[janmalec]

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

Edit: spelling of tritium

[Reason077]

> "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!

[pera]

Tritium is not the only radioactive isotope present though:

https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reac...

> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90, TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water

[littlestymaar]

And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).

This is a complete non-issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fission

[kyrra]

> 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.

[Reason077]

> "Wood and animal waste"

Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.

Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.

[titzer]

> Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions

Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.

Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

[WithinReason]

Also, for another bit of comparison, there's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296

[teawrecks]

That number doesn't mean anything on its own. How about a ppb ratio?

[yandrypozo]

Thank you for saying that, I still don't get how so many people who claim to take decision based on science are so against nuclear tech.

[jerf]

Well, one reason is that a lot of people casually assume that the baseline level of radiation in the natural environment is 0.0000000...., but it's not.

Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.

Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.

Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.

[MomoXenosaga]

Science is irrelevant. There still hasn't been a political decision in my country on where to store nuclear waste.

[7952]

No one really does make decisions like that though. The world is not a lab where you can control all the variables. Nor can anyone have the breadth of knowledge to understand all relevant research. We just adopt a set of heuristics based on our own experience and understanding.

And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.

[forty]

Nuclear is like a religious thing. No one is actually looking at facts and science, they just have belief that this is a solution or the problem. Look how conclusions from an expert panel are shrugged at as "nuclear is obviously the only right solution", no one cares whether those conclusion are based on science or not.

Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.

[causi]

I maintain that "being utter horseshit" should be added to the reasons to flag a submission.

[photochemsyn]

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."

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...

[7952]

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.

[teawrecks]

> Tritium is already present in the ocean

Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?

[DennisP]

We've increased the atmosphere's CO2 concentration by 50%. A few grams of tritium won't significantly change its concentration in the ocean.

[janmalec]

It would be if we added way more tritium. We are adding a very small amount compared to what is already there naturally and even that will decay away.

[janmalec]

Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.

[clarionbell]

Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen.

His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"

It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.

Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.

[belorn]

It is without doubt a critical gaps in information. We need to know first how much radionuclides already exist in the ocean (per volume), and where those comes from. All combustion and mining release to some degree radioactive isotopes into the environment, and much of it ends up sooner or later into the ocean.

A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.

More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.

[newsclues]

Credentialism and appeals. To authority to silence dissent are disgusting anti-scientific mistakes that plague our society.

Source: I’m a dropout and frequently encounter highly educated idiots

[engineer_22]

>I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start...

The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.

[Pyramus]

> 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.

[SECProto]

> 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.

First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[Archelaos]

> 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, ...

[janmalec]

You have completely missed my point. Every time you drive to work or flush your toilet you make an impact to the environment. How do you justify this action? Is it ok because you think that the impact to the environment is small? Will the end result of your action be a "massive destruction of the ecosphere"? Maybe it will be, but you have no other choice in life than evaluate all impacts and improve where you can and where it matters most.

[TedShiller]

Right, it’s all safe and fine as long as we don’t release the water into your own backyard and swimming pool.

[yreg]

What a pointless and unnecessarily personal attack. A rotting tuna is safe and fine in an ocean and I wouldn't want it in my own swimming pool.

[janmalec]

Well actually, at 1/40 the regulatory tritium limit for drinking water, it is perfectly suitable for any backyard and/or swimming pool.