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Suga says time ripe to decide fate of Fukushima No.1 water
- marricks 6y agoHonest to god, isn’t shooting it just any direction in space safer?!
- MattGaiser 6y agoUnless the rocket explodes and spreads it everywhere.
- Robotbeat 6y agoMost likely would spread it into the ocean. So same thing as status quo. (Not like it’s actually a problem FWIW.)
- formerly_proven 6y ago> more than 1.2 million tons of treated water Good luck with that. That's about 100 times more than the mass of all cargo send into space so far.
- rangibaby 6y agoI read a book or something online by Michio Kaku where he was passionately against launching any kind of nuclear material because of the possibility of the rocket exploding before reaching space.
- greptomania 6y agoSafer option would be to bury it deep underground. Much ado has been said about this approach due to long-term uncertainty, but even 100-1000 years of safe storage is better than dumping it into the ocean, or having it explode on the launchpad - at least imo. Future us can always go back and improve storage as technology brings new possibilities.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> The treated water has been building up because more than 100 tons of groundwater seeps into the wrecked reactor basements every day, mixing with highly radioactive debris. If you can put 100 tons a day into orbital escape velocity, various governments would love to talk to you.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoYes, but you'd have to get it into space first. Rocket equation tyranny is expensive to get past.
- ORioN63 6y agoHow is that in any way realistic? It is treated water that they're thinking of releasing. Still radioactive, but not Fukushima radioactive.
- varjag 6y agoYou don't want it to end up on an Earth orbit (let alone a decaying one) so you'll want to give it escape velocity. That's a lot more velocity than usual. And fission byproducts are heavy..
- amalcon 6y ago"Shooting it just any direction into space" is overwhelmingly likely to be suborbital, meaning that it will just crash back into Earth somewhere. An orbital trajectory might be safer, but it's probably not what anyone has in mind. An escape trajectory is in practice impossible for this much mass.
- wodenokoto 6y agowe are talking about 1.2 million tons of water. It’s about $2-3.000 per kg to launch stuff into out of space. So it’s about $2.400.000.000.000-3.600.000.000.000, not to talk about the environmental impact of all the rocket fuel being burned in the atmosphere.
- Robotbeat 6y agoBut what if the cost is reduced to $10-30/kg (the latter for escape)? https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU
- StreamBright 6y agoAbsolutely not. A Challenger like even would be catastrophic with a payload like that even if the size and weight of the payload would not make it impossible for a liftoff with current technology. The other part is that there are safe ways of getting rid of the contaminated water on Earth.
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoWait... so Godzilla is going to end up being a documentary?
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoTL;DR "The government is considering releasing water in small quantities at a time into the Pacific off Fukushima Prefecture over a period of about 30 years, after diluting the concentration of tritium to about one-fortieth of the maximum set out by national standards."
- kijin 6y ago30 years from now, we might have to spend a lot of money harvesting all that tritium back out of the ocean to feed our fusion reactors.
- pletnes 6y agoTritium’s half life is \approx 12 years.
- throwawayboise 6y agoIt's also a low-energy beta emitter, not dangerous externally, and has a short biological half-life in the human body (days), so it there is not a long term bioaccumulation risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
- maxnoe 6y agoFusion reactors will create their tritium from Lithium. Tritiums half life is just to short.
- junon 6y agoAnd yet we're left with this incredibly outrage-inducing headline that only a small fraction of readers will look further into.
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26741539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26741539
- flotzam 6y agoUnlocking new levels of "socializing losses"
- ashtonkem 6y agoDepends how much, and how well they disperse it. The oceans are actually fairly radioactive as is; there’s an estimated 4 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved into the oceans naturally. If you disperse the waste thoroughly, it wouldn’t realistically move the needle one iota, at least as a one time expedient. Concentrated in one spot, or as a regular disposal mechanism is not recommended, obviously.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, and especially not ideological clichés. If you have a substantive point to make, that's great, but just dropping tropes guarantees a lower-quality thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bpodgursky 6y agoThese headlines really show how articles on nuclear waste do less to increase public knowledge than they do to increase confusion. The public has 0 concept about how much background radiation is in the world around them, and how there are a LOT of daily activities that increase that exposure -- like flying in an airplane. The waste here, dumped into the open ocean -- whose size is mind-bogglingly large -- likely increases radiation exposure to the average person as much as them stepping outside for 1.3 extra seconds per century.
- riskable 6y agoI was going to say something similar: As long as they don't dump it all in one place and release it intelligently (accounting for ocean currents and mixing; basically hire meteorologists, oceanographers, and marine biologists) it should be quite safe. It's not like they're dumping the uranium rods into the ocean; they're (mostly) just trying to find a way to get rid of all that radioactive water. When diluted across the entire ocean it shouldn't have any impact on ecosystems and it shouldn't accumulate in predators (that we eat) like other types hazardous waste.
- ashtonkem 6y agoEven dumping uranium wouldn’t be so bad if you ground it up really finely and dispersed it thoroughly. There is a lot of uranium in the oceans naturally. A few kilos here and there is literally nothing in comparison, as long as it’s not in one spot.
- bpodgursky 6y agoTo be precise: there are about 4 billion tons of naturally dissolved uranium in the oceans currently.
- derchu 6y agoObligatory: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- temp-dude-87844 6y ago
- Ericson2314 6y agoIs there actual risk here? I see the key phrase "reputational damage". Seeing how much uranium is already dissolved in the oceans, I think this is probably far less bad than e.g. micro-plastics.
- lainga 6y agoYes, reputational damage - see other comments below - if HN cannot understand the plan neither will the general public
- jillesvangurp 6y agoIf everyone starts dumping their nuclear waste like this, then yes. Which is why this not cool and Japan should do the right thing and just pay for solving this properly and responsibly. They took on the moral responsibility to do that when they started planning to build the reactor. Tough luck it didn't work out for them with getting some electricity on the cheap. Just bad luck or bad planning (leaning towards the latter). Nuclear waste is inconvenient because handling it properly is very costly and as soon as you start accounting for that, nuclear stops being cheap. Or put differently, it's only cheap if you make the waste somebody else's problem. Not unlike people's tail emissions from their cars are somehow not their problem but we all get to enjoy the effects of global warming. It's more a question of "can Japan get away with just dumping nuclear waste in international waters?". Answer: yes of course they can. People will whine a bit but nobody is going to do much more than that. Probably some marine life will be affected. And there's a chance that shows up in our food chain. (Japanese love sushi, just saying). But the Pacific is a big place so the chance of that is not super high. Or it happens in a few hundred years when that crap is still radioactive. By then it's the problem of a few generations after us. We might simply call that bad luck and claim that will not have a measurable effect. A few people dying in the future would be hard to measure or connect to this specific event. That doesn't mean it won't happen but just that you have plausible deniability. People confuse that with "it's fine". Depends if we are talking legalities here or moral responsibility.
- dehrmann 6y ago> If everyone starts dumping their nuclear waste like this This sounds weird, but I feel like Japan almost earned this privilege when it had a reactor by the ocean melt down.
- PicassoCTs 6y agoOkay, so this is basically day zero, for anyone who wants to eat fish? After this, only with a Geiger counter?
- thepete2 6y agoHard to know without more info. It likely depends on the rate with which they release it and the currents, i.e. how the radioactive water dilutes with the ocean. What should matter for the fish consumption there should be the local concentration.
- rblatz 6y agoNo, because this will blend into the existing background radiation already present in the ocean.
- ceejayoz 6y agoI'd worry a lot more about other pollutants we've been dumping for decades. You get more radioactivity exposure from the world's active coal plants than a bunch of Fukushimas.
- dzdt 6y agoThe bad headline here seems to be editorializing on the part of the HN submitter. The actual article link headline is "Suga says time ripe to decide fate of treated Fukushima No.1 water". Renaming "treated Fukushima No.1 water" as "radioactive waste" here is misleading and causing poor discussion by commenters assuming a concentrated high-level nuclear waste product as opposed to low-level contaminated rainwater as is the actual case.
- Afforess 6y agoYou drink it then. It was editorialized correctly, the government is planning on dumping radioactive water into the ocean. Saying that the water is "treated" and thus not a problem is equally misleading.
- Guthur 6y agoAnd the question is would it even remotely effect the overall background radiation already present. Radiation is generated from multitude of sources and adding this got be homeopathy levels of dilution.
- dang 6y ago(Submitted title was "Dumping Fukushima radioactive waste into ocean “most realistic” gov policy") Editorializing titles like that will cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. It's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Unlike on some other social news sites, submitting an article to HN confers no special rights over the submission and particularly no right to frame for others how they should interpret an article or a situation. Titles are the most powerful influence on threads—by far, actually—so this is a big deal. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... If you felt that the article's original title was misleading, it's ok to change it, but you should do that by making it more neutral, not by replacing it with your own view. In this case your objection can easily be addressed by taking out the word "treated".
- lukeplato 6y agoStupid question: why don't we launch nuclear waste into space on a trajectory similar to that of the Pioneer probe?
- gruez 6y agoSomeone asked the same thing but it's buried: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740046
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoHint: divide the mass of 1.2million tons of water with the mass of the Pioneer probe.
- m4rtink 6y agoIn short - launching heavy stuff to space is expensive and nuclear fuel is heavy (elements) pretty much by definition. Also even the most modern rockets still fail from time to time and you nuclear waste being spread over a wide area by an explosion or unplanned atmospheric reentry is much worse than having a few guards watch an heavy duty inert fuel container four a couple decades. And lastly today burned out fuel is still about 95% usable if you care to remove the impurities preventing further chain reaction that come from fission products. Not to mention all sorts of valuable materials that got created due to transmutation of part of the material via neutron capture in the reactor core.
- opwieurposiu 6y agoOne self luminous exit sign contains about 0.00074 PBq of tritium. The Fukushima stored water contains about 0.76 PBq of tritium(as of 2018), 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. If you want to more than net out the radiation release from dumping this water, close one small coal plant. https://safecast.org/2018/06/part-1-radioactive-water-at-fukushima-daiichi-what-should-be-done/ https://safecast.org/2018/06/part-1-radioactive-water-at-fuk... https://www.everglow.us/pdf/tritium-exit-sign-fact-sheet-lan https://www.everglow.us/pdf/tritium-exit-sign-fact-sheet-lan...
- aurizon 6y agoAhh, the boogeyman.... This water containstraces of various contaminants. Most of which are substantial dimensionally. If you chose a dense ion exchange membrane (sea water desalination membranes are low density to maximise water throughput) - this denser membrane will allow all the water to be stripped of contamination. You will get a clean stream and a dirty stream and with cascaded membranes you will separate the contaninated water into a releasable stream and a contaminated stream that is .001% of the volume of the clean stream. This contaminated stream is very small and can be stored for 1000+ years in less space than it now consumes. The clean stream is releasable.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/CNYPA https://archive.is/CNYPA