13 ms·

Japan decides to release water from Fukushima plant into sea

127 points by thread_id 5y ago

ddingus 5y ago
The solution to pollution is dilution.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-01-03 https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-01-03
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Lolol, I chuckled
- koolba 5y ago
  I say this in my mind every single time I wash my hands.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Interesting take. Truth in action. Simple, practical.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Well, another solution is to not pollute, because at some point it may not be possible to dilute.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    That's not going to happen. We're going to pollute. That's what we do. So we have to make intelligent decisions about what we emit, where we emit it, and how much we emit.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    It is always possible to dilute. Does not always make sense though. No free lunches here. No matter what we do, there are costs and risks. And no matter what, our nature tends to take us well down a path to a point of real pain before those costs change behavior too. If we valued things differently, we would pollute and manage things differently, but we don't. Maybe one day we will. I agree with you, but am just being real about our nature.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Is there a single method of generating power that does not pollute? Solar power requires mining cadmium and tellurium, creating plastic frames, solder, connections, etc -- and then replacing said panels as they become ineffective/broken/dirty. These end up in the landfill and buried. Wind power require mining rare earth metals, manufacturing large quantities of fiberglass or carbon fiber composite bodies, and then, once they're damaged, ineffective or spent, they end up in the land fill and buried. The question is one of efficiency: which power generation method yields the lowest amount of waste and lowest health and life risks per TWh of generated electricity.
- trhway 5y ago
  >The solution to pollution is dilution. it has been proven times and times again that such a "solution" doesn't work. Just an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#/media/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at... Similar to the CO2 where the issue isn't any one particular car or plane, the issue in this case isn't the polluted water from one plant. The issue is the practice of dumping of stuff into the oceans. Allowing such practice to go forward will quickly lead to the ocean not able to "dilute" anymore to safe concentration the stuff we'd be dumping into it. And on pure economics grounds - businesses and even regular people are getting fined even for accidental releases into water and air, and why should a nuclear plant be allowed to externalize its costs (which the dumping is) instead of bearing it? The do have an insurance after all.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    You mean doesn't always work, right? Containment is another option we sometimes have available to us, when we cannot transform the waste otherwise. In general though, dilution is the go to. In this scenario, we will end up forced to live with dilution. Containment is crazy, and the core itself is likely to end up in the water cycle. Breakdown takes a looooong time.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    Obviously the answer is to make more atmosphere and/or ocean!
    - trhway 5y ago
      we have the whole Solar system waiting for our stuff to be dumped there.
      - ddingus 5y ago
        Getting it out is ultra high risk.
  - Guvante 5y ago
Causality1 5y ago
Correct decision. The water only contains 0.76 PBq of tritium. That's only half the radiation US nuclear plants dump every year.
- passerby1 5y ago
  What's the reason for the US nuclear plants to dump it?
  - luxuryballs 5y ago
    I think they are making electricity.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    They are allowed to do so, like in so many other countries. It turns out dumping liquid radioactive wast into oceans is fine (law wise, if only radioactive and not otherwise problematic etc.)......
  - Causality1 5y ago
    It just isn't that much. Depending on what kind of flow rate they have it'll be below detectable concentration almost immediately.
Animats 5y ago
Well, it's been 10 years, so tritium is half as radioactive now.
- kenned3 5y ago
  It is equally radioactive as it was 10 years ago, but now there is half of it left. While i am very supportive of nuclear power, this idea of half-life seems misunderstood. what remains is just as radioactive... Just now there is less of it.
  - t8e56vd4ih 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure intensity is proportional to "what's left".
  - ascar 5y ago
    If there are half as many radioactive isotopes left then the material is also half as radioactive, as radioactivity is measured in decays per second (Becquerel [1]). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel
- deeviant 5y ago
  I don't believe this is correct. The tritium is constantly being made. They are pumping water into a highly radioactivity area to cool the rods, but making tritium in the process.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >They are pumping water into a highly radioactivity area to cool the rods, but making tritium in the process. AFAIK the water being dumped isn't currently used to cool the reactor.
ghodith 5y ago
Can anyone explain to me why this would be preferred over the alternative they mention in the article of evaporating the water?
- garmaine 5y ago
  The radioactive water still goes somewhere. Would you rather it go into the ocean or into our lungs and crops?
  - asymmetric 5y ago
    You seem to imply the ocean is a clearly better option — I’m not sure it is? Harm will come to us and other animals either way, the extent seems a bit hard to assess and depends highly on what one values.
    - eganist 5y ago
      The water can stop beta particles far more effectively than the air (2in v. 10ft), which minimizes the risk to life forms save for those which directly interact with tritium water, but even then, there's far more water in the ocean for tritium water to dilute into. In the air, the water will still get invariably pulled into the water cycle, wherein it condenses into rain, enters streams and lakes, plants, life, etc. where it can't as effectively dilute. Would love for a nuclear or environmental researcher to fact-check me here. I'm out of my depth. I'm just applying the trivia that I know.
      - skrause 5y ago
        This "what if" xkcd is somewhat relevant: https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/ The vast majority of water molecules in the oceans have never been drunk by any human ever.
      - rnhmjoj 5y ago
        I'm just a physics student by incidentally I'm researching tritium right now. Tritium is one of the least toxic radionuclide because the β radiation it emits is very low energy, also the biological half life is only 10 days (it means it's quickly eliminated by the body): unless you ingest very large quantities of it, you're probably going to be fine. In fact, the range of the electrons is even less than you quote: around 5 mm in air and 6 μm in water, which means it's effectively stopped by the dead skin layer. If I were to decide, I would probably pick dilution in water over vaporisation.
1cvmask 5y ago
Which marine products are they referring to: The government had initially hoped to make a decision on the discharge of the treated water in October last year but later decided it would need more time for discussions amid staunch concern about reputational damage to marine products.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Seafood for domestic and international consumption.
staticelf 5y ago
Japan is a cool country, except stuff like this and their obsession in killing whales, sharks and dolphins.
TedShiller 5y ago
So in other words they just waited until the accident is no longer in the headlines?
- kminehart 5y ago
  Read the article before jumping to conclusions.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    A fact is not the same as a conclusion
- wffurr 5y ago
  ...isn't this a headline?
9500 5y ago
10 years too late if you ask me...
- dathinab 5y ago
  There are some radioactive elements in the water which decay relatively fast, so waiting a bit before releasing it is a good idea (and on radioactive scale 10years are just a bit).
samatman 5y ago
Good. A decade of listening to hippies say the most insane things about radiation from Fukushima, driven by cynical and breathless media mendacity, was a real black pill. I've said this before: Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster in human history, because our media landscape amplified it into something which effectively cut off nuclearization of baseline power as something which Western nations which aren't France could do. I don't know precisely how many gigatonnes of carbon we're talking about but it is, without exaggeration, a double-digit percentage of the total. It could be gone and it isn't, and it's because of Fukushima. The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible. What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable. Such a shame.
- neolog 5y ago
  > benefitted only a few people in journalism Some competitor industries too.
- merb 5y ago
  > The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible. well there is a lot of sealine, which would disagree if they could. (they can't of course) it will have tons of impact on the sealife where the water will be released. it might be even going ways where we do not know. it's basically a tradeoff. release it in the sea and pollute that or worse it could in some way contain freshwater. it's not a black pill and such measures should probably taken with care. > What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable. if only human cost is bad, than I guarantee you that in 10-20 years you do not want to live on this planet. we should never treat such a thing lightly no matter if it will only pollute 0.00001% of the plants inside the ocean.
- 0xTJ 5y ago
  I really find it gross the extent to which fear mongering over nuclear happens. Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal, which kill far more people, even scaling by use. Instead of using a source of power that's overall incredibly safe, and which produces relatively small amounts of highly manageable waste, people have pushed to switch to these incredibly environmentally harmful power sources. This is especially surprising from countries like Germany that, as someone who doesn't live anywhere near them, see them as technically adept. My province in Canada got 60% of our power in 2018 from nuclear (plus 1/4 from hydro), and a different province got 95% of theirs from hydro, but then that's offset by other provinces that get 90% of theirs from natural gas and coal. Sure not every place is ideally suited for a lot of nuclear (though hopefully SMRs will help), but 90% is too high. We need less fossil fuels and more nuclear to bridge the gap to more renewables. For an interesting comparison of the deaths from nuclear energy, compared to other sources, I highly recommend "How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM
egb 5y ago
Cringely has some columns about this: https://www.cringely.com/2021/03/26/10-years-later-fukushima-daiichi-still-melts-down-my-heart/ https://www.cringely.com/2021/03/26/10-years-later-fukushima...
dathinab 5y ago
Well a lot of countries did (and some still do) send liquid radio active wast into the oceans. Supposedly it's all fine "because it get's diluted enough". But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by. But then it might be true on the bug picture and it just needs time to be diluted, in which case a one-time release (instead of continual ones I'm speaking about) might be fine. More importantly is to learn from all the problems which made the catastrophe worse. A recurring theme is "known" problems not have been known by the people operating it (i.e. they didn't reach them) and emergency plans having gaps. So like always it's more a human then a technical problem. But then human problems always happen.
- jshmrsn 5y ago
  “But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by.” Do you have a link/source for this?
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/16205804/caffeine-in-puget-sound-sends-researchers-back-to-square-one https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/16205804/caffeine-in... This doesn't talk about the health problems because in this case that wouldn't quite make sense, but it does show that minerals/substances/chemicals/whatever can locally concentrate around an area even when it's connected to the ocean.
    - nanis 5y ago
      > The researchers said little is known about the effects of caffeine on wildlife, but the caffeine in Puget Sound is so diluted it probably has a minimal effect.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  > But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by. What's good source for this claim?
forgetfulness 5y ago
It doesn't say how they're going to release it though. Are they just going to flush it by the shore? Wouldn't you want to actually spread it out as much as possible and as far away as you can, rather than have it concentrated right next to where you and lots of fauna live?
- pm90 5y ago
  From the article: > The following month, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, drafted a plan to dilute the water to below the legal limit for concentration of radioactive materials before releasing it in the sea. Presumably that’s safe to dump into the sea shore when it’s that diluted.
  - freetime2 5y ago
    Yup and will further dilute by orders of magnitude once released into the open ocean.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Absolutely, but it’s critical monitoring is occurring to ensure enough dilution is taking place to render what is being dumped harmless.
dang 5y ago
Past related threads, including one from a few days ago: Suga says time ripe to decide fate of Fukushima No.1 water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26739686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26739686 - April 2021 (54 comments) Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into Pacific, minister says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925770 - Sept 2019 (30 comments) Radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi: What should be done? (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304208 - June 2019 (61 comments) No One Knows What to Do with Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689554 - June 2015 (135 comments) Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an 'emergency' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6160977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6160977 - Aug 2013 (125 comments)
devy 5y ago
This article makes it seems like no big deal as all radioactive contaminants have been removed by the so-called ALPS except tritium (which has a half life of 12.43 years). However, that's simply not the case. TEPCO has been repeatedly lying to the public about the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and downplayed the impact but we now know that it's a INES Level 7 accident. The only INES Level 7 was Chernobyl disaster. But Chernobyl nuclear plant was an inland site - Fukushima is ocean-front power plant site that has the risk of leakeage to sea, so the long term effect is very likely to be much much worse. Greenpeace released a report[1] recently, and to no one's surprise, most of the decontaminated area are still heavily contaminated today. Also TEPCO's current approach on clean up in unsustainable - certainly not with hundreds of the tanks to store contaminated waste water. Additionally, the cooling of nuclear fuel debris should be switched from water to air cooling. What this means is that there will be more waste water generated and more radioactive to be released into the environment and now into the Pacific ocean. It only takes 400 days for the water to be circulated around the global and the water can be evaporated and rain into inland areas too - the spread would affect more than just oceans. Dr. Ken Buesseler, a senior marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he would prefer to see all the water treated properly before any is released. As he noted in his paper[3], there are actually a dozen more radioactive contaminants (perhaps more) in the waste water to be removed. WaPo has a more balanced reporting[2] on this. So yeah, this news is anything but good. To be fair, Japan being a island nation cannot solve this clean up effort by themselves, they do need other countries to help and figure out a better permanent solution for the nuclear waste disposal here. [1]: https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/nature/publication/2021/03/04/50412/ https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/nature/publication/2021/03/... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/fukushima-japan-radioactive-water-anniversary/2021/03/05/b0515cd0-76b8-11eb-9489-8f7dacd51e75_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/fukushima-... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344036480_Buesseler_Opening_Floodgates_at_Fukushima_Science_Perspective_Aug_2020 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344036480_Buesseler...
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Why would Japan being an island nation prevent it from handling this situation?
cbmuser 5y ago
It’s Tritium aka Hydrogen with two neutrons which is part of any water anyway and even part of the human body. Even if they release all of the Tritium water, they will not even cause a minuscule bump in the Tritium concentration of the ocean. Plus, Tritium is a beta emitter and the particles have a range of merely a few micrometers. Releasing that Tritium has never been a health or environmental problem, it has merely been a PR and political problem.
- Retric 5y ago
  Tritium isn’t in normal water at any appreciable quantities, your probably thinking of Deuterium. Tritium’s has a half life is only 12.32 years and is very light weight making it surprisingly deadly per kg. Releasing this quantity sufficiently far off shore is a minimal health hazard, but the stuff is a serious health hazard that needs to be handled appropriately. That said, it’s also worth 30,000$/gram so it’s generally only a problem at very low concentrations.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    Is it not possible to concentrate it via centrifuge or distillation?
    - Retric 5y ago
      Physically possible but not economically viable, it’s ~3 grams of tritium out of ~1,000,000,000,000 grams of water.
  - hilbert42 5y ago
    Same rhetorical question here. At that price, it would seem it's worth concentrating it, so why not? Of course, that would depend on the average concentrations in the holding tanks, so I consulted the source of much knowledge and it has an answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium (go to Fukushima Daiichi). "<...>the Tritiated Water Task Force released a report on the status of tritium in tritiated water at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant<...>. [In 2016] <...> holding of tritium on-site was 760 TBq (equivalent to 2.1 g of tritium or 14 mL of pure tritiated water) in a total of 860,000 m3 of stored water. This report also identified the reducing concentration of tritium in the water extracted from the buildings etc. for storage, seeing a factor of ten decrease over the five years considered (2011–2016), 3.3 MBq/L to 0.3 MBq/L (after correction for the 5% annual decay of tritium)." That report is here: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/pdf/20160915_01a.pdf https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... Now draw your own conclusions.
acidburnNSA 5y ago
At one point CNN and Greenpeace were saying that the Carbon-14 in particular would "change human DNA", since the tritium levels would be diluted well below anything people could reasonably define as hazardous [1]. There are 63.6 GBq of Carbon-14 in the tanks total. Sounds like a lot but that actually comes out to 0.4 grams total. This entire amount is generated naturally every ~40 minutes in the atmosphere [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/11/29/japan-should-release-tritium-contaminated-water-to-the-ocean/?sh=1a15a3e0d8ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/11/29/japan-sho... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-25-greenpeace-mistaken-on-radiocarbon-impact.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-25-greenpeace-mistake...
- deeviant 5y ago
  In the entire atmosphere? I dunno, that statement does not make it sound better to me at all.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    To be fair that 0.4g is getting dropped into the entire ocean heh.
    - Eduard 5y ago
      No, it's not distributed world wide evenly in all oceans
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Certainly will get there in time :) unless they're planning to contain it in little aquariums.
        pvaldes 5y ago
        Certainly not. The ocean is a little more complex than a glass of water. The solution to this problem will came in the hands of science or will not happen. If we dismiss even the most basic science or use that time to make silly jokes instead, we will enjoy a brutal wake up call and return to reality when our flamboyant plans backfire. And they will do. The entire planet will be very disappointed with Japan if they finally do that. Their public image as a modern country will suffer, for sure.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
totetsu 5y ago
Is it going to be diluted on land and the diluted mix pumped to sea, or pumped out to sea undiluted?
User23 5y ago
Tritium radioluminescence is actually really cool. It's too bad they aren't commercializing this instead of dumping it in the ocean.
chenzhekl 5y ago
Off-topic, I don't know if there will still be that many people defending the action if it is not Japan but Russia.
MrDresden 5y ago
I see the article mentions that the idea of evaporation was discussed. Any one know why that route wasn't taken? Would it aerosol the Tritium?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robster 5y ago
Lots of very clever people in the comment section, so please tell me in which universe is releasing 1.2 million tonnes of radioactive waste water into the ocean ever justifiable as good or even preferable? The impacts would be felt for at least ten years across the world. The best way is to contain it, as they have for ten years, and Japan has polluted land to store the wastes, the only problem is the expense. And if you could solve it with money, that's not a big problem at all for a government. I suppose with this move, Japan can even threaten the world for support to help them contain the waste.
notaspecialist 5y ago
They have a lot of money, and can easily store the radioactive waste, but - out of sight - out of mind for the Japanese. I lived in Japan for many years, and the feeling I left with was that the Japanese do not care about the environment. EDIT: Some do, but they are the minority, and easily dismissed by real Japanese.

127 points by thread_id 5y ago

ddingus 5y ago

The solution to pollution is dilution.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-01-03 https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-01-03
- ddingus 5y ago
  Lolol, I chuckled
koolba 5y ago
I say this in my mind every single time I wash my hands.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Interesting take. Truth in action. Simple, practical.
saagarjha 5y ago
Well, another solution is to not pollute, because at some point it may not be possible to dilute.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  That's not going to happen. We're going to pollute. That's what we do. So we have to make intelligent decisions about what we emit, where we emit it, and how much we emit.
- ddingus 5y ago
  It is always possible to dilute. Does not always make sense though. No free lunches here. No matter what we do, there are costs and risks. And no matter what, our nature tends to take us well down a path to a point of real pain before those costs change behavior too. If we valued things differently, we would pollute and manage things differently, but we don't. Maybe one day we will. I agree with you, but am just being real about our nature.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Is there a single method of generating power that does not pollute? Solar power requires mining cadmium and tellurium, creating plastic frames, solder, connections, etc -- and then replacing said panels as they become ineffective/broken/dirty. These end up in the landfill and buried. Wind power require mining rare earth metals, manufacturing large quantities of fiberglass or carbon fiber composite bodies, and then, once they're damaged, ineffective or spent, they end up in the land fill and buried. The question is one of efficiency: which power generation method yields the lowest amount of waste and lowest health and life risks per TWh of generated electricity.
trhway 5y ago
>The solution to pollution is dilution. it has been proven times and times again that such a "solution" doesn't work. Just an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#/media/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at... Similar to the CO2 where the issue isn't any one particular car or plane, the issue in this case isn't the polluted water from one plant. The issue is the practice of dumping of stuff into the oceans. Allowing such practice to go forward will quickly lead to the ocean not able to "dilute" anymore to safe concentration the stuff we'd be dumping into it. And on pure economics grounds - businesses and even regular people are getting fined even for accidental releases into water and air, and why should a nuclear plant be allowed to externalize its costs (which the dumping is) instead of bearing it? The do have an insurance after all.
- ddingus 5y ago
  You mean doesn't always work, right? Containment is another option we sometimes have available to us, when we cannot transform the waste otherwise. In general though, dilution is the go to. In this scenario, we will end up forced to live with dilution. Containment is crazy, and the core itself is likely to end up in the water cycle. Breakdown takes a looooong time.
- wffurr 5y ago
  Obviously the answer is to make more atmosphere and/or ocean!
  - trhway 5y ago
    we have the whole Solar system waiting for our stuff to be dumped there.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Getting it out is ultra high risk.
- Guvante 5y ago

Causality1 5y ago

Correct decision. The water only contains 0.76 PBq of tritium. That's only half the radiation US nuclear plants dump every year.

passerby1 5y ago
What's the reason for the US nuclear plants to dump it?
- luxuryballs 5y ago
  I think they are making electricity.
- dathinab 5y ago
  They are allowed to do so, like in so many other countries. It turns out dumping liquid radioactive wast into oceans is fine (law wise, if only radioactive and not otherwise problematic etc.)......
- Causality1 5y ago
  It just isn't that much. Depending on what kind of flow rate they have it'll be below detectable concentration almost immediately.

Animats 5y ago

Well, it's been 10 years, so tritium is half as radioactive now.

kenned3 5y ago
It is equally radioactive as it was 10 years ago, but now there is half of it left. While i am very supportive of nuclear power, this idea of half-life seems misunderstood. what remains is just as radioactive... Just now there is less of it.
- t8e56vd4ih 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure intensity is proportional to "what's left".
- ascar 5y ago
  If there are half as many radioactive isotopes left then the material is also half as radioactive, as radioactivity is measured in decays per second (Becquerel [1]). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel
deeviant 5y ago
I don't believe this is correct. The tritium is constantly being made. They are pumping water into a highly radioactivity area to cool the rods, but making tritium in the process.
- gruez 5y ago
  >They are pumping water into a highly radioactivity area to cool the rods, but making tritium in the process. AFAIK the water being dumped isn't currently used to cool the reactor.

ghodith 5y ago

Can anyone explain to me why this would be preferred over the alternative they mention in the article of evaporating the water?

garmaine 5y ago
The radioactive water still goes somewhere. Would you rather it go into the ocean or into our lungs and crops?
- asymmetric 5y ago
  You seem to imply the ocean is a clearly better option — I’m not sure it is? Harm will come to us and other animals either way, the extent seems a bit hard to assess and depends highly on what one values.
  - eganist 5y ago
    The water can stop beta particles far more effectively than the air (2in v. 10ft), which minimizes the risk to life forms save for those which directly interact with tritium water, but even then, there's far more water in the ocean for tritium water to dilute into. In the air, the water will still get invariably pulled into the water cycle, wherein it condenses into rain, enters streams and lakes, plants, life, etc. where it can't as effectively dilute. Would love for a nuclear or environmental researcher to fact-check me here. I'm out of my depth. I'm just applying the trivia that I know.
    - skrause 5y ago
      This "what if" xkcd is somewhat relevant: https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/ The vast majority of water molecules in the oceans have never been drunk by any human ever.
    - rnhmjoj 5y ago
      I'm just a physics student by incidentally I'm researching tritium right now. Tritium is one of the least toxic radionuclide because the β radiation it emits is very low energy, also the biological half life is only 10 days (it means it's quickly eliminated by the body): unless you ingest very large quantities of it, you're probably going to be fine. In fact, the range of the electrons is even less than you quote: around 5 mm in air and 6 μm in water, which means it's effectively stopped by the dead skin layer. If I were to decide, I would probably pick dilution in water over vaporisation.

1cvmask 5y ago

Which marine products are they referring to: The government had initially hoped to make a decision on the discharge of the treated water in October last year but later decided it would need more time for discussions amid staunch concern about reputational damage to marine products.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Seafood for domestic and international consumption.

staticelf 5y ago

Japan is a cool country, except stuff like this and their obsession in killing whales, sharks and dolphins.

TedShiller 5y ago

So in other words they just waited until the accident is no longer in the headlines?

kminehart 5y ago
Read the article before jumping to conclusions.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  A fact is not the same as a conclusion
wffurr 5y ago
...isn't this a headline?

9500 5y ago

10 years too late if you ask me...

dathinab 5y ago
There are some radioactive elements in the water which decay relatively fast, so waiting a bit before releasing it is a good idea (and on radioactive scale 10years are just a bit).

samatman 5y ago

Good. A decade of listening to hippies say the most insane things about radiation from Fukushima, driven by cynical and breathless media mendacity, was a real black pill. I've said this before: Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster in human history, because our media landscape amplified it into something which effectively cut off nuclearization of baseline power as something which Western nations which aren't France could do. I don't know precisely how many gigatonnes of carbon we're talking about but it is, without exaggeration, a double-digit percentage of the total. It could be gone and it isn't, and it's because of Fukushima. The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible. What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable. Such a shame.

neolog 5y ago
> benefitted only a few people in journalism Some competitor industries too.
merb 5y ago
> The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible. well there is a lot of sealine, which would disagree if they could. (they can't of course) it will have tons of impact on the sealife where the water will be released. it might be even going ways where we do not know. it's basically a tradeoff. release it in the sea and pollute that or worse it could in some way contain freshwater. it's not a black pill and such measures should probably taken with care. > What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable. if only human cost is bad, than I guarantee you that in 10-20 years you do not want to live on this planet. we should never treat such a thing lightly no matter if it will only pollute 0.00001% of the plants inside the ocean.
0xTJ 5y ago
I really find it gross the extent to which fear mongering over nuclear happens. Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal, which kill far more people, even scaling by use. Instead of using a source of power that's overall incredibly safe, and which produces relatively small amounts of highly manageable waste, people have pushed to switch to these incredibly environmentally harmful power sources. This is especially surprising from countries like Germany that, as someone who doesn't live anywhere near them, see them as technically adept. My province in Canada got 60% of our power in 2018 from nuclear (plus 1/4 from hydro), and a different province got 95% of theirs from hydro, but then that's offset by other provinces that get 90% of theirs from natural gas and coal. Sure not every place is ideally suited for a lot of nuclear (though hopefully SMRs will help), but 90% is too high. We need less fossil fuels and more nuclear to bridge the gap to more renewables. For an interesting comparison of the deaths from nuclear energy, compared to other sources, I highly recommend "How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

egb 5y ago

Cringely has some columns about this: https://www.cringely.com/2021/03/26/10-years-later-fukushima-daiichi-still-melts-down-my-heart/ https://www.cringely.com/2021/03/26/10-years-later-fukushima...

dathinab 5y ago

Well a lot of countries did (and some still do) send liquid radio active wast into the oceans. Supposedly it's all fine "because it get's diluted enough". But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by. But then it might be true on the bug picture and it just needs time to be diluted, in which case a one-time release (instead of continual ones I'm speaking about) might be fine. More importantly is to learn from all the problems which made the catastrophe worse. A recurring theme is "known" problems not have been known by the people operating it (i.e. they didn't reach them) and emergency plans having gaps. So like always it's more a human then a technical problem. But then human problems always happen.

jshmrsn 5y ago
“But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by.” Do you have a link/source for this?
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/16205804/caffeine-in-puget-sound-sends-researchers-back-to-square-one https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/16205804/caffeine-in... This doesn't talk about the health problems because in this case that wouldn't quite make sense, but it does show that minerals/substances/chemicals/whatever can locally concentrate around an area even when it's connected to the ocean.
  - nanis 5y ago
    > The researchers said little is known about the effects of caffeine on wildlife, but the caffeine in Puget Sound is so diluted it probably has a minimal effect.
BurningFrog 5y ago
> But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by. What's good source for this claim?

forgetfulness 5y ago

It doesn't say how they're going to release it though. Are they just going to flush it by the shore? Wouldn't you want to actually spread it out as much as possible and as far away as you can, rather than have it concentrated right next to where you and lots of fauna live?

pm90 5y ago
From the article: > The following month, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, drafted a plan to dilute the water to below the legal limit for concentration of radioactive materials before releasing it in the sea. Presumably that’s safe to dump into the sea shore when it’s that diluted.
- freetime2 5y ago
  Yup and will further dilute by orders of magnitude once released into the open ocean.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Absolutely, but it’s critical monitoring is occurring to ensure enough dilution is taking place to render what is being dumped harmless.

dang 5y ago

Past related threads, including one from a few days ago: Suga says time ripe to decide fate of Fukushima No.1 water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26739686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26739686 - April 2021 (54 comments) Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into Pacific, minister says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925770 - Sept 2019 (30 comments) Radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi: What should be done? (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304208 - June 2019 (61 comments) No One Knows What to Do with Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689554 - June 2015 (135 comments) Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an 'emergency' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6160977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6160977 - Aug 2013 (125 comments)

devy 5y ago

This article makes it seems like no big deal as all radioactive contaminants have been removed by the so-called ALPS except tritium (which has a half life of 12.43 years). However, that's simply not the case. TEPCO has been repeatedly lying to the public about the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and downplayed the impact but we now know that it's a INES Level 7 accident. The only INES Level 7 was Chernobyl disaster. But Chernobyl nuclear plant was an inland site - Fukushima is ocean-front power plant site that has the risk of leakeage to sea, so the long term effect is very likely to be much much worse. Greenpeace released a report[1] recently, and to no one's surprise, most of the decontaminated area are still heavily contaminated today. Also TEPCO's current approach on clean up in unsustainable - certainly not with hundreds of the tanks to store contaminated waste water. Additionally, the cooling of nuclear fuel debris should be switched from water to air cooling. What this means is that there will be more waste water generated and more radioactive to be released into the environment and now into the Pacific ocean. It only takes 400 days for the water to be circulated around the global and the water can be evaporated and rain into inland areas too - the spread would affect more than just oceans. Dr. Ken Buesseler, a senior marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he would prefer to see all the water treated properly before any is released. As he noted in his paper[3], there are actually a dozen more radioactive contaminants (perhaps more) in the waste water to be removed. WaPo has a more balanced reporting[2] on this. So yeah, this news is anything but good. To be fair, Japan being a island nation cannot solve this clean up effort by themselves, they do need other countries to help and figure out a better permanent solution for the nuclear waste disposal here. [1]: https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/nature/publication/2021/03/04/50412/ https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/nature/publication/2021/03/... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/fukushima-japan-radioactive-water-anniversary/2021/03/05/b0515cd0-76b8-11eb-9489-8f7dacd51e75_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/fukushima-... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344036480_Buesseler_Opening_Floodgates_at_Fukushima_Science_Perspective_Aug_2020 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344036480_Buesseler...

phendrenad2 5y ago
Why would Japan being an island nation prevent it from handling this situation?

cbmuser 5y ago

It’s Tritium aka Hydrogen with two neutrons which is part of any water anyway and even part of the human body. Even if they release all of the Tritium water, they will not even cause a minuscule bump in the Tritium concentration of the ocean. Plus, Tritium is a beta emitter and the particles have a range of merely a few micrometers. Releasing that Tritium has never been a health or environmental problem, it has merely been a PR and political problem.

Retric 5y ago
Tritium isn’t in normal water at any appreciable quantities, your probably thinking of Deuterium. Tritium’s has a half life is only 12.32 years and is very light weight making it surprisingly deadly per kg. Releasing this quantity sufficiently far off shore is a minimal health hazard, but the stuff is a serious health hazard that needs to be handled appropriately. That said, it’s also worth 30,000$/gram so it’s generally only a problem at very low concentrations.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Is it not possible to concentrate it via centrifuge or distillation?
  - Retric 5y ago
    Physically possible but not economically viable, it’s ~3 grams of tritium out of ~1,000,000,000,000 grams of water.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  Same rhetorical question here. At that price, it would seem it's worth concentrating it, so why not? Of course, that would depend on the average concentrations in the holding tanks, so I consulted the source of much knowledge and it has an answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium (go to Fukushima Daiichi). "<...>the Tritiated Water Task Force released a report on the status of tritium in tritiated water at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant<...>. [In 2016] <...> holding of tritium on-site was 760 TBq (equivalent to 2.1 g of tritium or 14 mL of pure tritiated water) in a total of 860,000 m3 of stored water. This report also identified the reducing concentration of tritium in the water extracted from the buildings etc. for storage, seeing a factor of ten decrease over the five years considered (2011–2016), 3.3 MBq/L to 0.3 MBq/L (after correction for the 5% annual decay of tritium)." That report is here: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/pdf/20160915_01a.pdf https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... Now draw your own conclusions.

acidburnNSA 5y ago

At one point CNN and Greenpeace were saying that the Carbon-14 in particular would "change human DNA", since the tritium levels would be diluted well below anything people could reasonably define as hazardous [1]. There are 63.6 GBq of Carbon-14 in the tanks total. Sounds like a lot but that actually comes out to 0.4 grams total. This entire amount is generated naturally every ~40 minutes in the atmosphere [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/11/29/japan-should-release-tritium-contaminated-water-to-the-ocean/?sh=1a15a3e0d8ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/11/29/japan-sho... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-25-greenpeace-mistaken-on-radiocarbon-impact.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-25-greenpeace-mistake...

deeviant 5y ago
In the entire atmosphere? I dunno, that statement does not make it sound better to me at all.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  To be fair that 0.4g is getting dropped into the entire ocean heh.
  - Eduard 5y ago
    No, it's not distributed world wide evenly in all oceans
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Certainly will get there in time :) unless they're planning to contain it in little aquariums.
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        Certainly not. The ocean is a little more complex than a glass of water. The solution to this problem will came in the hands of science or will not happen. If we dismiss even the most basic science or use that time to make silly jokes instead, we will enjoy a brutal wake up call and return to reality when our flamboyant plans backfire. And they will do. The entire planet will be very disappointed with Japan if they finally do that. Their public image as a modern country will suffer, for sure.

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totetsu 5y ago

Is it going to be diluted on land and the diluted mix pumped to sea, or pumped out to sea undiluted?

User23 5y ago

Tritium radioluminescence is actually really cool. It's too bad they aren't commercializing this instead of dumping it in the ocean.

chenzhekl 5y ago

Off-topic, I don't know if there will still be that many people defending the action if it is not Japan but Russia.

MrDresden 5y ago

I see the article mentions that the idea of evaporation was discussed. Any one know why that route wasn't taken? Would it aerosol the Tritium?

deleted 5y ago

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robster 5y ago

Lots of very clever people in the comment section, so please tell me in which universe is releasing 1.2 million tonnes of radioactive waste water into the ocean ever justifiable as good or even preferable? The impacts would be felt for at least ten years across the world. The best way is to contain it, as they have for ten years, and Japan has polluted land to store the wastes, the only problem is the expense. And if you could solve it with money, that's not a big problem at all for a government. I suppose with this move, Japan can even threaten the world for support to help them contain the waste.

notaspecialist 5y ago

They have a lot of money, and can easily store the radioactive waste, but - out of sight - out of mind for the Japanese. I lived in Japan for many years, and the feeling I left with was that the Japanese do not care about the environment. EDIT: Some do, but they are the minority, and easily dismissed by real Japanese.