Japan Decides To Release Treated Fukushima Water Into the Sea 96
hcs_$reboot shares a report from CBS News: Japan will release more than a million tons of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea in a decades-long operation, reports said Friday, despite strong opposition from environmentalists, local fishermen and farmers. The release of the water, which has been filtered to reduce radioactivity, is likely to start in 2022 at the earliest. The decision ends years of debate over how to dispose of the liquid that includes water used to cool the power station after it was hit by a massive tsunami in 2011. A government panel said earlier this year that releasing the water into the sea or evaporating it were both "realistic options." The treated water is currently kept in a thousand huge tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi site, where reactors went into meltdown nearly a decade ago after the earthquake-triggered tsunami. Plant operator TEPCO is building more tanks, but all will be full by mid-2022.
I'm seeing the New York Post headline now... (Score:1, Funny)
... 75 years after Hiroshima bombing, Japan nukes California.
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Radioactivity occurs naturally in the sea and everywhere in nature so this could make sense. I guess it's a matter of how fast it will be released and the levels implicated. Why not have one or several independent entities supervise the release? Even environmentalists could be part of that supervision.
It might be better to dissipate it than to keep it all concentrated in one spot. The more transparent the process will be the better. If they keep everything hidden behind closed doors than I guess it gives a
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They have filtered the water somewhat but that has created its own problems. The is now a vast amount of nuclear waste that must be handled somehow. Some of it high level, often mixed and difficult to handle, and the pile keeps growing as they dismantle the melted down reactors.
Tritium (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with tritium is that while outside our bodies it is relatively harmless (the beta particles it produces are very low energy and cannot penetrate skin) it can replace hydrogen in our bodies because it is a hydrogen isotope and there it can do a lot more damage. The good news is that since it is just hydrogen it should not end up naturally concentrating anywhere e.g. like some fish can concentrate heavy metals from sea water etc. because hydrogen is everywhere.
Provided Japan has made sure the rate of release is slow enough and diluted enough it should be pretty safe and the biggest danger will be where the tritium is most concentrated i.e. on the Japanese coast.
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I thought you had to ignite hydrogen to make it bond with oxygen.
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That takes a lot of energy. They'd have to build a nuclear plant to have enough power to do that. Starting to see the problem?
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You can remove tritium easily, just electrolyse the water to hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen goes into the upper atmosphere and boils off into space, simple.
Really? Are you nuts? Hydrogen is highly reactive and will quickly bind to form water in air and not make it to space. Now, you have tritium in the atmosphere where you can breath it in which is certainly no better and very likely much worse. Then there is the huge amount of power you would need to do this. There is a good reason why aluminium smelters (that use electolysis to extract aluminium) are built in regions with copious amounts of cheap electricity.
The only way you can sensibly deal with this w
Tritium?! I want some! (Score:2)
Tritium is useful, and very expensive. I want some!
That's the stuff that makes things glow - such as watch hands, pistol sites, emergency exit signs, etc. It's like $30,000/gram but fortunately it's useful at very low concentration - a little bit of tritium in the paint makes the faint glow.
Unfortunately I hear that all of the water to be released is only only tritium to make about five or six glowing watches.
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There was a similar issue at Three Mile Island -- a bunch of RO pure water with a little bit of tritium in it. The proposal to dilute it with enough river water so that the tritium content was well below standards for drinking water were Viewed With Alarm by all the usual suspects, with shrieking "THEY WANT TO DUMP RADIOACTIVE WATER INTO THE RIVER!" headlines.
I'm not sure what they actually ended up doing with it. One proposal at the time was to just evaporate it all.
Re:I'm seeing the New York Post headline now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the radiation is from tritium. Tritium does not bioaccumulate. Tritium decays to Helium-3 via beta emission at only about 6 kv. The "radiation" is stopped by a tenth of mm of seawater.
This shouldn't even be controversial.
Dump it into the sea.
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The problem is that commercial fishers and farmers in the area have already been devastated by the disaster and spend the better part of a decade trying to rebuild trust in their products. Now the government says they intend to dump a large quantity of contaminated material into the sea.
Doubtless there will be more lawsuits. The original ones from immediately after the disaster are still going. The latest ruling is that the compensation given so far was insufficient and the government and TEPCO are on the h
Re: I'm seeing the New York Post headline now... (Score:2)
The fisheries has have been devastated out of an abundance of caution. Fish caught just off the shore from Fukushima Daichi have repeatedly shown very low levels of contamination - much lower than the minimum allowed levels and hardly measurable above âbackgroundâ(TM).
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Yes, and they had to invest in equipment to scan all the fish (and farm produce) just to build consumer confidence, and even then...
Put it this way, say you are an ordinary person, don't know much about it except that it was dangerous enough to cause a mass evacuation and testing for thyroid cancer. You have a choice between Fukushima fish and some other fish. You will buy the other fish, you aren't going to bother getting expert advice or take the (unknown to you and somewhat disputed) risk.
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Yes, and they had to invest in equipment to scan all the fish (and farm produce) just to build consumer confidence, and even then...
Put it this way, say you are an ordinary person, don't know much about it except that it was dangerous enough to cause a mass evacuation and testing for thyroid cancer. You have a choice between Fukushima fish and some other fish. You will buy the other fish, you aren't going to bother getting expert advice or take the (unknown to you and somewhat disputed) risk.
So its the fear of nuclear, not nuclear itself. Interesting...
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It's not the fear, it's the additional cost of proving that it's safe.
There is cost for the producer. There is cost for the consumer (time to do research and educate themselves about the science). And in the end a lot of it is still unclear or disputed because we haven't been able to do careful double-blind studies on the effects of this stuff on humans over decades, only try to infer what the risk is from observing the outcome of various disasters.
People do this all the time. New engine oil comes on the ma
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I think there's a tiny bit more to that; if tritium ends up in your body, which it will, it can do damage when it decays. However, compared to the tritium already present in uncontaminated water, this is nothing to worry about.
So I have to agree: this shouldn't even be controversial. Dump it into the sea.
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The obvious risk here is that they'll dump water with more than just tritium in it.
They have tanks containing a million tonnes of water.
Many different scientists have taken a scoop of water out of that tank and tested it.
No fancy chemical analysis is needed because radioactive stuff emits RADIATION. So it is trivial to detect.
They are finding only tritium.
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Radioactivity occurs naturally in the sea and everywhere in nature so this could make sense. I guess it's a matter of how fast it will be released and the levels implicated. Why not have one or several independent entities supervise the release? Even environmentalists could be part of that supervision.
This is water that has been filtered of the cesium and strontium that are the most dangerous components of nuclear waste (intermediate half-life, gamma radiation) leaving behind tritium (short half-life, beta radiation). This is not hazardous when diluted into the ocean.
https://www.wired.com/story/fu... [wired.com]'
Oh No, they say he's got to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Go Go Godzilla.
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This is how they spawned Godzilla. Hell no!
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You two sound like some sort of cult.
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You're thinking of Mothra...
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And the sequel once they decide, having learned from their first mistake, to shoot the contaminated water into space.
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Some days the jokes just write themselves.
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Hold on, going to buy stock in Tokyo construction companies. They're going to make a lot of money rebuilding the city.
We should probably let everyone impacted by Fukushima know, to be fair. They deserve a windfall after all that's happened to them.
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Tritium cannot be removed (Score:5, Informative)
Tritium is better known as radioactive hydrogen. It's often used as a radioactive source to power glow sticks and in some watch hands. A water molecule is made up of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom so it's understandable that there's nothing that can be done to remove it easily if some of the hydrogen atoms are radioactive. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years. Unfortunately with that much water (and it keeps building up), I don't see any other practical way to deal with this. Even evaporating the water will carry Tritium into the air.
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I have no problem with this if they simply dump it in the direction of China and North Korea.
Fukushima is on the eastern coast, so toward Hawaii, not NK and China.
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I have no problem with this if they simply dump it in the direction of China and North Korea.
Fukushima is on the eastern coast, so toward Hawaii, not NK and China.
I know. I suggest that the United States subsidize funding of a pipeline. Mix in some raw sewage as well.
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You get a large tanker, insulate the tanker, fill it with the contaminated water cooling it as you transfer it. Keep the water cool just about freezing. Find a deep place in the ocean, the water is already toxic down there from the deep sea vents. Drop a large hose over the side, to reach the bottom, every few hundred metres, there should be oil balloons (tyre tubes filled with oil) to support the hose to prevent too much load. As you go deeper provide cooling below freezing (water at depth wont freeze), so
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- buoyant support of the "pipe-to-seabed" - actually, you just use a neutrally-buoyant pipe material. It doesn't need to be particularly stiff, or to handle huge flow rates, so just choosing the right material should suffice. Put an anchor weigh on the bottom end and support that on a cable from the surface, no complications.
- You're wrong about water at depth "won't fre
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They can just build more storage tanks and keep the stuff for 100+ years.
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Tritium in fact can be removed, called a detitation system, would be wickedly expensive though on that scale.
As it is they're going to dump 900 TBq over 30 years, so 30 TBq per year which is less than some reactors that dump the stuff.... but who says that 40 - 50 TBq per year is good? I wouldn't...
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oop "detritiation" system, would hate to get that word in a spelling bee.
Anyway, old former nuke worker here, it is done at some reactors.
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Depends, how many TBq of tritium there already is in the ocean?
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Shhh. Don't tell the Canadians [www.cnl.ca].
The solution to pollution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The solution to pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of pollution which naturally disappears, yes, absolutely.
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Unless you are talking mercury and heavy metals. Fish accumulate them.
And good luck diluting the CO2 and methane we are pushing into the atmosphere.
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This is tritium. And it is relatively small amount. IOW, no big deal.
Consequences (Score:2)
I'm not so much afraid of the consequences from a scientific view, but i'm very concerned about the consequences for the public debate.
Proponents of nuclear will have a much harder time suggesting it as a partial solution for the climate issue. Which in turn means more ecological damage due to the carbon problem because governments all over the world might reject nuclear out of fear for the public opinion.
So, while the direct ecological impact may be minimal, the indirect impact may be huge. Which makes it
Consequences - of storage (Score:2)
What is the risk of storing radioactive water for a hundred years? The risk of releasing it, diluted, into the ocean is zero.
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>"What is the risk of storing radioactive water for a hundred years? The risk of releasing it, diluted, into the ocean is zero."
As others have posted, tritium has a half-life of only 12 years. So if they just wait that long, HALF the radioactivity will just disappear. Double that and 3/4 will be gone. So you don't have to wait long to make it even that much safer.
In any case, this isn't much danger, regardless, as long as it is dispersed very widely.
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How hard is it to build more storage tanks until we do have a technological solution
It gets a bit tedious to build out storage for 170m3 extra every single day. If the idea is to be able to store the water for 100 years, the tank volume required is more than 6 million m3, assuming the water flow remains constant. Right now the tank volume is around 1.2 million m3.
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Unfortunately, earthquake-proofing it would be a bit of a challenge. Probably, storing it in soil behind a frozen ground coffer would be more resilient - if the cooling system goes down for a week, so what? - but aren't they doing that already to isolate the site's groundwater from off-site water.
Retrieval isn't so easy. Which makes it politically awkward.
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Proponents of nuclear will have a much harder time suggesting it as a partial solution for the climate issue.
Hey look, we dumped *all* this shit here in the ocean and nothing happened. Yet more evidence that the greenies don't know what they are talking about.
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Mercury in fish. Look it up. Carry for a bit helping of mercury laden fish. And courtesy of the alleged administration, the EPA is relaxing mercury restrictions on coal fired power plants. Mercury...yummy good.
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Tritium does not accumulate in fish. Mercury comes from the new coal plants the Germans are building.
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Hint: Mercury has nothing to do with what anybody was discussing, until you opened your mouth, and when you did, it was the first damn word and the entire subject of your verbal diarrhea
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Mercury in fish. Look it up.
Eggs in China. Look it up. Why is mercury (a bioaccumulating heavy metal) even remotely relevant in a discussion about tritium (a short half life, non bioaccumulating hydrogen isotope)?
I can't help but think you're one of those greenies that doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.
At least (Score:3)
Do you want Godzilla? (Score:2)
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Why not concentrate tritium instead of dilluting? (Score:3)
Free glowing key-chains and exit signs for everybody!
If the T2O is concentrated enough to use in those applications, it's actually marketable. If it isn't, it's not very dangerous.
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key-chains and exit signs
What a waste! We need to conserve such a precious resource for more appropriate uses [ebay.com].
Do you really trust these corporate criminals? (Score:1)
Low level radiation is harmless? (Score:2)
I recently read somewhere (can't find the reference) that living things are largely unaffected by diffuse low level radiation, as cell's repair mechanisms can prevent any permanent damage. What appears to do the damage is concentrated high level radiation, or exposure to a massive radiation dose, which overwhelms cell repair mechanisms. So the waste water needs to be filtered to remove highly radioactive particles. I guess dissolved radioactive material is safe because it is diffuse and not concentrated.
The
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I believe there is a popular health spa in Japan, where the water is slightly radioactive, due to the surrounding rocks. If the discharged cooling water is less radioactive than the spa water, then perhaps people will be happy with it. I admit that is somewhat optimistic
But what's in the spa is organic radioactivity. The tritium from Fukushima is unnatural artificial radioactivity. Probably GMO radioactivity to boot. /sarcasm
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A big ha-ha to that.
During my work in electronics, I did a contract for ICI, a major chemicals company in the UK. ICI has a long history. They used to make gas mantles out of Thoria, which is slightly radioactive. Much of the Thoria came from mines in Cornwall. When the demand for gas lamps declined, ICI was left with a stockpile of Thoria, for which there was no longer any commercial use. ICI proposed burying the surplus Thoria in the mines in Cornwall where the stuff was originally mined from. The locals
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A high school friend of mine (after a stint as reactor operator on the Nimitz) worked at a nuclear power plant that was under construction. No fuel had even been brought to the site yet; no plumbing even, there was a row of Port-A-Potties set up to take care of necessities... when all the radiation alarms went off.
Someone who had had a radioactive iodine treatment for some thyroid disorder had used one of the Port-A-Potties.
Regulations required them to rope off an area around the Port-A-Potties with "DANG
Tritium (Score:2)
According to TFA, the primary isotope that they haven't been able to remove is tritium. Of course, TFA contains zero information about the levels of tritium present in the water.
If the concentration is high, then they frankly ought to be able to sell the water, since tritium is used in various applications. If the concentration is not all that high, then there's no problem, since seawater already contains fair quantities of the stuff, and it has a half-life of only a few years.
tl;dr: Sound like panic-making
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The amount of tritium in all the water being dumped is roughly the same as in 20-30 glowing keychains on sale on eBay.
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Better articles state there are approximately 900 TBq of tritium (900 times 10E12 Bequerels). There are reactors that dump about 40-50 TBq into the environment each year.... that's kind of a lot but essentially they're going to be in that range dumping 30 TBq a year.
Dumping it in pitholes? (Score:2)
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(laughing just enough to write this) Sure, let's dump tritium into volcanoes, it will just go away. Where? Well, it just goes away. Not a fan of science I see.
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It probably ends up in the same place the hurricanes go when they are nuked.
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I remember a serious proposal to test 'burying' reinforced containers of hazardous material like nuclear waste in the ocean floor NEAR a trench where subduction occurs and over time it will be pulled inside the earth. Yes lots of time, but still probably safer than above ground or cave storage in the long term if the canisters do not leak into ocean water.
The scientist was not able to get approval, or probably funding to test it.
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I remember a serious proposal to test 'burying' reinforced containers of hazardous material like nuclear waste in the ocean floor NEAR a trench where subduction occurs and over time it will be pulled inside the earth. Yes lots of time, but still probably safer than above ground or cave storage in the long term if the canisters do not leak into ocean water. The scientist was not able to get approval, or probably funding to test it.
Nuclear waste doesn't really last as long as advertised. There are 3 parts: high level (half-lives < 1 year), medium (half-lives < 30 years) and low level (unspent fuel). The first two parts are real problems that were filtered out of the water in this case. Those can be stored for < 300 years (10x half life == 1/1024th) and it just decays to stable. The unspent fuel basically is radioactive forever from our perspective. But there are many tons of Uranium in the ocean already. The unspent fue
So... is Chernobyl still the worst? (Score:1)
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Besides, if you go swimming in water, drink water, or beer for that matter, you are getting tritium.
Fishermen opposition? hang on ... (Score:2)
release it, though what a waste (Score:2)
But, this is a shame. Rather than dispose of it, Japan should focus on separating it out. We keep talking about getting tritium from from the moon and here it is in large quantities in relatively high concentration. Not only could it be used for future Fussion, but biological tagging, safety lights, etc.
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Do you happen to know what is the tritium concentration in moon vs Fukushima water tanks?
Isn't this mainly a geography problem? (Score:1)