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.
> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"
Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution.
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
And in order to come to any of those conclusions you have to get independent experts to perform a review. Your comment is an emotional defence of your own heuristics. Science requires verification.
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
> nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
> If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
Well, it's a mixture of water and radioactive isotopes. The million tons of water isn't a danger to the Pacific Ocean, but the stuff it's mixed with may or may not be.
If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
>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…
All over half a century ago, but there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of..., cases where the Japanese government didn’t come out well (e.g. Itai-Itai disease was known in 1912, but according to Wikipedia, “Medical tests started in the 1940s and 1950s”, and for Minamata disease “The Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectural governments conducted a joint survey in late 1960 and early 1961 into the level of mercury in the hair of people living around the Shiranui Sea. The results confirmed that organic mercury had spread all around the inland sea and that people were still being poisoned by contaminated fish. Hundreds of people were discovered to have levels greater than 50 ppm of mercury in their hair, the level at which people are likely to experience nerve damage. The highest result recorded was that of a woman from Goshonoura island who had 920 ppm in her sample.
The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”
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.
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.
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”
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] janmalec|3 years ago|reply
Edit: spelling of tritium
[+] [-] Reason077|3 years ago|reply
Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
[+] [-] kyrra|3 years ago|reply
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
[+] [-] WithinReason|3 years ago|reply
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296
[+] [-] yandrypozo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...
[+] [-] 7952|3 years ago|reply
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
[+] [-] teawrecks|3 years ago|reply
Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?
[+] [-] serenitylater|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] engineer_22|3 years ago|reply
The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.
[+] [-] Pyramus|3 years ago|reply
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
[+] [-] Archelaos|3 years ago|reply
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
[+] [-] TedShiller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|3 years ago|reply
If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.
[+] [-] top_sigrid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SapporoChris|3 years ago|reply
The entire pdf is a worthy read.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
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/2019/07/2...
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] Stevvo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|3 years ago|reply
Sounds a lot better than
760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.
[+] [-] dikei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetAlone|3 years ago|reply
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-Harad...
[+] [-] yreg|3 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] Someone|3 years ago|reply
The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] morninglight|3 years ago|reply
-
[+] [-] sonicggg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarionbell|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.h...
[+] [-] westcort|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Tabular-Iceberg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littlestymaar|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] ddingus|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourmandave|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonetheman|3 years ago|reply
Though it might be nice to see Godzilla IRL... at least until he/she squishes you with gigantic irradiated feet.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] holoduke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|3 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nu...
[+] [-] xyzzy21|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|3 years ago|reply
NHK WORLD PRIME Fukushima: The Curse of Groundwater https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016120/
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
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.