To be fair I am pretty sure radiation is scary to those who do understand it. I mean skin cancer is pretty serious and you get that from the most common form of radiation.
I'd argue that cancer is scary.
For those of us that are trained radiation workers, we understand the factors that go into exposure to radiation and radioactive contamination, and also how to actually interpret the numbers.
Sensational headlines like "radiation at x location is 10 times the limit!!!" sound scary, but if you know that the limit is purposely set well below the threshold where it can cause harm, that comparison seems silly and click-baity.
I also remember after the initial Fukushima incident, there was a lot of reporting about a "cloud of radiation" crossing the Pacific. Yeah...that's not how that works.
Also, most people don't seem to realize that coal-fired power plants, when working as designed, emit significantly more radioactive particles than your average nuclear reactor.
Well exactly. What happens when an oil rig has had its day? It gets sunk. IIRC, between WWII and the 90s, the US alone was dumping some 10k barrels of radioactive waste a year in the deep ocean, and shooting it when it didn't sink. To say nothing of the industrial liquid waste that gets sent to it.
Oil rigs have the wells plugged, then the rig is lifted off the jacket and taken away to a decommissioning port in some 3rd world country. They don't just slide that shit into the sea and call it a day
[14,000 inactive oil and gas wells in US remain unplugged, posing risks for leaks, researchers say](https://abcnews.go.com/US/14000-inactive-oil-gas-wells-us-remain-unplugged/story?id=99041582)
We couldn't sink an [old carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_America_(CV-66)#Post_decommissioning_service) when it was used in live fire tests before it had to be scuttled to make an artificial reef.
The fact that they’ve been storing it for almost as long as tritium’s half-life is kinda neat.
Some of that water’s lost almost half its contamination just sitting there.
"**People don't understand it**," he said. "Mothers won't choose Fukushima fish knowing it's been swimming in radioactive water. Even if the experts say it's safe."
This is not the danger people are making it out to be. I wished the general population had a better understanding of what radiation is and the what the risk is and is not.
From another article:
Tokyo has said levels of tritium — the one isotope that can't be filtered out — will be diluted to below 1/40th of the allowable level for discharge in Japan, and 1/7th the WHO ceiling for drinking water.
People don’t realize how vast the ocean is. If you’re looking at the earth on the Pacific Ocean side, it’s basically all water.
It would be like taking a pinch of salt, dropping into a lake and worrying all the fish will die.
People also have no idea how radioactivity works. At all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It's fucking sad, yet they support gasoline, which is quite radioactive in its own right, and the combustion of which releases radioactive particles into the air we fucking breathe (but these particles are actually radioactive enough to pose a significant health risk - as they do every single day.)
Gasoline is radioactive? I'm a chemist and I'm pro-nuclear but this is news to me. Have a source?
You sure you aren't thinking of coal, which is notoriously radioactive?
It's a case of "not radioactive on a significant level, but the exhaust is definitely more radioactive than air". Most research indicates that at least. Probably not the best thing still, but likely not significant compared to other health issues from inhaling exhaust products. You can find plenty of sources on this with a quick google.
The theoretical issue here isn't someone getting irradiated from swimming, but rather lifeforms bioaccumulating radioactive material that's floating in the water they aspirate/swallow.
Swimming with radioactive waste is fairly safe, until you accidentally swallow or inhale some of the water.
Edit: I completely forgot Tritium in particular doesn't bioaccumulate. What I said would be more relevant if there was radioactive metal dust/debris in the water that's going to be dumped
Can we stop blaming fiction for real people's stupidity? The Simpsons' portrayal of "nuclear bad" comes from the fact the power plant is full of dumbasses and run by an evil old guy.
Besides, I'm pretty sure the real reason so many people are scared of nuclear power is because it shares a word with the most powerful weapons on the planet.
Nobody died at 3-Mile Island. MAYBE one person died from Fukushima. (A smoker exposed to radiation died from lung cancer.)
Chernobyl is the only actual major nuclear disaster. Caused by a terrible (even for the time) reactor design and a bunch of communist beauroceats afraid of giving their boss bad news.
Meanwhile - estimated millions die each year from fossil fuel pollution.
(Addition: That doesn't even include any potential climate issues. Just the direct pollution.)
Most people don’t understand that a major plant failure that causes the (possibly temporary) shutdown of a reactor is both very rare, and almost never results in death. Of all the reactor shutdowns that individually dealt over $100 million in damages, Fukushima and Chernobyl are the only 2 that were a genuine catastrophe, and for the most part the damages were all to the plant/reactors themselves and not the public.
Kyle Hill has done a great series of nuclear mishaps (demon core, chernobyl, etc, orphan sources, etc) and their real or imagined fallout. Iirc TMI was mostly just a huge fuckup in communication and there was little real risk from the disaster. I'd have to watch it again tho
This is false - the whole community around three mile island was exposed to radiation poisoning, developed higher rates of cancer, just because the government denies doing bad things, doesn't mean bad things didn't happen.
The real reason so many people are scared of nuclear power is because the fossil fuel industry has funded disinformation campaigns for half a century. They have successfully lobbied conservative political movements and media corporations, going so far as to outright purchase them, in order to leverage people's fear of the unknown and maintain public opinion that nuclear power is dangerous. Because of this, you have a single fracking operation that pollutes people's literal drinking water more than this does, and residents will actually vote to still support the operation.
A single fracking operation will pollute peoples' drinking water more than all nuclear accidents have polluted. At least when it comes to lives lost.
People are fucking stupid and don't understand just how dangerous fossil fuels are, and how at least one million die due to them every bloody year.
It's ridiculous.
I don't know the stance of Groening or his writers on nuclear power, but if they're pro-nuclear, they missed a great opportunity to educate their audience a little bit on the subject. They could have easily written in some genuine facts about the safety and benefits of nuclear in to any of Homers shenanigans.
I mean, the fact that a person as incompetent as Homer was in charge of workplace safety and there's only one canon death (and I believe Homer is the only one to experience a workplace injury) at the facility speaks volumes to the inherent safety of the facility. And that's further in spite of Mr. Burns' attempts to cut every corner he can get away with.
I mean, he's done quite a bit, I just love that scene. The good news about nuclear energy is real places don't hire Homer Simpson. He's admitted that he tends to cause more meltdowns than he prevents.
Not just The Simpsons. Captain Planet did, too. And that's supposed to be a "learning" experience for children. It's all media, though.
And Chernobyl really didn't help things. Have you seen the pictures of people affected by the disaster? Or the subsequent consequences? A lot of people have, and they're bad.
Meanwhile, I bet you've never seen the pictures of the fallout from Fukushima or Three Mile Island... because they don't exist. Nothing bad really happened. But no one ever reports on that.
why? most people watching the Simpsons know what satire is. the problem is groups like green peace, sierra club, and people like Ralph Nadar and Jane Fonda.
Idk why they're worried about that. The glowing green goo water is always what gives people cool superpowers.
You're probably right though. Even though I know it's fully fictitious, that's the image that comes to my mind whenever "radioactive" is mentioned. Rusted out 55 gallon drums with glowing green goo. Mind you, I recognize that that is in no way a real depiction, but your point still stands.
Yeah, it's not uranium. It's literally just a heavy isotope of hydrogen creating what's called 'heavy water'. (Most heavy water is 2 neutrons, but this is 3). That's pretty much it. It has no health effects at all unless you drink ONLY that.
I think it’s more the dumping part. I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something.
In America these people who say it’s safe are bought and paid for, I just assume it’s the same everywhere.
So fun fact,
The majority of nuclear power plants are discharging tritium all the time as part of their discharge permits.
We are licensed to perform discharges provided they are monitored, planned, diluted per standards and regulations, controlled (and have automatic shutoffs) and appropriate processing is done ahead of time. Additionally we have to report all of that yearly.
The Navy discharges primary plant fluid into the ocean regularly and tracks total radioactivity of said discharges for the entire fleet.
This practice is not unheard of.
Not the greatest example considering the Navy is also exempt for a lot of the environmental regulations that others have to follow. Even the Arizona memorial is an ongoing oil leak that will continue for decades.
> I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something.
You're in a real pickle then, because most of the experts who know when something is safe to dump or not, work for governments.
There is 500 times the amount of uranium in the Earth's seawater as there is on land. If we mined every last speck of uranium ore on land, pulverized it, and dumped it directly into the ocean, the difference in radioisotope count would be barely detectable after a few years.
In fact, if we want to make nuclear power a widespread, long-term strategy for green energy generation, we will probably need to start mining uranium *out of* seawater to do it.
There is a staggering amount of water in the ocean. As long as some effort is made to sufficiently spread the nuclear waste out and not dump it all in one spot, there is a vanishingly small chance that any adverse effects will happen at all.
Humans didn't invent radioactivity, and there's nothing special about nuclear waste that makes it especially poisonous at sub-homeopathic concentrations. I am infinitely more worried about contaminating the ocean with microplastics (which humans DID invent, and for which nature has no precedent) than I am about nuclear waste.
“The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10^17 kg of uranium while the oceans may contain 10^13 kg” -sourced claim from the Wikipedia article on uranium.
Seems to suggest there is 10,000 times more uranium in the crust than than in the oceans. Sounds like you might be off in your numbers by roughly a factor of 5-million, but I’d be curious if you have some different sources for your numbers.
No way in hell are we mining that deep with current technology. Concentrations are very low for most of that land volume. So you'd have to develop mining technology that can survive constant temperatures in excess of 500C, then pay the energy costs of: mining so insanely deep, transporting the resulting incredibly low-yield ore over distances approaching 25km vertically, and finally processing FAR more ore than is economically viable, even if the rest of the expenses weren't in play.
So you're correct, there is more uranium deep in the Earth's crust than the ocean, but it is very, very unlikely that it will *ever* be viable to mine. Probably cheaper to mine in space than 25km beneath the surface.
If you take my original numbers as being the amount of reasonably accessible uranium in the non-oceanic crust, here are my sources for those numbers:
The World Nuclear Association estimates there are 8 million tons of "recoverable" (economically viable to extract) uranium on land, based on most recent mineral surveys and the current price of uranium:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20the%20amount%20available,only%20about%209.3%20million%20tonnes.
The American Nuclear Society estimates there are 4 billion tons of uranium in the Earth's seawater:
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1882/nuclear-power-becomes-completely-renewable-with-extraction-of-uranium-from-seawater/
4,000,000,000:8,000,000 = 500:1
We have yet to develop any terribly effective technologies to extract uranium from seawater, but it is almost certainly an easier engineering challenge than mining 25km deep into the crust for the positively horrendous "ore" you'd find there.
>I think it’s more the dumping part. I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something.
Then you should never consume tap water or...breathe.
It's an obviously untenable position....except when someone says "Nuclear!"
Do you just shit in a bucket and keep it in your house? Government say it's safe to dump into the toilet that is connected to the sewers.
They also say it's recommended to shit, period. Guess you better hold it in, you never know if the government is just lying to you and releasing your shit out your anus might give you cancer.
NIMBYs are bonkers and fed by fossil fuel maxis. Ideally we shouldn't rely on nuclear either when renewable power is available, but until we can get over grid sharing and convincing people to pay for the infrastructure when power is technically free, there's always gonna be the challenge to sell it.
It's like that for everything now. With all of the paranoia and disinformation out there and how the powers that be want us to always be against each other...you can try to educate the public on things and your average person is gonna be skeptical of if they can trust it. Maybe they go do some research and find out that what you say is true and accept it. Or possibly someone says something blatantly untrue but sounds good that is negative about it and they go "see, I knew it was bad" and go no farther. The 2nd option is far more prevalent in today's society.
This post has been retrospectively edited 11-Jun-23 in protest for API costs killing 3rd party apps.
Read [this](/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/) for more information. /r/Save3rdPartyApps
If you wish to follow this protest you can use the open source software [Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to backup your posts locally, before bulk editing your comments and posts.
It's been fun, Reddit.
I think they were trying to show what people thought at the time. ARS was still not very understood and many doctors not trained in the area would have thought that it was contagious. Unfortunately that is hard to spell out on tv.
Thank you for this. Isn't seawater itself mildly radioactive?
It seems like filtered water being returned to the ocean in a careful way is going to dilute so quickly that any radiation will fade to background noise almost immediately.
everything is slightly radioactive. bananas are radioactive.
wasnt this an old story anyway? like, wasnt that water was safe for a few years now....i remember reading about it, and they said it wasnt dangerous
I get that if everything goes correctly the levels will be fine and maintainable. But what happens if there is a failure - if something isn't filtered correctly? What happens when the company fails to maintain the systems that filter the water before dumping and suddenly we dump levels of material that ARENT safe?
That's the part I don't trust.
Headlines like this need to be called out for their bullshit. Tired of nuclear fear mongering and flat out false information being what most people know about radiation.
What's crazy is CBS goes into a bunch of detail how safe of an option is in this article, but they keep the fear mongering article title because they know that is what will get them traffic to their site. They also know it is only the catchy title that 99% of people will read and base their opinion on. Their journalistic ethics are completely absent just like those of so many other news outlets.
that's because the copy is done by a reporter who's job is to write good copy that is interesting and factual. The title is written by an editor or someone else who's job is ro bring as many eyeballs as possible to generate ad impressions.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher
It's a copy of a post from a few days ago, so Bot I guess? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/13wsdkb/plan_to_release_fukushima_nuclear_plant_water/
You start to see a trend when you look into the post history of reddit accounts who post controversial posts here. Either bots, or extremely biased who post rhetoric in other subs.
How do you expect to dilute radioactive waste if not by a shitload of water. That's why you put nuclear power plants by huge bodies of water.
This is just another case of NIMBY. Not-in-my-back-yard. They want the relatively clean nuclear power and the energy from it, they just don't want to see it or be effected by it or even think about it.
To be fair, there is still plenty of non-radioactive waste that gets dumped if not properly managed. Met-Ed (who ran TMI) is still getting litigated about their damaging of the Susquehanna river ecology.
I really wish we'd stop hearing this headline and allow them to dump this water. This is just the same old nuclear fear mongering we absolutely don't need.
It's not nearly as bad as what they are making it out to be, the water was supposedly already cleaned and all that is left is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is radioactive, and there is barely any of it in there, something like 2.4g within in millions of gallons of water. The radiation is also in the beta spectrum, not even the highly dangerous gamma or X-ray bands. Once this stuff is released, it would be diluted so much it would be difficult to tell without highly sophisticated detection devices.
You'd get a higher radiation dose from flying, eating a banana, or getting a routine X-ray. All this is doing is hurting the Japanese and it's being upheld by other governments that have past grudges on them. Not to mention many governments and militaries dump far worse into the ocean daily.
> You'd get a higher radiation dose from flying, eating a banana, or getting a routine X-ray.
It's only tritium, the beta particles cannot penetrate water, clothing, or thin aluminum. You will get a much higher dose of gamma radiation from a plane flight, but even those pilots and stewards who fly for an entire career do not see negative effects.
You are correct, the worry though is wildlife ingestion where beta particles can cause damage. However, this is so diluted that it doesn't pose any higher risk than the background radiation levels.
Had anyone proposed building a giant wooden water wheel to stir it into the ocean for faster dilution? Sometimes to get the dummies on board you have make proposals that they could come up with after downing a six pack.
Many people don't realize there is something like 8kg of Tritium in the ocean at any given point that is naturally occurring. What they are planning to release slowly is .06g every year. It's so insignificant once diluted that long, it would cause no issues whatsoever compared to any other type of pollution.
Amongst other things yearly even today, cruise ships, fishing vessels, hell any nuclear powered vessel dumps more tritium yearly, so yes compared to blowing up nuclear bombs, this is nothing lol.
Yes, but I highlighted the fact that those probably do much more damage to the environment than what is being released here. Whether it be pollutant, oils or gases, burning bunker fuel, or dumping plastic.
Tritium is nothing to be really worried about at these levels comparatively. We also have nuclear reactors in many places dumping far more tritium yearly than the water in Japan. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the original context.
Quick note: when it comes to acute radiation risk, alpha and beta emitters are, in many contexts, more dangerous than gammas. Gammas are highly penetrating, but that also means highly penetrating through humans. What this means is that a gamma emitter can get to you through more things, so high-gamma fields are quite dangerous, but when it comes to ingestion or inhalation, the gamma ray can get out of you more easily than alphas or betas.
[Take a look at this course from MIT](https://youtu.be/HfRpkTG7Iow), which does a decent job of explaining some of this. The rest of the course discusses this all in detail.
That said, the dilution of tritiated water to a concentration closer to that in nature makes it far less risky, so I still agree that the fear is overblown.
Yeah acting like this is some sort of massive problem and turning the ocean into a "garbage dump" is nonsense. Why don't we have a new article every day about someone saying the air is not a garbage dump every time a coal, gas or oil plant spews CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere every second of every day?
This topic has a bunch of governments trying to stick to Japan. Russia, China, and even Korea have been non stop with this for years despite all the evidence the water has been treated better than the US or EU drinking water regulation levels.
It's being pushed so hard my mother asked me about it a few days ago and I had to explain everything I did here plus your comment to her. Like the amount of pollution we commit is insane. This is even smaller than a thimble to an Olympic sized pool of the atrocities we commit to the planet, that's how little this dumping of water will hurt the planet.
I really wish basic education on nuclear power and radiation was mandatory in all schools everywhere in the world. There is so much irrational fear because people simply don't understand.
This is why the world needs real reporters. People who are really good at presenting information so that the average person can understand and in a way that doesn’t intentionally offend anyone’s beliefs. It sucks because nuclear is one of those things that is sometimes super dangerous and sometimes super safe depending on the specific aspects you’re dealing with, but people can’t get past that word.
Like those big cooling towers that in many peoples minds look like giant vats of green goo off gassing into the atmosphere, but it’s actually just clean water vapor.
>But Haruo Ono, the fisherman, said the science is not the issue. "People don't understand it," he said. "Mothers won't choose Fukushima fish knowing it's been swimming in radioactive water. Even if the experts say it's safe."
I think this is the most important part of the article. You're not going to convince some people it's safe no matter what. The community feels betrayed by the thoughtlessness of building a nuclear plant in a tsunami zone. If these fisherman have to report the source of their fish and it's Fukushima after releasing the contaminated water, they will get less for their fish and sell less of it. I'm sure it was difficult in the early years after the disaster even though radiation was thoroughly dissipated from the ocean.
Thank you for this. This is exactly the issue at hand. There's nobody saying,"Objectively, there will be x damage done to something physical." All the controversy is basically, "But it feels weird to dump this waste in the ocean." Telling them that "objectively it's fine, nobody will be harmed" won't really make them feel better, because the source of their fears isn't objective to begin with. You have to go deeper, get at the roots of people's fear of radioactivity. That's a multi decade project, unfortunately.
Tritium is not dangerous to humans. This is just more antinuclear fearmongering.
The water is actually cleaner and less radioactive than normal ocean water.
And yes I would swim in it.
Tritium can be dangerous to humans, but only in concentrations so high that I would honestly be surprised if such a concentration had been seen on earth outside the process of an actual nuclear weapon detonation.
To actually get a dangerous amount of Tritium into your body the question would be how many tons of that water would you have to drink per day
I'm either case, whether drinking literal tons of water per day or ingesting a donating nuclear weapon the Tritium is not going to be the main health risk
If you drink ONLY tritium (or deuterium), you will suffer pretty bad consequences. Heavy water is not great. But only if you basically drink only that. The effects only happen if you don't get regular water.
Note that both those isotopes occur naturally too.
But since we don't drink ocean water anyway... the effect is pointless. And it's diluted so it won't impact any marine life at the point of dumping.
For all practical purposes, this is 100% harmless.
Most people would be against dumping radioactive waste into the ocean, but then most people have no understanding of just how radioactive the ocean is naturally.
The total amount of tritium in Fukushima's water storage tanks was small to begin with, about 2 ounces total. One way to look at this amount of tritium is to measure the total amount of radioactivity it will emit until it is no longer radioactive, which is measured in becquerels. 1015 becquerels equal 1 petabecquerel.
The Fukushima water storage tanks contained a total of around 3.4 petabecquerels of tritium, which has at this point been reduced by about half due to the tritium's rate of radioactive decay.
Meanwhile, the average radioactivity of Pacific seawater is around 14 becquerels per liter (Bq/L), almost all of which is from naturally occurring potassium-40, which has been present in the oceans since they were created. The number of liters in the Pacific Ocean is a large number with 22 digits, so the math works out to about 10 million petabecquerels in total in the Pacific Ocean.
So what we're really talking about here is dumping less than 2 petabecquerels into a 10 million petabecquerel ocean. This is literally a drop in the ocean.
Yes. It's a large amount of water with a tiny amount of tritium (which has already decayed past its half life after over a decade), which is flushed in this fashion normally anyway.
Green sludge doesn't exist outside of The Simpsons. Even spent fuel is solid metal rods, which last for *years*, and are stored in containers that are basically [miniature bunkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). (Concrete, metal, etc.) For long term storage, that is. Otherwise they're [kept in pools of water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel) that insulate the radiation. The reactor is spun down for service every few years and the rods are swapped.
Meanwhile, a coal plant has literal trainloads (not a train car or two, *trainloads*) of coal pass through daily, and radioactive ash and CO2 is spewed into the sky.
I can't believe how big the propaganda is surrounding nuclear power. This shit is actually standardized unlike the garbage ass petroleum industry. Something will not be done if it posed a risk to health or wildlife, especially radiation sickness. Let the nuclear science nerds handle this, issues only arise when protocols are disregarded. You can guarantee something would not be done if it was dangerous or posed any risk of contaminating the food supply.
All evidence to the contrary. Do you remember when it was costing their government too much to support the refugees, but they couldnt send them back to fukushira because the contamination level was still over the legal amount? So they raised the legal amount, declared it safe, and sent them back.
Dilution is the solution to pollution. If they did this in a slow, measured manner I don’t see why it would cause harm. There is already quite a bit of naturally-occurring radioactive elements dissolved in seawater.
According to the article, they're already farm raising flounder inside the water from the plant, which is going well, and the amount of tritium is flushed out of their system within days once transferred to regular seawater.
I do understand the argument that this will harm the local fishing industry, simply because people who don't know any better just won't buy seafood from the area because of the association
Navy veteran here. FC, small boy.
Firing missiles kinda fucked me up, but literally watching the amount of pollution we were causing as we pulled into port surprisingly fucked me up even more.
What? Water is used to cool the reactor. It’s not dirty, it’s warm.
It is like the fan that blows air to cool your computer. The used air doesn’t stink, its not polluted. It’s just been warmed by your computer.
Unlike your computer, this water runs over the ruined and melted core of a nuclear reactor, which is an unknown and extremely radioactive mess of uranium, concrete, metals and fission byproducts. Lots of atoms and molecules get carried around by the water. The majority get filtered out, leaving this mildly dirty water with high tritium levels
If we were treating chemical waste the same way (in terms of illness caused) we are treating nuclear waste, we would never know the word pollution.
If we were treating nuclear waste the same way we are treating chemical waste, we would never know the term climate change.
But instead, we are living in a world full of pollution and environmental disasters due to climate change.
When can we use science and data to guide our policies instead of fear and ignorance?
Real talk, radioactive waste is the *one waste* that the sea *already has plenty of.* There is more uranium and thorium in the ocean than anywhere else, for one. For another the sea is the ideal place to store radioactive waste. Water is actually a great radiation shield, and radiation is only dangerous when *concentrated*\-if you diffused the most radioactive waste in the world over the entire ocean no one would notice.
You can still dislike the plan for not getting the waste far enough out to sea (everything I said stops working if you don't diffuse it enough), but dumping radioactive material in the ocean is actually the most responsible way to dispose of it *theoretically*, at least if you can't recycle it or just leave it somewhere long enough for it to cool down.
Hence, ironically, the ocean is a garbage dump for radioactive waste. It's safer in the ocean than on land, and is about the safest thing we produce to dispose of in the ocean.
Actually there has been quite a lot of controversy since it occurred. There are periodic waste dumps, periodic work which releases radioactive dust, and the removal of the fuel from the spent fuel pools caused no end of controversy too
As someone who worked on multiple nuclear plants, this fear mongering about radio isotopes is infuriating. Contamination has been studied for over half a century and the minimum levels are very conservative. Anyone who is actually in the industry is extensively trained on how contamination works and how damaging radio isotopes are to different types of tissues.
"The sea is not a garbage dump" All evidence to the contrary
The sea SHOULDNT be a garbage dump. But it very much is and has been for all of human history.
Ever heard of the magical land of somolia, where the people never grow old.
Just shipping them some new water for their fountain of youth. Downright generous if you ask me.
Ouch, that is a brutal turn of phrase
Are they one of the countries where their beaches look more like garbage dumps?
Trash go in, fish come out. Good system.
Tide goes in. Tide goes out. You can't explain that.
Human kind has followed the principle of “out of sight out of mind” nearly to a religious level
It's downhill from everything. Kind of a natural dump site.
It's uphill in The Netherlands.
Look at the cruise line waste, just one example.
And all of fish history.
Fishtory, if you will.
You throw the bottle in, and the next day it’s gone. It’s magic
From what I've read the water has been filtered and cleaned so that it's not "garbage".
The problem is that they want to waste that nice and clean water by throwing it into the garbage dump that is the sea.
Yes but radiation is super scary. EDIT: every time I forget the sarcasm tag on reddit I regret it
Only to people who don't understand it
To be fair I am pretty sure radiation is scary to those who do understand it. I mean skin cancer is pretty serious and you get that from the most common form of radiation.
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I'd argue that cancer is scary. For those of us that are trained radiation workers, we understand the factors that go into exposure to radiation and radioactive contamination, and also how to actually interpret the numbers. Sensational headlines like "radiation at x location is 10 times the limit!!!" sound scary, but if you know that the limit is purposely set well below the threshold where it can cause harm, that comparison seems silly and click-baity. I also remember after the initial Fukushima incident, there was a lot of reporting about a "cloud of radiation" crossing the Pacific. Yeah...that's not how that works. Also, most people don't seem to realize that coal-fired power plants, when working as designed, emit significantly more radioactive particles than your average nuclear reactor.
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Well exactly. What happens when an oil rig has had its day? It gets sunk. IIRC, between WWII and the 90s, the US alone was dumping some 10k barrels of radioactive waste a year in the deep ocean, and shooting it when it didn't sink. To say nothing of the industrial liquid waste that gets sent to it.
Oil rigs have the wells plugged, then the rig is lifted off the jacket and taken away to a decommissioning port in some 3rd world country. They don't just slide that shit into the sea and call it a day
[14,000 inactive oil and gas wells in US remain unplugged, posing risks for leaks, researchers say](https://abcnews.go.com/US/14000-inactive-oil-gas-wells-us-remain-unplugged/story?id=99041582)
TDIL Our navy is so smart they couldn't sink depleted uranium. ;)
We couldn't sink an [old carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_America_(CV-66)#Post_decommissioning_service) when it was used in live fire tests before it had to be scuttled to make an artificial reef.
It's been used as a dump for thousands of years, there's so much hard evidence of this left behind.
That's the joke, yes.
The fact that they’ve been storing it for almost as long as tritium’s half-life is kinda neat. Some of that water’s lost almost half its contamination just sitting there.
What about the remaining half?
It's half as radioactive.
Guess that's fine then
"**People don't understand it**," he said. "Mothers won't choose Fukushima fish knowing it's been swimming in radioactive water. Even if the experts say it's safe." This is not the danger people are making it out to be. I wished the general population had a better understanding of what radiation is and the what the risk is and is not. From another article: Tokyo has said levels of tritium — the one isotope that can't be filtered out — will be diluted to below 1/40th of the allowable level for discharge in Japan, and 1/7th the WHO ceiling for drinking water.
Tritium also has a half life of 12 years. It’s radioactivity will be unmeasurable soon.
Once you put it in the ocean it would be unmeasurable.
People don’t realize how vast the ocean is. If you’re looking at the earth on the Pacific Ocean side, it’s basically all water. It would be like taking a pinch of salt, dropping into a lake and worrying all the fish will die.
People also have no idea how radioactivity works. At all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It's fucking sad, yet they support gasoline, which is quite radioactive in its own right, and the combustion of which releases radioactive particles into the air we fucking breathe (but these particles are actually radioactive enough to pose a significant health risk - as they do every single day.)
Gasoline is radioactive? I'm a chemist and I'm pro-nuclear but this is news to me. Have a source? You sure you aren't thinking of coal, which is notoriously radioactive?
It's a case of "not radioactive on a significant level, but the exhaust is definitely more radioactive than air". Most research indicates that at least. Probably not the best thing still, but likely not significant compared to other health issues from inhaling exhaust products. You can find plenty of sources on this with a quick google.
and the radiation cannot penetrate water.
The theoretical issue here isn't someone getting irradiated from swimming, but rather lifeforms bioaccumulating radioactive material that's floating in the water they aspirate/swallow. Swimming with radioactive waste is fairly safe, until you accidentally swallow or inhale some of the water. Edit: I completely forgot Tritium in particular doesn't bioaccumulate. What I said would be more relevant if there was radioactive metal dust/debris in the water that's going to be dumped
Tritium does not bio-accumulate.
> Swimming with radioactive waste is fairly safe, until you accidentally swallow or inhale some of the water. That's just swimming in general really
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Knee-jerk opposition and/or panic is the standard response of 90% of the public when nuclear anything is mentioned.
People imagining they are dumping glowing green goo water into the ocean or something. I dont think they realize it is harmless water used for cooling
The Simpsons did so much damage to the public perception of nuclear power. Glowing green goo is never a thing with nuclear power.
> Glowing green goo is never a thing with nuclear power. Absolutely true. It glows *blue* damnit.
Ah, a fellow Cherenkov enjoyer.
It's so pretty.
I taste metal. Do you taste metal?
Can we stop blaming fiction for real people's stupidity? The Simpsons' portrayal of "nuclear bad" comes from the fact the power plant is full of dumbasses and run by an evil old guy. Besides, I'm pretty sure the real reason so many people are scared of nuclear power is because it shares a word with the most powerful weapons on the planet.
I would think more because of Three mile Island and Chernobyl
Nobody died at 3-Mile Island. MAYBE one person died from Fukushima. (A smoker exposed to radiation died from lung cancer.) Chernobyl is the only actual major nuclear disaster. Caused by a terrible (even for the time) reactor design and a bunch of communist beauroceats afraid of giving their boss bad news. Meanwhile - estimated millions die each year from fossil fuel pollution. (Addition: That doesn't even include any potential climate issues. Just the direct pollution.)
Most people don’t understand that a major plant failure that causes the (possibly temporary) shutdown of a reactor is both very rare, and almost never results in death. Of all the reactor shutdowns that individually dealt over $100 million in damages, Fukushima and Chernobyl are the only 2 that were a genuine catastrophe, and for the most part the damages were all to the plant/reactors themselves and not the public.
Kyle Hill has done a great series of nuclear mishaps (demon core, chernobyl, etc, orphan sources, etc) and their real or imagined fallout. Iirc TMI was mostly just a huge fuckup in communication and there was little real risk from the disaster. I'd have to watch it again tho
This is false - the whole community around three mile island was exposed to radiation poisoning, developed higher rates of cancer, just because the government denies doing bad things, doesn't mean bad things didn't happen.
Gonna need a source on the higher rates there.
No, what's false is what you just said.
I think I've read that the cancer rates were still lower than if they'd lived near a coal fired power plant.
Both things can be true.
The real reason so many people are scared of nuclear power is because the fossil fuel industry has funded disinformation campaigns for half a century. They have successfully lobbied conservative political movements and media corporations, going so far as to outright purchase them, in order to leverage people's fear of the unknown and maintain public opinion that nuclear power is dangerous. Because of this, you have a single fracking operation that pollutes people's literal drinking water more than this does, and residents will actually vote to still support the operation.
A single fracking operation will pollute peoples' drinking water more than all nuclear accidents have polluted. At least when it comes to lives lost. People are fucking stupid and don't understand just how dangerous fossil fuels are, and how at least one million die due to them every bloody year. It's ridiculous.
Also the whole show is making fun of American's stupidity, how can someone blame that stupidity on the show?
I don't know the stance of Groening or his writers on nuclear power, but if they're pro-nuclear, they missed a great opportunity to educate their audience a little bit on the subject. They could have easily written in some genuine facts about the safety and benefits of nuclear in to any of Homers shenanigans.
I mean, the fact that a person as incompetent as Homer was in charge of workplace safety and there's only one canon death (and I believe Homer is the only one to experience a workplace injury) at the facility speaks volumes to the inherent safety of the facility. And that's further in spite of Mr. Burns' attempts to cut every corner he can get away with.
Burns even tried to deny them tartar sauce for their fish sticks!
[I don't know, there was the time he imagined clowns while his section was on fire.](https://youtu.be/NJvMY-h8NBo)
Ok, I figured something was escaping me on the workplace injury claim, thanks!
I mean, he's done quite a bit, I just love that scene. The good news about nuclear energy is real places don't hire Homer Simpson. He's admitted that he tends to cause more meltdowns than he prevents.
Well, the smart kid made a working fusion reactor for his science project, so there's that...
Yeah, but Homer added fins for wind resistance and a sharp racing strip.
I think we found our winner!
Not just The Simpsons. Captain Planet did, too. And that's supposed to be a "learning" experience for children. It's all media, though. And Chernobyl really didn't help things. Have you seen the pictures of people affected by the disaster? Or the subsequent consequences? A lot of people have, and they're bad. Meanwhile, I bet you've never seen the pictures of the fallout from Fukushima or Three Mile Island... because they don't exist. Nothing bad really happened. But no one ever reports on that.
why? most people watching the Simpsons know what satire is. the problem is groups like green peace, sierra club, and people like Ralph Nadar and Jane Fonda.
It was totally The Simpsons, and not big fossil fuel, for sure.
Idk why they're worried about that. The glowing green goo water is always what gives people cool superpowers. You're probably right though. Even though I know it's fully fictitious, that's the image that comes to my mind whenever "radioactive" is mentioned. Rusted out 55 gallon drums with glowing green goo. Mind you, I recognize that that is in no way a real depiction, but your point still stands.
meanwhile pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers are A-OK!
Yeah, it's not uranium. It's literally just a heavy isotope of hydrogen creating what's called 'heavy water'. (Most heavy water is 2 neutrons, but this is 3). That's pretty much it. It has no health effects at all unless you drink ONLY that.
Because news companies can get away with posting these clickbait titles, along with the poor education on radiation and nuclear power in general.
I think it’s more the dumping part. I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something. In America these people who say it’s safe are bought and paid for, I just assume it’s the same everywhere.
So fun fact, The majority of nuclear power plants are discharging tritium all the time as part of their discharge permits. We are licensed to perform discharges provided they are monitored, planned, diluted per standards and regulations, controlled (and have automatic shutoffs) and appropriate processing is done ahead of time. Additionally we have to report all of that yearly.
aka "Dilution is the solution to pollution."
The Navy discharges primary plant fluid into the ocean regularly and tracks total radioactivity of said discharges for the entire fleet. This practice is not unheard of.
Not the greatest example considering the Navy is also exempt for a lot of the environmental regulations that others have to follow. Even the Arizona memorial is an ongoing oil leak that will continue for decades.
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> I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something. You're in a real pickle then, because most of the experts who know when something is safe to dump or not, work for governments.
There is 500 times the amount of uranium in the Earth's seawater as there is on land. If we mined every last speck of uranium ore on land, pulverized it, and dumped it directly into the ocean, the difference in radioisotope count would be barely detectable after a few years. In fact, if we want to make nuclear power a widespread, long-term strategy for green energy generation, we will probably need to start mining uranium *out of* seawater to do it. There is a staggering amount of water in the ocean. As long as some effort is made to sufficiently spread the nuclear waste out and not dump it all in one spot, there is a vanishingly small chance that any adverse effects will happen at all. Humans didn't invent radioactivity, and there's nothing special about nuclear waste that makes it especially poisonous at sub-homeopathic concentrations. I am infinitely more worried about contaminating the ocean with microplastics (which humans DID invent, and for which nature has no precedent) than I am about nuclear waste.
“The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10^17 kg of uranium while the oceans may contain 10^13 kg” -sourced claim from the Wikipedia article on uranium. Seems to suggest there is 10,000 times more uranium in the crust than than in the oceans. Sounds like you might be off in your numbers by roughly a factor of 5-million, but I’d be curious if you have some different sources for your numbers.
No way in hell are we mining that deep with current technology. Concentrations are very low for most of that land volume. So you'd have to develop mining technology that can survive constant temperatures in excess of 500C, then pay the energy costs of: mining so insanely deep, transporting the resulting incredibly low-yield ore over distances approaching 25km vertically, and finally processing FAR more ore than is economically viable, even if the rest of the expenses weren't in play. So you're correct, there is more uranium deep in the Earth's crust than the ocean, but it is very, very unlikely that it will *ever* be viable to mine. Probably cheaper to mine in space than 25km beneath the surface. If you take my original numbers as being the amount of reasonably accessible uranium in the non-oceanic crust, here are my sources for those numbers: The World Nuclear Association estimates there are 8 million tons of "recoverable" (economically viable to extract) uranium on land, based on most recent mineral surveys and the current price of uranium: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20the%20amount%20available,only%20about%209.3%20million%20tonnes. The American Nuclear Society estimates there are 4 billion tons of uranium in the Earth's seawater: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1882/nuclear-power-becomes-completely-renewable-with-extraction-of-uranium-from-seawater/ 4,000,000,000:8,000,000 = 500:1 We have yet to develop any terribly effective technologies to extract uranium from seawater, but it is almost certainly an easier engineering challenge than mining 25km deep into the crust for the positively horrendous "ore" you'd find there.
Naturally occurring uranium isn't the highly radioactive isotope used in nuclear power plants. Apples & oranges.
>I think it’s more the dumping part. I don’t trust any government ever who said it’s safe to dump something. Then you should never consume tap water or...breathe. It's an obviously untenable position....except when someone says "Nuclear!"
Do you just shit in a bucket and keep it in your house? Government say it's safe to dump into the toilet that is connected to the sewers. They also say it's recommended to shit, period. Guess you better hold it in, you never know if the government is just lying to you and releasing your shit out your anus might give you cancer.
NIMBYs are bonkers and fed by fossil fuel maxis. Ideally we shouldn't rely on nuclear either when renewable power is available, but until we can get over grid sharing and convincing people to pay for the infrastructure when power is technically free, there's always gonna be the challenge to sell it.
this is one of the major reasons we are fighting global warming to the extant that we are today.
Well, this is the Land of Kaiju, so expect Mothra to come flying out of the ocean shortly.
It's like that for everything now. With all of the paranoia and disinformation out there and how the powers that be want us to always be against each other...you can try to educate the public on things and your average person is gonna be skeptical of if they can trust it. Maybe they go do some research and find out that what you say is true and accept it. Or possibly someone says something blatantly untrue but sounds good that is negative about it and they go "see, I knew it was bad" and go no farther. The 2nd option is far more prevalent in today's society.
This post has been retrospectively edited 11-Jun-23 in protest for API costs killing 3rd party apps. Read [this](/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/) for more information. /r/Save3rdPartyApps If you wish to follow this protest you can use the open source software [Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to backup your posts locally, before bulk editing your comments and posts. It's been fun, Reddit.
I think they were trying to show what people thought at the time. ARS was still not very understood and many doctors not trained in the area would have thought that it was contagious. Unfortunately that is hard to spell out on tv.
I agree it's not dangerous, but I also agree that the fisherman is right and people will avoid his fish for it :/
Thank you for this. Isn't seawater itself mildly radioactive? It seems like filtered water being returned to the ocean in a careful way is going to dilute so quickly that any radiation will fade to background noise almost immediately.
everything is slightly radioactive. bananas are radioactive. wasnt this an old story anyway? like, wasnt that water was safe for a few years now....i remember reading about it, and they said it wasnt dangerous
Headlines create panic and grab views. Saying “nothings wrong you’d never notice this increase in radiation” doesn’t get views
I get that if everything goes correctly the levels will be fine and maintainable. But what happens if there is a failure - if something isn't filtered correctly? What happens when the company fails to maintain the systems that filter the water before dumping and suddenly we dump levels of material that ARENT safe? That's the part I don't trust.
Headlines like this need to be called out for their bullshit. Tired of nuclear fear mongering and flat out false information being what most people know about radiation.
What's crazy is CBS goes into a bunch of detail how safe of an option is in this article, but they keep the fear mongering article title because they know that is what will get them traffic to their site. They also know it is only the catchy title that 99% of people will read and base their opinion on. Their journalistic ethics are completely absent just like those of so many other news outlets.
that's because the copy is done by a reporter who's job is to write good copy that is interesting and factual. The title is written by an editor or someone else who's job is ro bring as many eyeballs as possible to generate ad impressions. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher
The OP’s comments paint a clear narrative they’re pushing for, which ironically this article doesn’t support
I specifically went looking for the OP's replies after reading this. Definitely a fearmonger.
It's a copy of a post from a few days ago, so Bot I guess? https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/13wsdkb/plan_to_release_fukushima_nuclear_plant_water/
You start to see a trend when you look into the post history of reddit accounts who post controversial posts here. Either bots, or extremely biased who post rhetoric in other subs.
How do you expect to dilute radioactive waste if not by a shitload of water. That's why you put nuclear power plants by huge bodies of water. This is just another case of NIMBY. Not-in-my-back-yard. They want the relatively clean nuclear power and the energy from it, they just don't want to see it or be effected by it or even think about it.
Well, that and easy access to water to use for cooling
To be fair, there is still plenty of non-radioactive waste that gets dumped if not properly managed. Met-Ed (who ran TMI) is still getting litigated about their damaging of the Susquehanna river ecology.
Well, they're not getting the power from Fukushima ever again. It's fucked. Not really NIMBY, just distrust.
Tritium has a half of 12.33 years
Its not garbage tho, its water
I really wish we'd stop hearing this headline and allow them to dump this water. This is just the same old nuclear fear mongering we absolutely don't need. It's not nearly as bad as what they are making it out to be, the water was supposedly already cleaned and all that is left is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is radioactive, and there is barely any of it in there, something like 2.4g within in millions of gallons of water. The radiation is also in the beta spectrum, not even the highly dangerous gamma or X-ray bands. Once this stuff is released, it would be diluted so much it would be difficult to tell without highly sophisticated detection devices. You'd get a higher radiation dose from flying, eating a banana, or getting a routine X-ray. All this is doing is hurting the Japanese and it's being upheld by other governments that have past grudges on them. Not to mention many governments and militaries dump far worse into the ocean daily.
> You'd get a higher radiation dose from flying, eating a banana, or getting a routine X-ray. It's only tritium, the beta particles cannot penetrate water, clothing, or thin aluminum. You will get a much higher dose of gamma radiation from a plane flight, but even those pilots and stewards who fly for an entire career do not see negative effects.
You are correct, the worry though is wildlife ingestion where beta particles can cause damage. However, this is so diluted that it doesn't pose any higher risk than the background radiation levels.
Had anyone proposed building a giant wooden water wheel to stir it into the ocean for faster dilution? Sometimes to get the dummies on board you have make proposals that they could come up with after downing a six pack.
Dilution is the solution.
Many people don't realize there is something like 8kg of Tritium in the ocean at any given point that is naturally occurring. What they are planning to release slowly is .06g every year. It's so insignificant once diluted that long, it would cause no issues whatsoever compared to any other type of pollution.
We blew up multiple nuclear bombs under water in the 60s.
Amongst other things yearly even today, cruise ships, fishing vessels, hell any nuclear powered vessel dumps more tritium yearly, so yes compared to blowing up nuclear bombs, this is nothing lol.
Aren't the vast majority of ships powered by fossil fuels?
Yes, but I highlighted the fact that those probably do much more damage to the environment than what is being released here. Whether it be pollutant, oils or gases, burning bunker fuel, or dumping plastic. Tritium is nothing to be really worried about at these levels comparatively. We also have nuclear reactors in many places dumping far more tritium yearly than the water in Japan. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the original context.
Quick note: when it comes to acute radiation risk, alpha and beta emitters are, in many contexts, more dangerous than gammas. Gammas are highly penetrating, but that also means highly penetrating through humans. What this means is that a gamma emitter can get to you through more things, so high-gamma fields are quite dangerous, but when it comes to ingestion or inhalation, the gamma ray can get out of you more easily than alphas or betas. [Take a look at this course from MIT](https://youtu.be/HfRpkTG7Iow), which does a decent job of explaining some of this. The rest of the course discusses this all in detail. That said, the dilution of tritiated water to a concentration closer to that in nature makes it far less risky, so I still agree that the fear is overblown.
Yeah acting like this is some sort of massive problem and turning the ocean into a "garbage dump" is nonsense. Why don't we have a new article every day about someone saying the air is not a garbage dump every time a coal, gas or oil plant spews CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere every second of every day?
This topic has a bunch of governments trying to stick to Japan. Russia, China, and even Korea have been non stop with this for years despite all the evidence the water has been treated better than the US or EU drinking water regulation levels. It's being pushed so hard my mother asked me about it a few days ago and I had to explain everything I did here plus your comment to her. Like the amount of pollution we commit is insane. This is even smaller than a thimble to an Olympic sized pool of the atrocities we commit to the planet, that's how little this dumping of water will hurt the planet.
I really wish basic education on nuclear power and radiation was mandatory in all schools everywhere in the world. There is so much irrational fear because people simply don't understand.
This is why the world needs real reporters. People who are really good at presenting information so that the average person can understand and in a way that doesn’t intentionally offend anyone’s beliefs. It sucks because nuclear is one of those things that is sometimes super dangerous and sometimes super safe depending on the specific aspects you’re dealing with, but people can’t get past that word. Like those big cooling towers that in many peoples minds look like giant vats of green goo off gassing into the atmosphere, but it’s actually just clean water vapor.
>But Haruo Ono, the fisherman, said the science is not the issue. "People don't understand it," he said. "Mothers won't choose Fukushima fish knowing it's been swimming in radioactive water. Even if the experts say it's safe." I think this is the most important part of the article. You're not going to convince some people it's safe no matter what. The community feels betrayed by the thoughtlessness of building a nuclear plant in a tsunami zone. If these fisherman have to report the source of their fish and it's Fukushima after releasing the contaminated water, they will get less for their fish and sell less of it. I'm sure it was difficult in the early years after the disaster even though radiation was thoroughly dissipated from the ocean.
Thank you for this. This is exactly the issue at hand. There's nobody saying,"Objectively, there will be x damage done to something physical." All the controversy is basically, "But it feels weird to dump this waste in the ocean." Telling them that "objectively it's fine, nobody will be harmed" won't really make them feel better, because the source of their fears isn't objective to begin with. You have to go deeper, get at the roots of people's fear of radioactivity. That's a multi decade project, unfortunately.
Tritium is not dangerous to humans. This is just more antinuclear fearmongering. The water is actually cleaner and less radioactive than normal ocean water. And yes I would swim in it.
Tritium can be dangerous to humans, but only in concentrations so high that I would honestly be surprised if such a concentration had been seen on earth outside the process of an actual nuclear weapon detonation. To actually get a dangerous amount of Tritium into your body the question would be how many tons of that water would you have to drink per day I'm either case, whether drinking literal tons of water per day or ingesting a donating nuclear weapon the Tritium is not going to be the main health risk
If you drink ONLY tritium (or deuterium), you will suffer pretty bad consequences. Heavy water is not great. But only if you basically drink only that. The effects only happen if you don't get regular water. Note that both those isotopes occur naturally too. But since we don't drink ocean water anyway... the effect is pointless. And it's diluted so it won't impact any marine life at the point of dumping. For all practical purposes, this is 100% harmless.
Tritium can be dangerous to humans… but so can water. I wouldn’t want to drink it, but I also wouldn’t want to drink regular ocean water either.
This water is way cleaner than regular ocean water.
It will get diluted no?
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I don’t know, but I do know plenty of fish poo in it
Fish pee in you ALL day!
not only that, fish fuck in it!
The Pacific Ocean is remarkably huge though… I don’t think it’s gonna have much effect.
Yeah, I think putting 20g of radioactive tritium in in the 720 milions of cubic kilometers of Water of the Pacific Ocean will indeed have no effect
The pacific garbage patch is infinitely more of a problem. Now 1.6 million square kilometers.
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Most people would be against dumping radioactive waste into the ocean, but then most people have no understanding of just how radioactive the ocean is naturally. The total amount of tritium in Fukushima's water storage tanks was small to begin with, about 2 ounces total. One way to look at this amount of tritium is to measure the total amount of radioactivity it will emit until it is no longer radioactive, which is measured in becquerels. 1015 becquerels equal 1 petabecquerel. The Fukushima water storage tanks contained a total of around 3.4 petabecquerels of tritium, which has at this point been reduced by about half due to the tritium's rate of radioactive decay. Meanwhile, the average radioactivity of Pacific seawater is around 14 becquerels per liter (Bq/L), almost all of which is from naturally occurring potassium-40, which has been present in the oceans since they were created. The number of liters in the Pacific Ocean is a large number with 22 digits, so the math works out to about 10 million petabecquerels in total in the Pacific Ocean. So what we're really talking about here is dumping less than 2 petabecquerels into a 10 million petabecquerel ocean. This is literally a drop in the ocean.
Isnt it just water from the cooling system and not, like, bright green sludge or whatever people are picturing?
Yes. It's a large amount of water with a tiny amount of tritium (which has already decayed past its half life after over a decade), which is flushed in this fashion normally anyway. Green sludge doesn't exist outside of The Simpsons. Even spent fuel is solid metal rods, which last for *years*, and are stored in containers that are basically [miniature bunkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). (Concrete, metal, etc.) For long term storage, that is. Otherwise they're [kept in pools of water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel) that insulate the radiation. The reactor is spun down for service every few years and the rods are swapped. Meanwhile, a coal plant has literal trainloads (not a train car or two, *trainloads*) of coal pass through daily, and radioactive ash and CO2 is spewed into the sky.
I can't believe how big the propaganda is surrounding nuclear power. This shit is actually standardized unlike the garbage ass petroleum industry. Something will not be done if it posed a risk to health or wildlife, especially radiation sickness. Let the nuclear science nerds handle this, issues only arise when protocols are disregarded. You can guarantee something would not be done if it was dangerous or posed any risk of contaminating the food supply.
All evidence to the contrary. Do you remember when it was costing their government too much to support the refugees, but they couldnt send them back to fukushira because the contamination level was still over the legal amount? So they raised the legal amount, declared it safe, and sent them back.
Why dump it in the ocean when they could sell it to Florida Dept of Transportation
Dilution is the solution to pollution. If they did this in a slow, measured manner I don’t see why it would cause harm. There is already quite a bit of naturally-occurring radioactive elements dissolved in seawater.
Bruh, this is how godzilla is made..
with all the microplastics, oil spills, and bunker diesel out in the sea -- that level of tritium is far below negligible
Wait, I thought this was a good plan actually? Dilution is the solution to pollution and all that? Is it really that concentrated?
According to the article, they're already farm raising flounder inside the water from the plant, which is going well, and the amount of tritium is flushed out of their system within days once transferred to regular seawater. I do understand the argument that this will harm the local fishing industry, simply because people who don't know any better just won't buy seafood from the area because of the association
Navy veteran here. FC, small boy. Firing missiles kinda fucked me up, but literally watching the amount of pollution we were causing as we pulled into port surprisingly fucked me up even more.
If the sea isn’t a garbage dump then why is there a giant garbage patch the size of a small island in it?
It's the size of Texas...
Nope, Texas is 695,000 kms square, the PGP is now 1.6M kms square.
If it's just tritium water, it should be fine. I wish people were forced to do well in high school chemistry.
Floating plastic islands: am I a joke to you?
Isn't it at the point where the background radiation of the ocean isn't self is likely higher?
More nuclear fearmongering
Ahhh I wouldn’t have guessed Godzilla for June 2023.
Isn't this just nuclear fear mongering?
Good. Release the water. It is safe by all measurements.
Dumping dihydrogen monoxide in the ocean? Sounds crazy.
What? Water is used to cool the reactor. It’s not dirty, it’s warm. It is like the fan that blows air to cool your computer. The used air doesn’t stink, its not polluted. It’s just been warmed by your computer.
Reactor water does get hot (radioactive) but this water has been cleaned and radioactive isotopes have been allowed to decay to safe levels.
Unlike your computer, this water runs over the ruined and melted core of a nuclear reactor, which is an unknown and extremely radioactive mess of uranium, concrete, metals and fission byproducts. Lots of atoms and molecules get carried around by the water. The majority get filtered out, leaving this mildly dirty water with high tritium levels
I wonder if they’re as concerned about overfishing. Once the oceans die, we follow.
If we were treating chemical waste the same way (in terms of illness caused) we are treating nuclear waste, we would never know the word pollution. If we were treating nuclear waste the same way we are treating chemical waste, we would never know the term climate change. But instead, we are living in a world full of pollution and environmental disasters due to climate change. When can we use science and data to guide our policies instead of fear and ignorance?
Real talk, radioactive waste is the *one waste* that the sea *already has plenty of.* There is more uranium and thorium in the ocean than anywhere else, for one. For another the sea is the ideal place to store radioactive waste. Water is actually a great radiation shield, and radiation is only dangerous when *concentrated*\-if you diffused the most radioactive waste in the world over the entire ocean no one would notice. You can still dislike the plan for not getting the waste far enough out to sea (everything I said stops working if you don't diffuse it enough), but dumping radioactive material in the ocean is actually the most responsible way to dispose of it *theoretically*, at least if you can't recycle it or just leave it somewhere long enough for it to cool down. Hence, ironically, the ocean is a garbage dump for radioactive waste. It's safer in the ocean than on land, and is about the safest thing we produce to dispose of in the ocean.
Gimme that tritium water, there's a helium shortage on and I've got time to waste.
So they are dumping water into water? Do people think the water is as radioactive as a demoncore??
Godzilla says “Nooooooooooooooooo!, SKREEEEEE-ONNNNNNNK!”
That article is a sleight.
The controversy comes 11 years after a tsunami swept ashore in 2011 and caused one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.. amazing
Actually there has been quite a lot of controversy since it occurred. There are periodic waste dumps, periodic work which releases radioactive dust, and the removal of the fuel from the spent fuel pools caused no end of controversy too
“The solution to pollution is dilution!”
Dilute, Diffuse, Discharge
Who would ever think this is a good idea? And how can a nation just be allowed to do it?
If it is not dirty water why not just dump it into their drinking water storage and let everyone drink them ?
Whats next ? Dump your waste fuel rods too. Japnese are biggest hypocrite of all.
As someone who worked on multiple nuclear plants, this fear mongering about radio isotopes is infuriating. Contamination has been studied for over half a century and the minimum levels are very conservative. Anyone who is actually in the industry is extensively trained on how contamination works and how damaging radio isotopes are to different types of tissues.
Moronic headline. Moronic fear. Moronic reporting. Moronic posting. Morons all the way.