that before releasing the water. To this day, the answer is “nothing”
The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues: it's one of the cleanest country I've ever seen, so I'm willing to trust them if they say the waste water dumping plan is safe.
Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual.
Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.
It's a tough issue, because it's also the Japanese gov and TEPCO who brought this all mess, their trade-offs on how much to secure that plant didn't pay off, to say the least.
We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.
>The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues
I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…
All over half a century ago, but there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of..., cases where the Japanese government didn’t come out well (e.g. Itai-Itai disease was known in 1912, but according to Wikipedia, “Medical tests started in the 1940s and 1950s”, and for Minamata disease “The Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectural governments conducted a joint survey in late 1960 and early 1961 into the level of mercury in the hair of people living around the Shiranui Sea. The results confirmed that organic mercury had spread all around the inland sea and that people were still being poisoned by contaminated fish. Hundreds of people were discovered to have levels greater than 50 ppm of mercury in their hair, the level at which people are likely to experience nerve damage. The highest result recorded was that of a woman from Goshonoura island who had 920 ppm in her sample.
The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”
The quantity of Tritium in the water of concern is 760 TBq. This is not a huge amount; if the accident had not occurred the plant would have discharged more than that amount into the ocean over the years since during its normal operation.
It wasn't a critique of the argument. I was just a bit uncertain which number were correct. 2.1g or 15g is still pretty tiny in comparison to the mount of water that it is diluted with. I was/am tempted to calculate what the probability of a single atom would be in a glass of water.
What a disingenuous argument. Of course nobody can prove that this wouldn’t make the endangered Samoan saltwater frogs gay or something. But is this really a possibility that we need to be taking seriously?
I am absolutely pro nuclear.
But I think that for every single invested or earned dollar from a nuclear facility a fraction must be reserved for storage, break down, clean ing etc. There should be an world wide independent institute setting these rules up. And all countries should follow them otherwise harse sanctions will follow.
Making mistakes with nuclear is unforgivable.
I don't know how other countries work but that actually is a legal requirement in the US. The NRC requires reactor operators to set aside funds for decommissioning[1], and the government charges a fee to nuclear plants to cover long-term waste storage[2]. Or at least, they did, until 2014. The waste fund has accumulated to $43 billion (as of 2018), but the government hasn't managed to actually store any waste; since the utilities were also incurring the cost to store the waste themselves, they successfully sued and got the fee lifted, until such time as the government starts taking the waste off their hands.
If only fossil plants were required to pay for burying their waste deep underground. Then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years. Even if it bioconcentrated in some way, it is going to have a short time to have its effect then it will be gone.
The anti-nuclear movement should be regarded as we regard the anti-vax movement.
They both seem to have a standard of zero risk without comparison to the alternatives. (Yes, there are adverse events with vaccines, and even with the risk of those adverse events, they do far more good than harm).
There is overwhelming evidence for safety, but they keep bringing up theoretical risks and point to events in the past (see issues with rotavirus vaccine) to spread FUD. Thins ends up hurting everyone.
Haha, after the disaster my tongue-in-cheek solution to the mess was just use a small tactical nuke to blow the whole mess into the ocean. Someone said that would put waste into the atmosphere :-(
But hey, they can just drain the water into the ocean right?!?!
1. Scientists: Japan’s Plan To Dump Nuclear Waste Into The Pacific Ocean May Not Be Safe
2. A panel of scientists has identified critical gaps in the data supporting the safe discharge of wastewater into the Pacific
3. Independent scientists are questioning Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, following a review of the available evidence
4. Last year Japan announced that wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, destroyed in March 2011 following the Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, would be dropped into the Pacific in 2023
5. “So these are all the things we need to consider.” Confusing The Masses The Pacific Islands Forum convened its panel of experts – specializing in policy and different scientific disciplines – because of the highly technical nature of Japan’s plan
6. But panel scientist Robert Richmond, director of the University of Hawaii Kewalo Marine Laboratory, says the panel unanimously believes that critical gaps in information remain
7. Through phytoplankton, Richmond says, the radioactive element could then find its way into the greater food system as the microscopic plants are consumed by mollusks and small fish, which are later consumed by other fish and eventually humans
8. The IAEA is expected to deliver reports from its site visits in the next two months, according to its website, and would release a fully comprehensive report before any water is released
183 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadThe radioactive core is moving and will eventually be in contact with the water. It may already be. Does anyone know?[1]
If a dump of water used for cooling is a concern (and it is for me personally and I am open to learning it is not), is our situation not far more grave given eventual contact with the water and this source multiplied by however many world water cycles of contact will occur over the crazy long half life that hot core has?
[1] I saw some discussion on this early on and struggle to find it and or current info I trust today. Hoping others here know more.
Tritium, the thing ONE of the scientists is concerned about, is an isotope of hydrogen. It's barely radioactive, and it has half life of about 12 years. You may know it as the stuff that illuminates watch faces and sights. It's used in many other industrial applications and as far as radioactive elements goes
If you read the actual article you may see it's classic fear mongering:
The panel of multi-disciplinary scientists, hired by the intergovernmental Pacific Islands Forum, has not found conclusive evidence that the discharge would be entirely safe, and one marine biologist fears contamination could affect the food system.
TL;DR: They couldn't say something could happen, so they said that they can't conclude nothing will happen. Which is exactly what everybody knew before. One of them said that something COULD happen, but he doesn't know how.
GP was probably referring to the low energy of the decay (18 keV per decay) which is much lower than other common radionuclides found in waste. For example, Cs-137 releases 600 keV per decay, and Sr-90 releases 576 keV followed by 2274 keV. Tritium is a much lower energy decay, per atom.
However, when made internal, as in food?
The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.
To start, seawater has more things than water. Both Hydrogen and Oxygen have isotopes that can decay and emit radioactivity, so yes, water can definitely be radioactive, by definition. For a relatively short time because is not plutonium of course, but it can be.
And, unlike Plutonium, the problem is that life beings are mostly made of water and we didn't coevolved with a such rare element as tritium is in nature. Water is freely allowed to enter and travel and has granted access to every part of the human body. We trade a big danger for other, but this does not mean that radioactive water can't harm us.
"Is not a danger" here means "we don't know and, as long as liability is impossible to be traced back to us, we don't care".
It’s one of the least dangerous radioisotopes out there, so I’m not particularly fussed, but it is incorrect to say water can’t be radioactive.
http://thedailychrenk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/simptox...
If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.
The legal limit for tritium emissions for a nuclear plant in the US is a total of 0.2kg per year according to NRC. A metric ton is 1000kg. In order to get a million tons you would need 5x10^9 nuclear plants all releasing their maximum amount of tritium. If the amount would then be as diluted as in the article, ie 860,000 tons water for every 2.1 gram, you would then need 4*10^18 tons of water. There isn't enough water on earth to do so.
Edit: spelling of tritium
“A Japanese official said it’s okay if you drink this water,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news briefing. “Then please drink it.”
That was why, to try to avoid sounding disingenuous, I tried to apologize upfront for the question, and recognized and appreciated the poster qualifications.
I was trying to qualify what safe means in this context. A bit like when talking for example to an aircraft manufacturer CEO, for example as in:
1) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly" ...type of safe
OR
2) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly, I will do a weekly trip on it with my family" ...type of safe
You could have asked something like "do you agree with the Japanese claim that the water is safe to drink? Would you be willing to drink it?"
Tritium is very different. It is an isotope of Hydrogen, and a water molecule containing one atom of Tritium is fairly indistinguishable from any other water molecule. The most important thing is that it has no reason to stick to any other Tritium from that glass that you drank. It will spread throughout your body. Like all other water molecules, it will probably be out of your body in a mater of days. Tritium's half life is 12 years, so the vast, super vast majority of all the Tritium you'd drink with that glass of water will be long gone before it has a chance to decay.
But even if some of these atoms decay, their decay is a beta particle (an electron, and if you really care one antineutrino as well, although that antineutrino will probably travel through a few galaxies before it interacts with anything). The beta particle is not very damaging (compare that with the gamma rays emitted by Plutonium). For sure a single one is not damaging at all. Now, in contrast with the speck of the radioactive metal above, this beta particle will not be followed by others like it, because the Tritium that emitted it doesn't have any other Tritiums next to it.
I’m not sure how much the half life matters a lot if you ingest a lot. To be fair, kinda unlikely from drinking water, but might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life (but then, it’s probably already doing that now for much larger quantities).
Either way, I suppose the 3 X-rays I had today completely obviate any relevance of the tritium.
Unless fish have some mechanism for selectively keeping tritium (which might be very useful) or don't replace their water, there's no way for a fish to "[gather] Tritium its whole life".
Correct; it's in liquid, which blocks its radiation even more effectively.
The mucous layer in the stomach and intestines will stop it cold. It can't even get past the layer of dead cells that make up our skin.
Note that I am not arguing that the tritium releases proposed in Japan are dangerous. They are far below any theshold for risk that should concern us. But that's because the concentration is so low, not because ingested tritiated water isn't potentially dangerous.
I am quite sure there are more naturally occurring reservoirs of water that is strictly more lethal; also non-diluted.
His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
It seems that they are trowing money to the sea after paying yet for storing it for the last 11 years.
Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... [Q6]
Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
Huh? It has a half-life of 12 years.
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
“HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
> Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
Yes, you can beat the biological half-life if you eat whopping doses of the stuff. That's... not a common situation.
If you ate said factory worker, you'd be back to normal in a couple weeks, as long as you didn't keep eating factory workers.
Drinking (or inhaling) 50,000 gallons of the (undiluted, so best case in terms of volume) water from storage tanks would probably get you with kidney failure somewhat before the tritium does.
Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.
Same reason we don’t use nuclear reactors to turn lead into gold, even though we can: it’s far more expensive than it’s worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production
It's *ten* times more expensive than gold!
(If I remember correctly, medical ³He MRI's are done on a closed rebreather -- they literally want to recycle your lung air, it's that valuable).
Source: I’m a dropout and frequently encounter highly educated idiots
A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.
More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.
(granted I don't know where the 760 TBq figure came from either, I'm just trying to get some clarity)
As far as I can figure out it probably does not.
Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
This is a complete non-issue.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fission
https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reac...
> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90, TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water
> Greenpeace said it had confirmed with Tepco that the system was not designed to remove carbon-14
Maybe there are updates on this matter but I couldn't find anything online.
"C-14 also cannot be removed by ALPS, but its concentration is far lower than its regulatory standard for discharge."
Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: It's not black and white unfortunately, and it's both a technological and societal effort to make nuclear power safe.
Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
There are two explanations I can think of:
> Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
This may be one reason. The risk of a 'meltdown' is actually so high cost but very low risk, that the corresponding distribution has no first moment. The 'expected cost' is infinite. I've heard folks use it as a real-world example of a Cauchy-type distribution, for more info see [1].
Another explanation might be that there is some sort of recency bias. But that would mean the cost was estimated correctly for the past - which is not what you would want to hear either.
You make a good point that externalities for fossil fuels are not priced in either, but that doesn't explain the phenomenon here. And I'm not arguing for or against the use of nuclear power - societies have already agreed to socialise the cost. I'm pointing out it's not as black and white ("nuclear power is and has always been safe") as some HN commenters may think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution
But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?
I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
The problem by elevating the seriousness of flushing a toilet, is that it dilutes more severe cases where one could do an actual impact.
To get back to the original issue: the OP told us that the dumping of Tritium does less harm than other discharge and thus we should look elsewhere for improvements. As I understand this sentence, he means we should not worry about it at all. This is out of proportion: he could have claimed that we should worry less about it, but it does not follow, that we should totally ignore it.
The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.
Pollution that changes the climate.
And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."
The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.
Let's not forget the simple logistical difficulty of using biomass. It is not as energy dense, which makes moving its own weight around more expensive too.
"The net energy ratio between energy output and input was 10.41.. Energy used for hauling hog fuel represented the largest part (36.27%) of the total energy input. The net energy ratio decreased 0.11 with each additional transportation mile
the net energy ratios reported here were on the high end of this range as energy input for possible active drying, storage, and final delivery was not included. " [0]
"The energy content was taken at 137,000 BTUs per gallon for diesel, and 125,000 BTUs per gallon for gasoline (Adams 1983)...
output: the mean HHV ranged from 8,946 to 9,105 BTUs/pound " [0]
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds, so it seems like pound-for-pound (pine-tree) biomass is less than half as productive as gasoline.*
Honestly, I was expecting worse. But over doubling energy costs isn't negligible, especially for poorer countries.
*this is at a glance work, not an actual deep dive
[0] Net energy output from harvesting small-diameter trees using a mechanized system Fei Pan Han-Sup Han Leonard R. Johnson
FOREST PRODUCTS JOURNAL VOL. 58, NO. 1/2 William J. Elliot
Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".
And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.
UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.
They can only do so if we help them. Providing the technology FOR FREE.
Human race is slowly outgrowing the concept of money. Current system does not fit into the future we have ahead of us. And quite a bit of high profile ppl see that and are afraid of losing power.
Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.
Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.
Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.
Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.
And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.
Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.
Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?
There is sure a lot of water in the ocean, but it's still possible to poison stuff locally, wherever you drop the stuff is going to have higher concentration, at least for a short while.
>The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
The entire pdf is a worthy read.
It usually would fall in conspiracy theory territory, expect TEPCO did bullshit their facts and numbers at several critical occasions already, and the gov stays in lockstep with TEPCO.
[0] https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/2...
Monks: opinion that requires authority
Even if China allow them to dump the water into the Gobi desert, it'd still cost billions of dollar to build and operate the pipeline. It'd never happen.
"it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it" is not supported by any science, it's just fear, the same fear that leads us to keep running coal power plants that kill people on a daily basis.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
[0] https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.h...
Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.
https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...
We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.
I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…
The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”
-
Sounds a lot better than
760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.
I just copied the numbers I saw elsewhere in this thread.
Though it might be nice to see Godzilla IRL... at least until he/she squishes you with gigantic irradiated feet.
If only fossil plants were required to pay for burying their waste deep underground. Then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html
[2] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nu...
> Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean
But it omits to say that this is actually extraordinarily diluted: we're talking about around 20 grams of pure tritiated water.
They both seem to have a standard of zero risk without comparison to the alternatives. (Yes, there are adverse events with vaccines, and even with the risk of those adverse events, they do far more good than harm).
There is overwhelming evidence for safety, but they keep bringing up theoretical risks and point to events in the past (see issues with rotavirus vaccine) to spread FUD. Thins ends up hurting everyone.
But hey, they can just drain the water into the ocean right?!?!
NHK WORLD PRIME Fukushima: The Curse of Groundwater https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/
1. Scientists: Japan’s Plan To Dump Nuclear Waste Into The Pacific Ocean May Not Be Safe
2. A panel of scientists has identified critical gaps in the data supporting the safe discharge of wastewater into the Pacific
3. Independent scientists are questioning Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, following a review of the available evidence
4. Last year Japan announced that wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, destroyed in March 2011 following the Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, would be dropped into the Pacific in 2023
5. “So these are all the things we need to consider.” Confusing The Masses The Pacific Islands Forum convened its panel of experts – specializing in policy and different scientific disciplines – because of the highly technical nature of Japan’s plan
6. But panel scientist Robert Richmond, director of the University of Hawaii Kewalo Marine Laboratory, says the panel unanimously believes that critical gaps in information remain
7. Through phytoplankton, Richmond says, the radioactive element could then find its way into the greater food system as the microscopic plants are consumed by mollusks and small fish, which are later consumed by other fish and eventually humans
8. The IAEA is expected to deliver reports from its site visits in the next two months, according to its website, and would release a fully comprehensive report before any water is released