5 ms·
Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen. His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentiona
by clarionbell 4y ago
Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen.
His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
- pvaldes 4y agoThen why not use it as a valuable source of the very expensive and non renewable Helium? It seems that they are trowing money to the sea after paying yet for storing it for the last 11 years.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI know very little, but the amount of tritium involved likely decays into a trivial amount of helium. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that there is 2.1 g of Tritium in 860,000 cubic meters of water.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ramchip 4y agoIt's 15 grams of tritium in total, so it won't generate much helium. Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/qa.html https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... [Q6]
- pvaldes 4y agoVery interesting, thanks. Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
- jhugo 4y ago> As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant Huh? It has a half-life of 12 years.
- jayparth 4y agoBiological half life is the more important figure here, by the way, and it’s very short (less than a month)
- ceejayoz 4y ago> As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative… What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks “HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
- pvaldes 4y agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22863967/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22863967/
- ceejayoz 4y agohttps://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/62/4/557/6256015 https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/62/4/557/6256015 > Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
- pvaldes 4y ago"A factory worker ingested tritium over 7.4 years. His exposure dose was estimated at 3–6 Sv. He developed isochromic anemia, and subsequently died of pancytopenia"
- ben_w 4y ago> Then why not use it as a valuable source of the very expensive and non renewable Helium? Same reason we don’t use nuclear reactors to turn lead into gold, even though we can: it’s far more expensive than it’s worth.
- perihelions 4y agoThat's actually what we do, in this case: nuclear reactor-derived tritium is the *sole* source of helium-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production It's *ten* times more expensive than gold! (If I remember correctly, medical ³He MRI's are done on a closed rebreather -- they literally want to recycle your lung air, it's that valuable).
- ben_w 4y agoIndeed. I was assuming that the comment I was replying to was referring to helium in general because they were not more specific, and the normal form is ⁴He — we’re not filling party balloons with it.