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Radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi: What should be done? (2018)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rmbryan 7y agoHere's Part 2: https://blog.safecast.org/2018/06/part-2-radioactive-water-at-fukushima-daiichi-what-should-be-done/ https://blog.safecast.org/2018/06/part-2-radioactive-water-a...
- adrianN 7y agoSo oil tankers can apparently carry some 300000 tons. Three or four oil tankers full would then be enough storage space for the onsite water. Couldn't we fill some tankers and have them release the water far away from any fishing grounds?
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI wondered that myself. I think the problem is that they first need to dilute it considerably before releasing it. If they do that before loading it onto the ship it might take too many journeys to empty the tanks. If they do it onboard the ship the you've got a ship full of radioactive water sailing about. I'm not sure how hazardous the water is but you might struggle to find people willing to sail on it.
- adrianN 7y agoTritium is quite weakly radioactive. It is effectively shielded by a few millimeters of air. As long as the crew doesn't drink the cargo they should be pretty save.
- marcosdumay 7y agoEvaporation may make it hard to insulate the crew from the cargo.
- adrianN 7y agoEvaporations from crude oil are probably more dangerous so I assume that oil tankers are equipped for this.
- m4rtink 7y agoMaybe just get an older tanker and sink it over the destination ? If you make holes big enough in the process it should take care of both dilution & the contaminated vessel. It worked fine for ships full of chemical weapons in the past, so should be able to work in this case as well. :)
- VBprogrammer 7y agoThe tanks that they are containing the water in at the moment could be made to float with some bladders and towed out. Maybe we've cracked it :)
- gnode 7y agoThis was my thought also, although it may not be trivial to just hire an oil tanker to transport radioactive water. Before dilution, there may be a significant risk of contamination to the vessel and crew. You'd probably need a special vessel, specifically designed to handle radioactive fluids. Even if an oil tanker is technically adequate, there's likely some costly certification / approval that would need to be done. All the handling involved would also introduce risks, and is probably more cheaply and safely achieved on land. That said, there's a political aspect to this, and maybe the perception of disposing of the water far away from Fukushima justifies the scientifically unnecessary added complexity.
- pvaldes 7y ago> it may not be trivial to just hire an oil tanker to transport radioactive water I bet that this is not even legal, for good reasons
- knodi123 7y agoI get what you're saying, but I also can't help but chuckle at the fact that you're practically quoting the old "We'll just tow it until it's beyond the environment" skit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- bitL 7y ago...and damage some preserved ecosystem in the process. Great idea!
- adrianN 7y agoThe article made it sound like the water is mostly harmless and Sellafield dumps orders of magnitude more into the sea without dramatic effects.
- gnode 7y agoThe same release from a vessel in open water is less likely to damage an ecosystem than release from the shoreline. That said, if it's diluted enough and released over a long enough period of time, it's unlikely to make much difference.
- pvaldes 7y agoNot!. Is just the opposite. Coastal ecosystems are much more resilient than deep water ecosystems! They evolved to stand changes. We must stop thinking in the ocean as just a lot of water. This way of thinking is suicidal.
- tru3_power 7y agoThat brings up a good point. There are a few nuclear zones that no one lives in right (Chernobyl came to mind after watching that hbo show)? Why don’t we at-least get some value out of of these sad situations and convert one to a nuclear disposal site?
- m4rtink 7y agoIIRC this is already happening in Chernobyl - other than all the wildlife preservation & tourism there is a big solar power plant being built: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-chernobyl-life-solar-power.html https://phys.org/news/2018-10-chernobyl-life-solar-power.htm... The article says they aim for up to 100 MWe capacity in the future, which would be nice, yet still illustrates how very powerful nuclear reactors are, with each of the 4 now inactive Chernobyl blocks producing 1000 MWe (and 3x times as much heat!).
- imchillyb 7y ago> ...Couldn't we fill some tankers and have them release the water... @adrianN 1st) Who is this /we/ you speak of? 2nd) Who's tankers are you suggesting /we/ utilize? 3rd) Who is the governing authority here that is in charge of the WE, the VESSELS, and the area of release? Who's backyard does this take place in? How much compensation is being offered for these privately owned tankers that will be permanently damaged by the radioactive waste being carried? Who is paying the wage and medical bills for the crews that are crewing said vessels? Where does this labor come from in the first place? Who is safety training these laborers in the proper use of protective gear, proper disposal procedures for contaminated gear, etc... Finally, where the hell is this highly-contaminated water going to be released and or stored? Most importantly, who the hell is going to pay for all of what you've suggested? _____ I sure as hell am not going to pay for it. TEPCO sure as hell isn't going to pay for it. Japan sure as hell isn't going to pay for it. SO, I ask again, who's footing the bill for this immensely complex and expensive process?
- pvaldes 7y agoHiding the problem under the rug. The sucessful human way of choice to manage radiation since the simpsons' first season Water currents would return it to home, or to somebody's home or kitchen. Fishes migrate also.
- Lazare 7y agoThat's not how it works. It's dilute enough it's safe to just dump it on the coast already; dumping it at sea would just be a big PR production to make it appear even safer. There's no risk of "water currents causing it to return home". That's not even something that is physically possible.
- pvaldes 7y ago> That's not even something that is physically possible. Water currents move water masses, travel in closed loops and obey the laws of physics. Claiming that is not even physically possible that the same water pass two times by a point is an overstatement. Can be unprobable, but is perfectly possible with enough time. Water in Fukushima travels to California and Alaska and then returns again to Japan, and then returns to USA in an endless loop. That's how it works. Ask an oceanographer. Water masses with their own collection of animals and plants are traced far away of their point of origin. Is not a secret at all.
- fredley 7y agoMy old Physics teacher always said to put it on cornflakes. The surface area of all cornflakes in existence (back of the envelope) would result in totally harmless concentrations, undetectable above background. Of course getting the waste evenly distributed over all the cornflakes is another matter, one for the engineers...
- jessriedel 7y agoNo one knows with any confidence whether radiation levels below background levels are harmful or not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
- AbrahamParangi 7y agoSure but the assumption is that however infinitesimally bad it is, it’s not worse than what you’re already tolerating.
- jessriedel 7y ago"Tolerating" might mean experiencing the normal levels of cancer, which is 2nd only to heart disease as a leading cause of death in the US. If we take a given amount of radiation, then, assuming the linear-no-threshold model, spreading that radiation around a giant population does not decrease the number of deaths induced.
- throwaway5752 7y agoDoesn't work that way if you ingest it, right? And obviously not all radiation is equal (alpha, beta, gamma) and even among those they have varying level of energy based on source. The concern here - if I understand correctly - is that it's ingestion and absorption of a low half live (more energetic) beta emitter.
- jessriedel 7y agoNo, I don't think the distinction between ingestion and external exposure is fredley's point. Indeed, a fixed amount of radiation is much more destructive when ingested. But regardless, that's not the point I'm disputing. I'm disputing whether "the radiation has been reduced to background levels" necessarily means the negative effect of the radiation has been made negligible. Rather, assuming the linear-no-threshold model, the number of radiation-induced deaths will not decrease.
- warmwaffles 7y agoQuick question / thought, why not run it through beds of sand that take some of the radiation and bury that sand somewhere? Eventually as you run the water through the sand long enough it should become less and less irradiated right?
- gnode 7y agoThe problem is that you have a large volume of radioactive fluid. The radioactivity is "low-level" but still poses a danger to health and life. If you store it somewhere, you have to be sure it will stay there. Additionally, if it turns out you stored it somewhere silly, you'd want to be able to get it back. The alternative is to dilute it down so that it's less harmful, but then you have a larger volume, and so containing it is a larger problem. If you dilute it to the point that its volume is the entirety of water on earth, then it's at a safe level (and a fraction of the natural level), and so isn't a containment problem anymore. Sand will not help the problem; the radioactive component is tritium, which is in the water molecules themselves. The sand will just mix with the water and give you a larger volume that has handling challenges of wet sand and evaporates and sweats radioactive water.
- Robotbeat 7y agoYou don’t need to dilute it to the entire volume of the earth’s supply to make it safe. Remember, we build granite countertops and eat nuts and go outside in the sunshine, all of which have large amounts of natural radiation.
- gnode 7y agoYou don't need to in the general case, although the only practical way to do so in this case is via the ocean.
- jtms 7y agoI’m guessing if there were a way to filter out the tritium they probably already would have. The article states that they already removed other isotopes from the water, but not the tritium. This leads me to believe there is something particularly tricky about separating it from water. Hopefully someone with some knowledge can weigh in here as I am curious as well.
- opwieurposiu 7y agoAnyone who lives in Colorado receives a dose of many Fukushima's a year. I have a radon counter in my basement and watch the count ebb and flow with the seasons. One self luminous exit sign contains about 0.00074 PBq of tritium. The Fukushima stored water contains about 0.76 PBq of tritium, enough for about 1027 signs. I suspect there is far more tritium in the exit signs in Tokyo then there is in the Fukushima water. https://www.everglow.us/pdf/tritium-exit-sign-fact-sheet-lanl.pdf https://www.everglow.us/pdf/tritium-exit-sign-fact-sheet-lan...
- rhacker 7y agoI don't fully understand the comment - but I think it's my lack of knowledge here. If I stand next to a sign made with a small amount of tritium I get a small dose of radiation. If I live near a river or ocean that has 0.76 PBq dumped into it, isn't that high concentration going to be a lot worse for me even if I drive past every exit sign in Tokyo? What if I end up growing a Tritium vegetable garden?
- Lazare 7y ago> isn't that high concentration going to be a lot worse for me even if I drive past every exit sign in Tokyo No, absolutely not. Both are extremely harmless. Zero is zero; neither is more harmful than the other. Let me put it this way: In both cases, a much bigger threat to you would be walking past the display of bananas at the local supermarket. (And no, you shouldn't be worried about the radiation from THAT either.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- GregoryPerry 7y agoEr, all it takes is one ingested radioactive particle to damage DNA and spawn cancer. Radioactive particles from Fukushima are showing up in automobile AC filters on the West Coast, and the media hasn't said much about the MOX fuel in Reactor 3 that many experts now theorize could go critical based on the volatile (and largely untested) combination of plutonium and uranium that MOX consists of. And Japanese culture is about the worst possible mindset to deal with this cleanup effort, they are more concerned about saving face and avoiding embarrassment in front of the international community for having made the genius decision to build a bunch of nuclear reactors, some of which are using experimental MOX fuel, on top of the Shionihara Fault. They haven't even located the melted fuel in these reactors yet, and one misstep could easily result in another meltdown or worse yet a critical MOX mushroom cloud that kills millions if not hundreds of millions of humans as the result. Never mind the 850,000 tons of contaminated water they are now simply going to discharge into the ocean.
- Shorel 7y agoSo, this means I can eat fish caught in the Pacific ocean again? Is the radioactivity low enough?
- Robotbeat 7y agoIt has been low enough the whole time. Radioactivity is super easy to detect even at harmless levels. Sunburn is a far (probably a million times? More?) bigger concern with similar effects (radiation burns possibly leading to cancer), yet people still go outside.
- hutzlibu 7y agoBecause sun is also healthy in the right dose. Its all about the right balance..
- Gibbon1 7y agoOr lack of sun is also unhealthy by the you can't win for nothing principal. The whole Fukushima aftermath is a good example of the Mike Tyson Principal: Everyones got a plan till they get punched in the face. There were plans how to prevent this kind of mess until it actually happened.
- Lazare 7y agoThere's probably a number of reasons not to eat fish caught in the Pacific ocean, but nothing to do with Fukushima was ever one of them. People grossly overestimate how much radiation there is, not to mention how dangerous it is. Bananas are much more radioactive than fish from the pacific, regardless of when or where caught. :)
- belenos46 7y agoUhhh, culture a bunch of spores of radiotrophic fungus[0] and dump them all over the area? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
- rbmktechik 7y agoThat water emits 3.6 Roentgen
- radnuke 7y ago"Under the scenarios being discussed, the water would be diluted to 60,000 Bq/L before being released to the ocean. This number alone seems alarming, but is the concentration level that has been legally allowed to be released from Japanese nuclear power plants and reprocessing facilities such as Tokaimura for decades." This is what needs to happen, any other action is kicking the can down the road. Another substantial earthquake or time will do the same. Additionally 60kBq/L is larger compared to other isotopes because of tritium's properties. As long as this isotope is diluted properly there is no possibility of biological aggregation or concentration of this, it is just hydrogen, chemically speaking.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- keiru 7y agoI'm far more worried about what happens when the next tsunami strikes. Getting rid of tons of contaminated water sounds important, or the sea will come and take it in one go.