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I suspect that the nuclear waste at Fukushima that they intend to release into the ocean is of that category very-low-level nuclear waste. 2.1gram of tritium di
by belorn 5y ago
I suspect that the nuclear waste at Fukushima that they intend to release into the ocean is of that category very-low-level nuclear waste. 2.1gram of tritium diluted in 860,000 tons of water. Not sure how many Becquerels/gram that is, but I would be interested to know if its actually higher than the 0.1 of the banana.
Is there a minimum level for what can be called very-low-level nuclear waste?
(As a minor side note, someone should update wikipedia since VLLW does not seem to exist there as a category and waste with less than 100 kBq/kg is explicitly defined as LLW).
- dmurray 5y agoSurprisingly, it's a lot more radioactive than the bananas. Pure tritium is 3.57×10^14 Bq/g [0] It's being diluted at a ratio of 4x10^11 : 1 so the diluted mixture still has 1000 Bq/g, or four orders of magnitude stronger than the equivalent mass in bananas. Of course, it gets diluted more after you release it into the ocean, but it would take a lot of mixing to get the water down only to banana levels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
- belorn 5y agoVery interesting. Looking at those numbers, potassium-40 has 32 bg/g. Does that mean that atoms of tritium gives out 10^13 more energy every second compared to potassium-40? It would be funny to see how long a city could survive on just then 1 gram of tritium, and it does give a bit more context to the idea of running a city on potassium-40.
- dmurray 5y agoPotassium atoms are bigger, so I think it's only 10^12 if you want to compare per-atom, but yes.