Japan To Start Releasing Fukushima Water Into Sea In 2 Years (apnews.com) 161
According to the Associated Press, Japan's government decided it will start releasing treated radioactive water accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean in two years. From the report: Under the basic plan adopted Tuesday by the ministers, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, also known as TEPCO, will start releasing the water in about two years after building a facility and compiling release plans adhering to safety requirements. It said the disposal of the water cannot be postponed further and is necessary to improve the environment surrounding the plant so residents can live there safely. TEPCO says its water storage capacity of 1.37 million tons will be full around fall of 2022. Also, the area now filled with storage tanks will have to be freed up for building new facilities needed for removing melted fuel debris from inside the reactors and for other decommissioning work that's expected to start in coming years.
In the decade since the tsunami disaster, water meant to cool the nuclear material has constantly escaped from the damaged primary containment vessels into the basements of the reactor buildings. To make up for the loss, more water has been pumped into the reactors to continue to cool the melted fuel. Water is also pumped out and treated, part of which is recycled as cooling water, and the remainder stored in 1,020 tanks now holding 1.25 million tons of radioactive water. Those tanks that occupy a large space at the plant interfere with the safe and steady progress of the decommissioning, Economy and Industry Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said. The tanks also could be damaged and leak in case of another powerful earthquake or tsunami, the report said.
Releasing the water to the ocean was described as the most realistic method by a government panel that for nearly seven years had discussed how to dispose of the water. The report it prepared last year mentioned evaporation as a less desirable option. About 70% of the water in the tanks is contaminated beyond discharge limits but will be filtered again and diluted with seawater before it is released, the report says. According to a preliminary estimate, gradual releases of water will take more than 30 years but will be completed before the plant is fully decommissioned. Japan will abide by international rules for a release, obtain support from the International Atomic Energy Agency and others, and ensure disclosure of data and transparency to gain understanding of the international community, the report said. China blasted the Japanese government for being "extremely irresponsible," and warned that it might take action. "The Japanese side has yet to exhaust all avenues of measures, disregarded domestic and external opposition, has decided to unilaterally release the Fukushima plant's nuclear waste water without full consultation with its neighboring countries and the international community," the foreign ministry statement said. "This action is extremely irresponsible and will pose serious harm to the health and safety of the people in neighboring countries and the international community."
South Korea also isn't happy with Japan's decision. "The government expresses strong regret over the Japanese government's decision to release contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean," said Koo Yoon-cheol, head of South Korea's Office for Government Policy Coordination.
In the decade since the tsunami disaster, water meant to cool the nuclear material has constantly escaped from the damaged primary containment vessels into the basements of the reactor buildings. To make up for the loss, more water has been pumped into the reactors to continue to cool the melted fuel. Water is also pumped out and treated, part of which is recycled as cooling water, and the remainder stored in 1,020 tanks now holding 1.25 million tons of radioactive water. Those tanks that occupy a large space at the plant interfere with the safe and steady progress of the decommissioning, Economy and Industry Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said. The tanks also could be damaged and leak in case of another powerful earthquake or tsunami, the report said.
Releasing the water to the ocean was described as the most realistic method by a government panel that for nearly seven years had discussed how to dispose of the water. The report it prepared last year mentioned evaporation as a less desirable option. About 70% of the water in the tanks is contaminated beyond discharge limits but will be filtered again and diluted with seawater before it is released, the report says. According to a preliminary estimate, gradual releases of water will take more than 30 years but will be completed before the plant is fully decommissioned. Japan will abide by international rules for a release, obtain support from the International Atomic Energy Agency and others, and ensure disclosure of data and transparency to gain understanding of the international community, the report said. China blasted the Japanese government for being "extremely irresponsible," and warned that it might take action. "The Japanese side has yet to exhaust all avenues of measures, disregarded domestic and external opposition, has decided to unilaterally release the Fukushima plant's nuclear waste water without full consultation with its neighboring countries and the international community," the foreign ministry statement said. "This action is extremely irresponsible and will pose serious harm to the health and safety of the people in neighboring countries and the international community."
South Korea also isn't happy with Japan's decision. "The government expresses strong regret over the Japanese government's decision to release contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean," said Koo Yoon-cheol, head of South Korea's Office for Government Policy Coordination.
How long 'til Godzilla appears? (Score:2)
radiation + seawater, kind of thing.
Re: How long 'til Godzilla appears? (Score:2)
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Pure, fresh, highly radioactive water. And ingesting tritium has long been understood to cause a number of health problems, particularly to embryos.
https://www.reformer.com/local... [reformer.com]
>Seawater is already radioactive
At vanishingly low levels. Natural tritium concentrations are one part in 10^18 (1 in a billion, billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000)
And contrary to the Forbes article, it's alpha radiation that's (mostly) blocked by the skin. Still a really bad idea to ingest it though.
Beta radiation, whic
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maybe adding some sugar
It already has tritium [slashdot.org]
Why not (Score:3)
Pump it into an empty oil tanker and take it somewhere else.
Maybe Kim whatshisname of North Korea would take it, he likes nuclear stuff.
Or send it to FL and fill up the swimming pools at Maralago
Re: Why not (Score:3)
There was a garbage barge loaded with fly ash that tried that once. It wound up back outside Philadelphia after going for a stroll around the world.
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The Khian Sea Disposal Incident [youtube.com]
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Actually, that might not be a bad idea since the water is going to have to be dumped sooner or later anyway - and it would clearly need to meet at least some environmental standards before that can legally happen. The current intention is almost certainly going to be a slow release of low-level radioactive water into the sea near the location of the Fukushima plant, which means the environmental impact will be heavily concentrated in that area u
Re:Why not (Score:4, Interesting)
The scale of the problem isn't unfeasible: the amount of water they want to release is only about 2.5 times the capacity of the current largest supertankers. Other potential issues which would have to be assessed are the risk of distributing local parasites when they dilute it with seawater - ship bilge water has been a means of transport of invasive species in the past; and the fact that supertankers which are intended to carry oil might have tanks which don't handle the corrosive effects of salt water very well.
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Nothing about this is cheap. However, a ULCC supertanker that can carry about 500,000 tons would only cost about $120M, which is less than 1% of what they've spent so far. Might be worth it to not cause additional harm to local marine economies. However, with the time period of release that they are talking about, you wouldn't need something capable of carrying ~30% of the total - more like 10% or less, which can be had for $43M new.
Considering that they've reportedly already spent over $300B, $43M for t
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I would think the risk is to the tanker. Those are not exactly super cheap. Maybe if you can find some that are already headed to the breaking yard. After all if they are a bit leaky - well that is sorta of the point :-). The big issue with all of this if I understand it correctly is chemical and biological processes re-concentrating the radio active isotopes.
So if this stuff gets caught up in rust or some other process it could contaminate the tankers. If that happens you now have to 'hot' tankers..
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Old ships have been sunk on purpose to help create coral reefs and aquatic habitats before, generally with good results, so as long as you can avoid any adverse chemical or biological processes from residual oil and the water from Fukushima, then you'd just need to pick a suitable atoll or seamount with some suitably shallow water.
You don't want to dump radioactives in shallow waters because of bioconcentration.
Give it a few decades and you'd hopefully have a decent amount of coral, plenty of fish (ideally not including too many with three eyes)
Ideally, huh?
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Why don't they evaporate the water? Then bury the residue, which should be relatively small.
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Because evaporating it would send some of the contamination up into the atmosphere. They figured that dumping it in the sea would be less likely to affect where people live, although obviously Aquaman might disagree.
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Except for the particulates small enough to be carried away with the evaporate (which rains into the ocean anyway). Filtering the evaporate is probably harder than simply filtering the water and dumping into the sea.
I can't imagine how corrosive evaporated seawater would be to all of the equipment and buildings that are decades away from being dismantled.
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Sounds like they're already planning to filter out the radioactive particulates, what they're talking about dumping is pure fresh, water that's highly radioactive because the hydrogen has been transmuted into tritium (unstable hydrogen with two neutrons instead of the normal zero)
Aside from the enormous energy requirements, evaporation would also mean that everyone downwind would then be breathing large amounts of radioactive tritium and suffering from the resulting health problems.
If they dump it in the oc
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Because the water itself is radioactive, as the hydrogen atom has been replaced with tritium.
Boiling tritiated water makes radioactive steam, which is far harder to contain, and far more dangerous from an ingestion perspective.
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Or send it to FL and fill up the swimming pools at Maralago
Please don't. Can you imagine the amount of nonsense we'd get from Trump if he had two heads from which to shout bullshit.
Do you want Kaiju? (Score:2)
China is upset, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
A country's environmental practices when handling hazardous material generated from human industry may put the rest of the planet's population at health risk? I'm guessing the irony of them complaining [bbc.com] is lost on them.
Re: China is upset, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unusually for a bbc story, it seems they lay much of the blame, not on China, but on the entire world.
I don't see any irony there at all, especially since it is localised.
Except that there's no risk (Score:5, Informative)
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Except that there's no risk. The concentration of tritium and other radioactive elements are low enough that if they dilute it by just 100x then it'll be safe enough to be used as tap water in the US.
Your assumptions illustrate that you have *zero* understanding of the issue. These are the concepts you need to understand. 1. Bio-accumulation. 2. micro-nutrient analogues.
The issue at hand is that the radio-isotopes being released are recognized by metabolisms as micro-nutrients. Those metabolisms filter and accumulate radioactive elements where they are eaten by higher order creatures, all they way up the top of the food chain to the Earths apex predator, Human Beings.
So no, you cannot "dilute"
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:5, Interesting)
Your claim that one cannot dilute them is strange, because the EPA and NRC appear to directly regulate concentrations of radionuclides.
On drinking water: https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/... [epa.gov]
More generally: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/... [nrc.gov]
Bananas and carrots pose a greater nuclear health threat than this water.
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Your claim
This is a characteristic of radio-isotopes, that is what science is for. (IIRC) Strontium-90 presents as calcium, Cesium-137 as Iodine, Plutonium-239 as Iron.
Bananas and carrots pose a greater nuclear health threat than this water.
Your assumption is so mired in ignorance it is ridiculous. Accumulation occurs over *time*, i.e it will continue to get worse and worse. Symptoms of ingesting tritium in primates is reduced brain weight. Beta radiation from tritium accumulated in fat cells has ample electron volts to modify DNA in reproductive cells as a source of transgenic dis
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Your assumption is so mired in ignorance it is ridiculous. Accumulation occurs over *time*, i.e it will continue to get worse and worse.
Do you understand the words: "tritium does not bioaccumulate"? Or is your brain shrunken already?
Symptoms of ingesting tritium in primates is reduced brain weight.
Yup. You clearly are demonstrating symptoms of tritium poisoning.
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:5, Informative)
Present your evidence.
https://www.irsn.fr/EN/Researc... [www.irsn.fr] - "To date, no phenomenon of tritium bioaccumulation has been observed in marine organisms on the French Channel coast."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov] - "From this experiment, the biological half-life of tritium was determined to be 2.26 days"
Tritium DOES NOT bioaccumulate.
Clearly you have no argument, no answer to the research presented. All you have a boring ad hom attacks,
Sorry. Your shrunken Greenpeacenik brain is simply incapable of understanding what people tell you. Let me say it slowly: concentration. Any clinically-significant effects require concentrations of tritium that are _trillions_ times greater than in Fukushima water storage. You can drink undiluted water from these tanks all your life and you will never get any clinical effects of radiation poisoning.
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You have incorrectly represented the results. OBT in the paper refers to "Organically Bound Tritium", i.e. it is bio-accumulated.
No, it does not. It simply means that the elevated background tritium levels got "snapshotted" when the sediment was formed. Just as elevated carbon-14 levels are "snapshotted" when an organism dies. Nothing more.
Read your fucking articles, please.
Please find some updated studies about bio-accumulation in marine creatures. [sciencedirect.com]
Irrelevant. They are using organically-bound tritium. Tritium released in water is NOT organically bound. Only a small fraction of it will ever become organically bound. It's so small that it's difficult to estimate, but it's probably within single Becquerels.
Apology accepted. Obviously you're so single mindedly focused on Tritium
N
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And you, once again, forgot that the article and summary both say that the water will be filtered and treated to remove the heavy elements present. That might have a large probability of why he's focusing on the tritium, since the other elements shouldn't be there when they start releasing it into the ocean, and thus are not germane to the conversation.
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Interesting. You ARE aware that there is a certain amount of tritium in ALL water, right? Yeah, even the bottled water you no doubt drink to avoid using tapwater....
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Your assumptions illustrate that you have *zero* understanding of the issue. These are the concepts you need to understand. 1. Bio-accumulation. 2. micro-nutrient analogues.
There are concepts that you need to understand. No, actually just one: CONCENTRATION.
It's ridiculously low for Sr in the tank water. It can be detected, of course, because modern analytic chemistry methods are scarily sensitive. But it's completely safe. You are also forgetting that tritium does NOT bioaccumulate and that Sr-90 happens quite naturally due to spontaneous uranium fission.
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Your assumptions illustrate that you have *zero* understanding of the issue. These are the concepts you need to understand. 1. Bio-accumulation. 2. micro-nutrient analogues.
There are concepts that you need to understand. No, actually just one: CONCENTRATION.
You are free to check the references I provided. Bio-accumulation *is* the concentration of radio-isotopes through biological means. You can ramble on all day about how little you know about Tritium and it wouldn't make any difference to the more harmful radio-isotopes being released. Strontium-90 will be released, it is one of the elements they cannot remove properly. Shall we go on? Present your evidence, not your assumptions.
Japan is a technological country. They should be forced to accumulate
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:4, Informative)
You are free to check the references I provided.
None of them is relevant. You're looking for "tritium poisoning" on Google and posting whatever crap you find without even checking it. Read you fucking articles and check the concentrations that are listed there.
To give you a clue, absolutely clean natural seawater near Japan's coastline has activity of 2000 Bq for cubic meter from natural tritium produced by decay and cosmic rays - https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] . All of Fukushima water in storage has total activity of about 5*10^14 Bq of tritium - https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] . I.e. it has the same total activity as 100 cubic kilometers of natural sea water.
Bio-accumulation *is* the concentration of radio-isotopes through biological means.
Yes. And tritium is an isotope that does not bioaccumulate. Read up on how bioaccumulation works and why isotopes of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen do not bioaccumulate.
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Except that Strontium can be removed, and is removed in industrial water purification facilities all over the world with simple lime softening - using these known procedures and equipment can reduce Strontium concentrations in water by 75% easily, and that's from a study conducted in 1954 [nih.gov].
Are you saying that the state of the art hasn't gotten any better in the last 60 years? Or that the water in question couldn't take multiple passes through the treatment process to further reduce quantities before dischar
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:4)
The whole concept of OBT doesn't make thermodynamic sense. There is always an equilibrium level of Tritium present that they don't appear to be subtracting out in their methods and if the sample has any trace Lithium in it you'll have Tritium production from cosmic ray neutrons.
Sr-90 is one of the easier elements to remove and the Japanese have done so.
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You are acting like all radioactive substances are equal, but they are not.
You need to worry about bioaccumulation when it's a heavy metal - strontium, cesium, etc. - that's not what they are looking to dump into the ocean. They are filtering that out of the water, and disposing of it with other high-level nuclear solids.
What is left is tritiated water, which does not bioaccumulate. It's not the best stuff to have around but it's far less dangerous than just opening a valve on these tanks and dumping the
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:5, Informative)
As a side note, the plan is to dilute it to 15% the level of tritium that the WHO recommend as the limit for drinking water (dilution to 1500 Bq/L, WHO threshold 10 000 Bq/L). The US's limit of 740 Bq/L is considerably more stringent than many places in the world.
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Plan to. The reality is that this could easily not work as hoped.
To dilute that much water they need to circulate a much large volume of water through their system. That isn't easy as they plan to pump it out from land, so it will disperse near the coast. The hope is that currents carry it away and help it dilute, but that's by no means guaranteed.
The plan to monitor the process to see if it is working, but they can only install so many monitoring stations and take so many samples. It's possible it will acc
Re:Except that there's no risk (Score:4, Informative)
If you've been wondering what's with all these different units for radioactivity, Becquerel (Bq) measures atomic decays per second. Gray (Gy) is the energy of those decays. i.e. (decays per second) * time of exposure * energy per decay / kg of tissue. Sievert (Sv) factors in the likelihood of that radiation to cause biological damage when you're exposed to it. i.e. ((Decays per second) * time of exposure * energy per decay / kg of tissue) * weighting factor for likelihood to cause genetic damage. So measuring the radioactivity in Bq here is already a concession to the alarmists, since it represents the largest number you can use to characterize the radioactivity from tritium. Since tritium is a low-energy beta emitter, the risk of biological harm is actually a lot lower than the Bq measurement would suggest..
With that in mind, the Sv equivalent doses [warwick.ac.uk] are quite low for tritium. The highest concentrations I've seen reported from water around Fukushima are 790,000 Bq/L. If you were to drink a liter of that straight, it would be equivalent to (790 kBq) * (1.8x10^-11 Sv/Bq) = 0.000014 Sv = 14 uSv by the time the water passed out of your system. Looking that up on xkcd's radiation chart [xkcd.com], that's a bit more than the natural radiation you receive in a day, and about 1/3 the radiation you receive during a 6 hour flight. So flying from Los Angeles to New York gives you roughly the same harmful radiation dose as drinking 3 liters of the most-tritium-laced water from Fukushima. And they're planning to dilute it to about 1/500th that concentration.
Re:China is upset, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The release will have a negligible effect on either China or Korea.
The release is on the Pacific side of Japan, where the current will carry it toward Alaska and eventually to the west coast of North America.
China and Korea are just complaining because of their general dislike for Japan.
Why waste it? (Score:2)
Sell it on ebay as "miracle water".
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"The tanks also could be damaged and leak..." (Score:2)
You mean, and then waste could get into the sea?
Oh wait...
An elegant solution to pollution (Score:2)
About 70% of the water in the tanks is contaminated beyond discharge limits but will be filtered again and diluted with seawater before it is released, the report says.
Top tip for any heavily polluting industry: just dilute your lethal emissions, then dilute a bit more... there you have it! You are now within the rules and are no longer a nasty polluter!
statistically insignificant (Score:2)
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Penny wise, pound foolish (Score:2)
With a long enough pipeline and enough dilution it's practically irrelevant ... but PR wise this is a disaster with massive costs.
I assume they don't want to evaporate because some of the gaseous compounds released over land are a much bigger problem than a drop in the ocean, but they could build a big distillator.
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1.37 million tons is approx 1.3949 million metric tons of water. A metric ton of water is one cubic metre in volume, i.e., 1,000 litres of water.
So Japan has to deal with something like 1,394,909,091 litres of water. An Olympic-sized swimming pool (50m x 25m x 2m) holds 2,500,000 litres of water. So expressed in that unit, Japan is proposing to release 557.963 "Olympic Swimming Pools" of treated Fukushima water in to the ocean.
Unfortunately, Fukushima isn't ideally placed in ter
China (Score:2)
Boycott begin now (Score:2)
You can’t shit where you live. By 2023 Japan should feel the economic costs to fouling the world’s oceans. This is the same country that thought Nazi was a good for humanity.
Do you **WANT** Godzilla ??? (Score:2)
. . . .because this is how you get Godzilla. . . .
(Insert Archer Meme here. . . )
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Not the same story. The previous story was speculative. This story is about the actual decision which has been made.
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Not the same story. The previous story was speculative. This story is about the actual decision which has been made.
Then hopefully next time only the factual story is posted.
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Then hopefully next time only the factual story is posted.
Why? Do you only like discussing the past and not having any opportunity to influence the future?
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So this story is like a fission product of the previous story? What is the half-life of slashdot stories? I wonder how long before the story fissiates into a stable form.
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I bleive it's actually "Sure, this generation isn't safe, but the next generation will be..."
Re: If it's done right, it's probably not a proble (Score:2)
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Isn't this a release over 30+ years? I think they'd have time to study the dissipation of the particulate in the interim.
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Re:Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, where did all the "environmentalist" go? Why aren't they screaming at Japan right now?
https://www.greenpeace.org/int... [greenpeace.org]
Re:Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting that they went with the human rights angle. They are increasingly becoming a human rights organization.
Obviously this will be hard on the people of Fukushima. It's actually a province, not a single town. They really struggled to rebuild businesses after the disaster, especially fishing and farming. Invested a lot in equipment to prove that the produce was safe, and in marketing to restore confidence. Even so many lost their businesses and livelihoods. This fresh release of material is going to worsen the situation.
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This fresh release of material is going to worsen the situation.
Why do you think that? Because Korea complained? How will it affect the people of Fukushima?
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I think they mean PR, not actual safety.
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Obviously this will be hard on the people of Fukushima.
What is the alternative that is better for them?
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TEPCO pays to filter the water, removing the contamination and disposing of it safely.
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TEPCO pays to filter the water, removing the contamination and disposing of it safely.
I thought it was filtered as much as it can be at this point and the remaining contaminant, tritium, cannot be filtered out. From TFA
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., and government officials say tritium, which is not harmful in small amounts, cannot be removed from the water, but all other selected radionuclides can be reduced to releasable levels. Some scientists say the long-term impact on marine life from low-dose exposure to such large volumes of water is unknown.
At some point, dispersing the water is less harmful overall than attempting to store it, where seepage will lead to concentrated contamination. I think it's a good idea to have a plan, and hopefully if the water is not sufficiently filtered in two years, they will revise the plan.
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It can be removed, just not at a price they are willing to pay.
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It can be removed, just not at a price they are willing to pay.
Can you provide some more background? Preferably from a relatively neutral source (e.g., not an source aligned with an advocacy group).
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Veolia makes such a system: https://www.nuclearsolutions.v... [veolia.com]
Veolia are a huge multinational company based in France, and they developed that technology for cleaning up French nuclear plants.
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Hey, where did all the "environmentalist" go? Why aren't they screaming at Japan right now?
https://www.greenpeace.org/int... [greenpeace.org]
Thank you for posting this. This is absolutely no longer a Japanese issue but a global issue. Japan has no right to dump the consequences of their inability to manage their nuclear facilities onto the rest of the world.
What sovereign right to Japan claim to be able to simply make this the rest of the worlds problem because they are to embarrassed to reach out to the global community for help in handling the disaster as it continues to unfold.
Ten years on and the only news from Fukusima is We don't
Re:Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for posting this. This is absolutely no longer a Japanese issue but a global issue. Japan has no right to dump the consequences of their inability to manage their nuclear facilities onto the rest of the world.
Actually, it's a carefully planned release of water from which the long-period contaminants cesium and strontium have been filtered. What's left is tritium, which because it is part of the water (T2O) cannot be filtered. Tritium is short-term and does not bioaccumulate.
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Short-term of course being a relative measure. With a half-life of 12.32 years most of the tritium released today will still be a danger a decade from now, and it'll take 33 years for 90% of it to decay away.
Also, while tritium doesn't significantly bioaccumulate from brief exposure, it does accumulate to ambient levels with chronic exposure, since water is a primary ingredient in most biological structures. It's good that it doesn't get bioconcentrated up the food chain like mercury and many radioactive
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The ocean is pretty big. What level of dilution is enough for you?
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What's the original concentration?
The US EPA suggests 20,000 pCi/L of tritium as a safe contamination level in drinking water, assuming you're not exposed to any other radioactive contamination from other sources(as if). Since tritium produces about 10,000 Ci per gram, that translates to 2 pg/L of tritium, or about 2 parts heavy water in 100,000,000,000,000.
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The article says the release will happen over the next 30 years, so by the time the tanks are empty, 90% of the tritiated water that used to be in them will just be water and some helium-3. Now, combine that with the fact that they have a maximum storage of 1.3 million tons, and the Pacific Ocean has somewhere in the neighborhood of 724 billion tons of seawater, even if what was stored in those tanks was 100% tritiated water (it's not), and released all at once (it won't be) you would be talking about a 0.
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If there was as much tritium as you're claiming in the Fukushima water, they wouldn't be throwing it away. It has a number of industrial, medical and military uses. But the concentration in the filtrate is too minuscule to be worth recovering. It is most especially too minuscule to be detected after it is released into the Pacific.
What the US and other governments were watching for in the weeks after Fukushima was tsunami debris and fish that contained strontium and cesium isotopes. That stuff is now long g
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Re:Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, where did all the "environmentalist" go? Why aren't they screaming at Japan right now?
The US supported this? Oh, well...
The real question is how much pollution this release will cause. The article does not inform us on this. Just that the amount of water is approximately 1.25 million tons (thus a bit more than 100m x 100m x 100m volume). Will the radiation quickly be diluted to be insignificant when they release it or will it have a significant environmental impact compared to other pollution sources?
My gut feeling is that the impact is rather negligible if done properly and that more focus should be put on reducing the huge daily pollution of the World Ocean from other sources. For example plastic pollution: https://www.forbes.com/sites/h... [forbes.com]
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The calculation is the cost of further cleaning the water and then dealing with the extracted waste, vs. the cost of dumping it in the ocean.
The dumping cost is rather low. Lawsuits are not big money-makers in Japan, in fact the amount of compensation received by people who lost their homes and businesses to the disaster is pathetic.
The clean up cost is already looking to be around the $350bn mark so they are looking to save money.
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Lawsuits are not big money-makers in Japan, in fact the amount of compensation received by people who lost their homes and businesses to the disaster is pathetic.
Japan learned from Chernobyl and the Ukrainian lawsuits. Lawsuits there were based on measuring the amount and type of radio-isotopes found in other regions around the country, the difference was made to be a way to measure just how far from normal the complainant's exposure and amount of compensation due.
Japan's answer: They took debris from Fukushima that were covered in fall-out from the disaster to different regions around Japan and burned them, exposing other regions to deny complainant the full seve
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I don't know if that's true, but the issue in the lawsuits was not the radiation exposure. It was the fact that people were forced to leave their homes and many have yet to be allowed to return due to clean up failing repeatedly. Turns out it is really, really hard to clear a contaminated area and eliminate all hot spots where radiation exceeds government safety limits.
The lawsuits were claiming compensation for lost property, lost businesses, psychological trauma and in some cases death. Japanese law does
Re:Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as radiation is concerned, about half the worldwide daily consumption of bananas. Or a coal-fired power plant run for 6 hours:
https://www.expunct.com/enviro... [expunct.com]
Re: Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Informative)
If the majority of the particulate settles nearby its concentration will be higher and of greater risk. The bottom feeders we eat as a delicacy (lobsters, shrimp/prawns, and crab) will likely house this contaminant.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radia... [cdc.gov]
Re: Where's Greenpeace, Greta, et al? (Score:5, Informative)
>What you have is radioactive particulate that is suspended in the water. H2O itself is not radioactive.
That's true of the Cesium, etc. that (it sounds like) they plan to filter out of the water.
Tritium however is radioactive hydrogen, it's part of the individual water molecules themselves. EG instead of H20, you have HTO, or possibly T20 depending on just how irradiated the water was. Chemically it's still just water, but water that's slightly heavier than usual (molecular mass of 20 or 22 instead of 18) and emits beta radiation.
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Funny you should mention tritium, I have been trying to get a decent ebay price on some used lensatic compasses that use tritium. So I had to study up on its half-life, etc. You would be surprised how many people trying to sell used compasses at 75% of their new price with manufacture dates of 1995, 2003, 2008, etc. BTW Beta Minus decay is when a Neutron turns into a Proton. A beta particle is an electron. Beta radiation gets stopped by your clothing and succombs to charge particle interaction. The decay
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The plan is to filter out the particulates to the extent reasonably possible. And then dilute with seawater. And release it slowly over decades. I'm not seeing a problem with this.
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Filtering out the heavy radioactive elements is fairly easy, and something they said they will do, per the article. Filtering tritiated water is something that has only been done in a lab - nowhere near the industrial scale needed here. And yes, the water itself is radioactive because it's not H20, it's T20 - the hydrogen atom has been replaced with a Tritium isotope.
So basically what you posted isn't really congruent with the summary or the article.
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Health Effects
Tritium is a relatively weak source of beta radiation. The beta particle itself does not have enough energy to penetrate the skin. However, it can pose a health risk if taken directly into the body in extremely large quantities; for example, a person would need to take in billions of becquerels before seeing a health effect
I really do not see Tritium being the biggest concern here. Not to mention its industrial application for luminescence.
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/en... [nuclearsafety.gc.ca]
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Hey, where did all the "environmentalist" go? Why aren't they screaming at Japan right now?
The US supported this? Oh, well...
The real question is how much pollution this release will cause. The article does not inform us on this.
Then I will. [slashdot.org]
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Hey, where did all the "environmentalist" go? Why aren't they screaming at Japan right now?
Is that like saying "where is the sun, why did it not rise today" as you lay in bed with your eyes closed? Rather than ask questions and look like an idiot I suggest you go out and look around.
Especially if you're trying to make a point that drives an agenda. With such a demonstration of ignorance you're actually sending the opposite message than the one you're intending to send.
Re: The Viral Pot and the Nuclear Kettle (Score:2)
That is yet to be shown....while the origin of the water in question is clear.
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Exactly where does this stuff go, your the same class of idiot who screams about Deep Storage techniques like Yucca Mountain. You seem to like to keep stuff around in concentrations so you can bitch about it.
We could use it to supply people like yourself a supply of drinking water. Since you think it is of no concern, you drink it.
I feel your "blah blah" insults are meaningless dribble that scream your internal dialogue as you look at yourself in a mirror revealing you do not have the technical knowledge to analyse the issue, so you should not speak to the subject.
Go bury your waste at Yucca, I don't care that it will pollute Nevada's water table. Properly designed facilities have been designed in Europe
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Japan decided to remove 25 metres of hillside and build the Fukushima facility on an ancient river bed. It was their own collusion between TEPCO and the government regulator that meant sea wall modifications weren't performed to protect the facility AND that located backup generators where they *would* be flooded.
Actually, GE insisted that was the best site for the reactor. Despite this, they are getting a free pass on their involvement [courthousenews.com] because to US courts there is no value to holding corporations accountable for their actions.
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If your argument is based on faulty assumptions, will you change your opinion with new information?
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2... [nature.com]
Chernobyl was much much worse, releasing not only 20x the amount of radiation in Bq but also because some of the failsafe design of Fukushima worked: the containment vessels remained largely intact and it didn't explode and catch fire, so the real nasties like plutonium didn't get dispersed.
And Chernobyl did affect the rest of the world. The West find out when a power plant ope