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Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

180 points by miscon 4y ago

oversocialized 4y ago
ddingus 4y ago
Two things I am concerned about: The radioactive core is moving and will eventually be in contact with the water. It may already be. Does anyone know?[1] If a dump of water used for cooling is a concern (and it is for me personally and I am open to learning it is not), is our situation not far more grave given eventual contact with the water and this source multiplied by however many world water cycles of contact will occur over the crazy long half life that hot core has? [1] I saw some discussion on this early on and struggle to find it and or current info I trust today. Hoping others here know more.
- clarionbell 4y ago
  To answer your question. The risk is minimal to nonexistent. Tritium, the thing ONE of the scientists is concerned about, is an isotope of hydrogen. It's barely radioactive, and it has half life of about 12 years. You may know it as the stuff that illuminates watch faces and sights. It's used in many other industrial applications and as far as radioactive elements goes If you read the actual article you may see it's classic fear mongering: The panel of multi-disciplinary scientists, hired by the intergovernmental Pacific Islands Forum, has not found conclusive evidence that the discharge would be entirely safe, and one marine biologist fears contamination could affect the food system. TL;DR: They couldn't say something could happen, so they said that they can't conclude nothing will happen. Which is exactly what everybody knew before. One of them said that something COULD happen, but he doesn't know how.
  - fsh 4y ago
    Tritium is highly radioactive (358 TBq/g). Otherwise it wouldn't make phosphors glow in the dark.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      A high number of decays per second per gram yes (it's a light element with short half-life) so a small amount of mass gives a lot of activity. The total activity of tritium in the stored water is a few hundred TBq (i.e. a few grams of tritium in all those thousands of tonnes of water). GP was probably referring to the low energy of the decay (18 keV per decay) which is much lower than other common radionuclides found in waste. For example, Cs-137 releases 600 keV per decay, and Sr-90 releases 576 keV followed by 2274 keV. Tritium is a much lower energy decay, per atom.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    These things are low risk externally. However, when made internal, as in food?
junon 4y ago
WasteWATER*. I hate when titles leave important things out to make them sound worse than they are. This is about WATER waste.
- top_sigrid 4y ago
  Water which ... is nuclear waste as it is from a nuclear power plant that had a core meltdown? Of course wastewater would have been more specific, but in the end they ARE dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.
  - junon 4y ago
    Nuclear waterwaste != nuclear waste. Water cannot be radioactive, and in fact water is a fantastic insulator for radiation. The water had contaminates in it and the argument is whether or not the current level of contaminates is safe. The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      > Water cannot be radioactive To start, seawater has more things than water. Both Hydrogen and Oxygen have isotopes that can decay and emit radioactivity, so yes, water can definitely be radioactive, by definition. For a relatively short time because is not plutonium of course, but it can be. And, unlike Plutonium, the problem is that life beings are mostly made of water and we didn't coevolved with a such rare element as tritium is in nature. Water is freely allowed to enter and travel and has granted access to every part of the human body. We trade a big danger for other, but this does not mean that radioactive water can't harm us.
      - u320 4y ago
        Tritium has a biological half-life in humans of 8 days. It's not a "big danger". Japan has gone out of their way to take all the precautions here, but since it's nuclear you know somebody is going to raise a stink anyway.
janmalec 4y ago
Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible case, this water will do less harm than what the other industries are releasing routinely, including water treatment plants. If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else. People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution, because we are irrationaly overestimating the dangers of nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity. These deaths are SOLELY a consequence of fear-based decision making. I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start evaluating the consequences of different scenarios with a scientific approach and stop taking decisions based on feelings. Edit: spelling of tritium
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  - janmalec 4y ago
    Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.
    - gilleain 4y ago
      Out of curiosity, why do you write 'Thritium' for 'Tritium'?
      - janmalec 4y ago
        I suck at spelling.
SapporoChris 4y ago
Tritium is regularly discharged from multiple countries. https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/pdf/202104_bp_breifing.pdf#page=29 https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... The entire pdf is a worthy read.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  To note, one of groups like Greenpeace’s argument is that gov. and TEPCO are straight bullshitting the waste water composition [0] It usually would fall in conspiracy theory territory, expect TEPCO did bullshit their facts and numbers at several critical occasions already, and the gov stays in lockstep with TEPCO. [0] https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/23/9618/ https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/2...
doingtheiroming 4y ago
Some years ago… Monks: opinion that requires authority
deleted 4y ago
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Namari 4y ago
Why not dropping that to the Sahara or to any remote desert that nobody lives?
- ugjka 4y ago
  Logistics... Where is Japan and where is Sahara
- dikei 4y ago
  They are dumping 1 Million metric tons of water over a period of 30 years. Even if China allow them to dump the water into the Gobi desert, it'd still cost billions of dollar to build and operate the pipeline. It'd never happen.
  - Namari 4y ago
    True but at this point it's not just a Japanese problem but a world wide one, if they dump it in the ocean, it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it. It reminds me of the WW2 boats that are still in the Oceans leaking toxic products and nobody wants to pay to take them out.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jhugo 4y ago
      Just to be clear, they are dumping a few grams of a relatively benign element which is regularly & safely discharged into the ocean during the normal operations of nuclear facilities worldwide, diluted in an extremely large volume of seawater. "it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it" is not supported by any science, it's just fear, the same fear that leads us to keep running coal power plants that kill people on a daily basis.
    - dikei 4y ago
      Nah, global warming due to CO2 is a world wide problem; this is, at best, a regional issue, since the water will be so diluted once it reach the other side of the ocean. Most likely, that this won't be an issue at all.
clarionbell 4y ago
Before anyone responds or makes a judgement, they should give a single minute of their lives to reading about tritium, the isotope ONE of the scientist is concerned about. Wikipedia[0] will do the trick if you have no other options. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  4 years ago (2018/8/20’s public hearing)[0], one of the subject was how that “Tritium water” also contained strontium and cobalt, and what to do about that before releasing the water. To this day, the answer is “nothing” [0] https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.html https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.h...
dikei 4y ago
The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues: it's one of the cleanest country I've ever seen, so I'm willing to trust them if they say the waste water dumping plan is safe.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual. Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading. https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harada/dp/1911498223 https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  It's a tough issue, because it's also the Japanese gov and TEPCO who brought this all mess, their trade-offs on how much to secure that plant didn't pay off, to say the least. We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.
- yreg 4y ago
  >The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…
Stevvo 4y ago
The quantity of Tritium in the water of concern is 760 TBq. This is not a huge amount; if the accident had not occurred the plant would have discharged more than that amount into the ocean over the years since during its normal operation.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  15 grammes of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water Sounds a lot better than 760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.
  - belorn 4y ago
    From what I can read, 1 gram of tritium is 358 trillion berequel. Thus, 760 trillion berequel of tritium would be a total of 2.1 grams.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I think you can adjust either side of that statement to fit, and not change anything about the point I was trying to make :) I just copied the numbers I saw elsewhere in this thread.
      - belorn 4y ago
        It wasn't a critique of the argument. I was just a bit uncertain which number were correct. 2.1g or 15g is still pretty tiny in comparison to the mount of water that it is diluted with. I was/am tempted to calculate what the probability of a single atom would be in a glass of water.
ourmandave 4y ago
The article's title could be the plot lead for the next Godzilla movie.
- tonetheman 4y ago
  Yes this comment. Though it might be nice to see Godzilla IRL... at least until he/she squishes you with gigantic irradiated feet.
panick21_ 4y ago
Ah the typical insane discussion about anything even remotely connected to nuclear.
Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
What a disingenuous argument. Of course nobody can prove that this wouldn’t make the endangered Samoan saltwater frogs gay or something. But is this really a possibility that we need to be taking seriously?
holoduke 4y ago
I am absolutely pro nuclear. But I think that for every single invested or earned dollar from a nuclear facility a fraction must be reserved for storage, break down, clean ing etc. There should be an world wide independent institute setting these rules up. And all countries should follow them otherwise harse sanctions will follow. Making mistakes with nuclear is unforgivable.
- DennisP 4y ago
  I don't know how other countries work but that actually is a legal requirement in the US. The NRC requires reactor operators to set aside funds for decommissioning[1], and the government charges a fee to nuclear plants to cover long-term waste storage[2]. Or at least, they did, until 2014. The waste fund has accumulated to $43 billion (as of 2018), but the government hasn't managed to actually store any waste; since the utilities were also incurring the cost to store the waste themselves, they successfully sued and got the fee lifted, until such time as the government starts taking the waste off their hands. If only fossil plants were required to pay for burying their waste deep underground. Then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html [2] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nuclear-waste-burial-fund-but-no-permanent-storage-solution-on-the-horizon/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nu...
littlestymaar 4y ago
From the article > Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean But it omits to say that this is actually extraordinarily diluted: we're talking about around 20 grams of pure tritiated water.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years. Even if it bioconcentrated in some way, it is going to have a short time to have its effect then it will be gone.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Scratch nuclear from the title. This plan has very little to do with radiation safety and is about chemical pollution.
avarsheny 4y ago
All nuclear waste should be blasted off into space.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
The anti-nuclear movement should be regarded as we regard the anti-vax movement. They both seem to have a standard of zero risk without comparison to the alternatives. (Yes, there are adverse events with vaccines, and even with the risk of those adverse events, they do far more good than harm). There is overwhelming evidence for safety, but they keep bringing up theoretical risks and point to events in the past (see issues with rotavirus vaccine) to spread FUD. Thins ends up hurting everyone.
phkahler 4y ago
Haha, after the disaster my tongue-in-cheek solution to the mess was just use a small tactical nuke to blow the whole mess into the ocean. Someone said that would put waste into the atmosphere :-( But hey, they can just drain the water into the ocean right?!?!
antoniuschan99 4y ago
There’s a NHK documentary on the same topic NHK WORLD PRIME Fukushima: The Curse of Groundwater https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/
westcort 4y ago
My key takeaways: 1. Scientists: Japan’s Plan To Dump Nuclear Waste Into The Pacific Ocean May Not Be Safe 2. A panel of scientists has identified critical gaps in the data supporting the safe discharge of wastewater into the Pacific 3. Independent scientists are questioning Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, following a review of the available evidence 4. Last year Japan announced that wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, destroyed in March 2011 following the Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, would be dropped into the Pacific in 2023 5. “So these are all the things we need to consider.” Confusing The Masses The Pacific Islands Forum convened its panel of experts – specializing in policy and different scientific disciplines – because of the highly technical nature of Japan’s plan 6. But panel scientist Robert Richmond, director of the University of Hawaii Kewalo Marine Laboratory, says the panel unanimously believes that critical gaps in information remain 7. Through phytoplankton, Richmond says, the radioactive element could then find its way into the greater food system as the microscopic plants are consumed by mollusks and small fish, which are later consumed by other fish and eventually humans 8. The IAEA is expected to deliver reports from its site visits in the next two months, according to its website, and would release a fully comprehensive report before any water is released
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yandrypozo 4y ago
Here we go again the never endless war against the safest and greenest source of energy ever invented: nuclear power.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Better article here from the experts at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anticipated-release-of-fukushimas-wastewater/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti... The issue is not so much tritium, but rather that claims of removal of some 60+ other radionuclides (products of fission of uranium) to below regulatory standards remain questionable. > "TEPCO and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry have acknowledged that more than 70 percent of the treated water at Fukushima contains 62 other nuclides that are higher than regulatory standards. Therefore, treated water may pose significant risks to the environment and public health and could damage Fukushima’s fishing and agricultural industry. The environmental, social, and economic impacts of releasing the treated water to the sea must be more carefully assessed."
exabrial 4y ago
Oh ffs... The water has been filtered and metals removed if I'm reading correctly. It contains a higher amount of tritium. Side note, seems like this could be sold to some research labs, no? Seems like if you need tritium using this rather than ocean water would be a good thing.
xyzzy21 4y ago
It's far safer than keeping it on dry land or burying it. Just look up the amount of water in the Pacific and then divide into the amount of waste water being discussed - the ratio is insanely tiny and nearly unmeasurable. The biological effects are far smaller because of this ratio than if you kept it concentrated on land.
dekhn 4y ago
Pretty much everything in the media I've seen about radioactive waste does not square when carefully analyzed. It receives an outsize proportion of criticism and FUD. My guess is that years of atomic bomb images and a few plant failures convinced people that nuclear is unsafe, when many of the perceived risks are minimal. I'm still concerned about long-term storage of waste, but not concerned people who can't judge risk accurately.
pfdietz 4y ago
Tritium in Fukushima tanks: 20 kilocuries. Potassium-40 in the oceans: 530 gigacuries.
- marze 4y ago
  From a PR perspective, they would do better constructing a precast concrete plant nearby the site, and use the water to make concrete.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
Contrarian opinion: Japan's plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean is totally, totally undeniably safe.
deleted 4y ago
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180 points by miscon 4y ago

Two things I am concerned about: The radioactive core is moving and will eventually be in contact with the water. It may already be. Does anyone know?[1] If a dump of water used for cooling is a concern (and it is for me personally and I am open to learning it is not), is our situation not far more grave given eventual contact with the water and this source multiplied by however many world water cycles of contact will occur over the crazy long half life that hot core has? [1] I saw some discussion on this early on and struggle to find it and or current info I trust today. Hoping others here know more.

clarionbell 4y ago
To answer your question. The risk is minimal to nonexistent. Tritium, the thing ONE of the scientists is concerned about, is an isotope of hydrogen. It's barely radioactive, and it has half life of about 12 years. You may know it as the stuff that illuminates watch faces and sights. It's used in many other industrial applications and as far as radioactive elements goes If you read the actual article you may see it's classic fear mongering: The panel of multi-disciplinary scientists, hired by the intergovernmental Pacific Islands Forum, has not found conclusive evidence that the discharge would be entirely safe, and one marine biologist fears contamination could affect the food system. TL;DR: They couldn't say something could happen, so they said that they can't conclude nothing will happen. Which is exactly what everybody knew before. One of them said that something COULD happen, but he doesn't know how.
- fsh 4y ago
  Tritium is highly radioactive (358 TBq/g). Otherwise it wouldn't make phosphors glow in the dark.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    A high number of decays per second per gram yes (it's a light element with short half-life) so a small amount of mass gives a lot of activity. The total activity of tritium in the stored water is a few hundred TBq (i.e. a few grams of tritium in all those thousands of tonnes of water). GP was probably referring to the low energy of the decay (18 keV per decay) which is much lower than other common radionuclides found in waste. For example, Cs-137 releases 600 keV per decay, and Sr-90 releases 576 keV followed by 2274 keV. Tritium is a much lower energy decay, per atom.
- ddingus 4y ago
  These things are low risk externally. However, when made internal, as in food?

junon 4y ago

WasteWATER*. I hate when titles leave important things out to make them sound worse than they are. This is about WATER waste.

top_sigrid 4y ago
Water which ... is nuclear waste as it is from a nuclear power plant that had a core meltdown? Of course wastewater would have been more specific, but in the end they ARE dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.
- junon 4y ago
  Nuclear waterwaste != nuclear waste. Water cannot be radioactive, and in fact water is a fantastic insulator for radiation. The water had contaminates in it and the argument is whether or not the current level of contaminates is safe. The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    > Water cannot be radioactive To start, seawater has more things than water. Both Hydrogen and Oxygen have isotopes that can decay and emit radioactivity, so yes, water can definitely be radioactive, by definition. For a relatively short time because is not plutonium of course, but it can be. And, unlike Plutonium, the problem is that life beings are mostly made of water and we didn't coevolved with a such rare element as tritium is in nature. Water is freely allowed to enter and travel and has granted access to every part of the human body. We trade a big danger for other, but this does not mean that radioactive water can't harm us.
    - u320 4y ago
      Tritium has a biological half-life in humans of 8 days. It's not a "big danger". Japan has gone out of their way to take all the precautions here, but since it's nuclear you know somebody is going to raise a stink anyway.

janmalec 4y ago

Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible case, this water will do less harm than what the other industries are releasing routinely, including water treatment plants. If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else. People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution, because we are irrationaly overestimating the dangers of nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity. These deaths are SOLELY a consequence of fear-based decision making. I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start evaluating the consequences of different scenarios with a scientific approach and stop taking decisions based on feelings. Edit: spelling of tritium

jay_kyburz 4y ago
- janmalec 4y ago
  Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.
  - gilleain 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, why do you write 'Thritium' for 'Tritium'?
    - janmalec 4y ago
      I suck at spelling.

SapporoChris 4y ago

Tritium is regularly discharged from multiple countries. https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/pdf/202104_bp_breifing.pdf#page=29 https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... The entire pdf is a worthy read.

makeitdouble 4y ago
To note, one of groups like Greenpeace’s argument is that gov. and TEPCO are straight bullshitting the waste water composition [0] It usually would fall in conspiracy theory territory, expect TEPCO did bullshit their facts and numbers at several critical occasions already, and the gov stays in lockstep with TEPCO. [0] https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/23/9618/ https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/2...

doingtheiroming 4y ago

Some years ago… Monks: opinion that requires authority

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Namari 4y ago

Why not dropping that to the Sahara or to any remote desert that nobody lives?

ugjka 4y ago
Logistics... Where is Japan and where is Sahara
dikei 4y ago
They are dumping 1 Million metric tons of water over a period of 30 years. Even if China allow them to dump the water into the Gobi desert, it'd still cost billions of dollar to build and operate the pipeline. It'd never happen.
- Namari 4y ago
  True but at this point it's not just a Japanese problem but a world wide one, if they dump it in the ocean, it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it. It reminds me of the WW2 boats that are still in the Oceans leaking toxic products and nobody wants to pay to take them out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Just to be clear, they are dumping a few grams of a relatively benign element which is regularly & safely discharged into the ocean during the normal operations of nuclear facilities worldwide, diluted in an extremely large volume of seawater. "it could affect all the life that live there and consequently human life that feeds of it" is not supported by any science, it's just fear, the same fear that leads us to keep running coal power plants that kill people on a daily basis.
  - dikei 4y ago
    Nah, global warming due to CO2 is a world wide problem; this is, at best, a regional issue, since the water will be so diluted once it reach the other side of the ocean. Most likely, that this won't be an issue at all.

clarionbell 4y ago

Before anyone responds or makes a judgement, they should give a single minute of their lives to reading about tritium, the isotope ONE of the scientist is concerned about. Wikipedia[0] will do the trick if you have no other options. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks

makeitdouble 4y ago
4 years ago (2018/8/20’s public hearing)[0], one of the subject was how that “Tritium water” also contained strontium and cobalt, and what to do about that before releasing the water. To this day, the answer is “nothing” [0] https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.html https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.h...

dikei 4y ago

The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues: it's one of the cleanest country I've ever seen, so I'm willing to trust them if they say the waste water dumping plan is safe.

JetAlone 4y ago
Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual. Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading. https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harada/dp/1911498223 https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...
makeitdouble 4y ago
It's a tough issue, because it's also the Japanese gov and TEPCO who brought this all mess, their trade-offs on how much to secure that plant didn't pay off, to say the least. We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.
yreg 4y ago
>The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…

Stevvo 4y ago

The quantity of Tritium in the water of concern is 760 TBq. This is not a huge amount; if the accident had not occurred the plant would have discharged more than that amount into the ocean over the years since during its normal operation.

Aeolun 4y ago
15 grammes of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water Sounds a lot better than 760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.
- belorn 4y ago
  From what I can read, 1 gram of tritium is 358 trillion berequel. Thus, 760 trillion berequel of tritium would be a total of 2.1 grams.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I think you can adjust either side of that statement to fit, and not change anything about the point I was trying to make :) I just copied the numbers I saw elsewhere in this thread.
    - belorn 4y ago
      It wasn't a critique of the argument. I was just a bit uncertain which number were correct. 2.1g or 15g is still pretty tiny in comparison to the mount of water that it is diluted with. I was/am tempted to calculate what the probability of a single atom would be in a glass of water.

ourmandave 4y ago

The article's title could be the plot lead for the next Godzilla movie.

tonetheman 4y ago
Yes this comment. Though it might be nice to see Godzilla IRL... at least until he/she squishes you with gigantic irradiated feet.

panick21_ 4y ago

Ah the typical insane discussion about anything even remotely connected to nuclear.

Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago

What a disingenuous argument. Of course nobody can prove that this wouldn’t make the endangered Samoan saltwater frogs gay or something. But is this really a possibility that we need to be taking seriously?

holoduke 4y ago

I am absolutely pro nuclear. But I think that for every single invested or earned dollar from a nuclear facility a fraction must be reserved for storage, break down, clean ing etc. There should be an world wide independent institute setting these rules up. And all countries should follow them otherwise harse sanctions will follow. Making mistakes with nuclear is unforgivable.

DennisP 4y ago
I don't know how other countries work but that actually is a legal requirement in the US. The NRC requires reactor operators to set aside funds for decommissioning[1], and the government charges a fee to nuclear plants to cover long-term waste storage[2]. Or at least, they did, until 2014. The waste fund has accumulated to $43 billion (as of 2018), but the government hasn't managed to actually store any waste; since the utilities were also incurring the cost to store the waste themselves, they successfully sued and got the fee lifted, until such time as the government starts taking the waste off their hands. If only fossil plants were required to pay for burying their waste deep underground. Then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html [2] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nuclear-waste-burial-fund-but-no-permanent-storage-solution-on-the-horizon/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nu...

littlestymaar 4y ago

From the article > Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean But it omits to say that this is actually extraordinarily diluted: we're talking about around 20 grams of pure tritiated water.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Tritium has a half life of about 12 years. Even if it bioconcentrated in some way, it is going to have a short time to have its effect then it will be gone.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Scratch nuclear from the title. This plan has very little to do with radiation safety and is about chemical pollution.

avarsheny 4y ago

All nuclear waste should be blasted off into space.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

The anti-nuclear movement should be regarded as we regard the anti-vax movement. They both seem to have a standard of zero risk without comparison to the alternatives. (Yes, there are adverse events with vaccines, and even with the risk of those adverse events, they do far more good than harm). There is overwhelming evidence for safety, but they keep bringing up theoretical risks and point to events in the past (see issues with rotavirus vaccine) to spread FUD. Thins ends up hurting everyone.

phkahler 4y ago

Haha, after the disaster my tongue-in-cheek solution to the mess was just use a small tactical nuke to blow the whole mess into the ocean. Someone said that would put waste into the atmosphere :-( But hey, they can just drain the water into the ocean right?!?!

antoniuschan99 4y ago

There’s a NHK documentary on the same topic NHK WORLD PRIME Fukushima: The Curse of Groundwater https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/

westcort 4y ago

My key takeaways: 1. Scientists: Japan’s Plan To Dump Nuclear Waste Into The Pacific Ocean May Not Be Safe 2. A panel of scientists has identified critical gaps in the data supporting the safe discharge of wastewater into the Pacific 3. Independent scientists are questioning Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, following a review of the available evidence 4. Last year Japan announced that wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, destroyed in March 2011 following the Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, would be dropped into the Pacific in 2023 5. “So these are all the things we need to consider.” Confusing The Masses The Pacific Islands Forum convened its panel of experts – specializing in policy and different scientific disciplines – because of the highly technical nature of Japan’s plan 6. But panel scientist Robert Richmond, director of the University of Hawaii Kewalo Marine Laboratory, says the panel unanimously believes that critical gaps in information remain 7. Through phytoplankton, Richmond says, the radioactive element could then find its way into the greater food system as the microscopic plants are consumed by mollusks and small fish, which are later consumed by other fish and eventually humans 8. The IAEA is expected to deliver reports from its site visits in the next two months, according to its website, and would release a fully comprehensive report before any water is released

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yandrypozo 4y ago

Here we go again the never endless war against the safest and greenest source of energy ever invented: nuclear power.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Better article here from the experts at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anticipated-release-of-fukushimas-wastewater/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti... The issue is not so much tritium, but rather that claims of removal of some 60+ other radionuclides (products of fission of uranium) to below regulatory standards remain questionable. > "TEPCO and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry have acknowledged that more than 70 percent of the treated water at Fukushima contains 62 other nuclides that are higher than regulatory standards. Therefore, treated water may pose significant risks to the environment and public health and could damage Fukushima’s fishing and agricultural industry. The environmental, social, and economic impacts of releasing the treated water to the sea must be more carefully assessed."

exabrial 4y ago

Oh ffs... The water has been filtered and metals removed if I'm reading correctly. It contains a higher amount of tritium. Side note, seems like this could be sold to some research labs, no? Seems like if you need tritium using this rather than ocean water would be a good thing.

xyzzy21 4y ago

It's far safer than keeping it on dry land or burying it. Just look up the amount of water in the Pacific and then divide into the amount of waste water being discussed - the ratio is insanely tiny and nearly unmeasurable. The biological effects are far smaller because of this ratio than if you kept it concentrated on land.

dekhn 4y ago

Pretty much everything in the media I've seen about radioactive waste does not square when carefully analyzed. It receives an outsize proportion of criticism and FUD. My guess is that years of atomic bomb images and a few plant failures convinced people that nuclear is unsafe, when many of the perceived risks are minimal. I'm still concerned about long-term storage of waste, but not concerned people who can't judge risk accurately.

pfdietz 4y ago

Tritium in Fukushima tanks: 20 kilocuries. Potassium-40 in the oceans: 530 gigacuries.

marze 4y ago
From a PR perspective, they would do better constructing a precast concrete plant nearby the site, and use the water to make concrete.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

Contrarian opinion: Japan's plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean is totally, totally undeniably safe.

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