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No One Knows What to Do with Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water

77 points| rl3 | 10 years ago |nautil.us | reply

135 comments

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[+] tdy721|10 years ago|reply
This is not the kind of problem it's being made out to be here.

First of all, Tritium is an beta emitter, blocked by a piece of paper or the skin. It's not dangerous in the environment unless it's consumed. Even better, it does not bio-accumulate, because it's water.

Second, the half life of Tritium is 12.4 years.

Consider this excerpt:

""" The World Health Organization’s standard for tritium in drinking water is 10,000 becquerels per liter (34 ounces). According to Mayumi Yoshida, a TEPCO communications officer, Fukushima’s stored water contains between 1 and 5 million becquerels per liter. """

So our radioactive waste is acceptable as Drinking Water at 10K.

Lets do the math

5000000/(2^9) = 9765.625

9*12.4 = 111.6 years

No one knows what do about the Radioactive Water?

How's about we wait few generations, and drink it!

This is child's play next to the real problems posed by long lived (400K+ year long half life) bio-accumulating isotope disposal.

I wouldn't mind if they dumped it in the ocean TBH.

[+] nosuchthing|10 years ago|reply
Assuming it's only Tritium?

At no point since the meltdown began, through when radiation began leaking into the atmosphere - of which was dispersed and detected around the globe, has any entity associated with the Fukushima plant or Japan shown any signs of willingness to be upfront and transparent about the situation.

The US Navy seemed to be one of the only real orginizations who offered an upfront warning of radiation exposure to citizens. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/15/japan.us.navy.ra...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-...

[3] http://www.radiationnetwork.com/Message.htm

[4] http://nypost.com/2013/12/22/70-navy-sailors-left-sickened-b...

[+] manigandham|10 years ago|reply
Considering we have lots of nuclear reactors floating around (ships and submarines), some of which have been destroyed and ended up in the ocean - it's probably the best place to put this stuff.

The world's oceans are absolutely massive and already have millions of tons of radioactive material dissolved along with plenty of cooling power. Maybe the specific dumping zone would be a little radiated for a bit but that can be solved by spreading it out in the deep sea and through natural ocean currents.

[+] TorKlingberg|10 years ago|reply
Alpha radiation is blocked by a piece of paper. Beta is harder to block, but not as bad as gamma. Beta radiation can definitely penetrate the skin.
[+] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
They're going to run out of room for tanks. And there must be access, because the tanks are going to rust out, and will need replaced. So storing the Tritium-contaminated water for a century or so is nontrivial.
[+] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
This will be the time to get someone to extract energy (or just the tritium, it has a lot of uses) from that.
[+] grecy|10 years ago|reply
What I learned during the Fukushima disaster and ongoing clean up is that the human race literally has no plan or technology to deal with things when nuclear plants go bad.

I'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch, but it boggles my mind that we just stood around and said "well, shit. We don't have a backup plan, and we're stuck with this for a very, very long time".

[+] toomuchtodo|10 years ago|reply
Same here! I argue constantly for wind and solar instead of nuclear not because nuclear is a bad technology, but we are bad as a species at managing it.

EDIT: It takes 10-20 years to get a nuclear generation plant built, starting at $1 billion USD, and I've never seen a wind turbine or solar panel need to be kept cool for days after having moderator rods dropped to prevent fuel rods from melting down and hydrogen gas destroying a pressured containment vessel.

Don't talk to me about thorium, MSRs, breeders, or whatever new fangled reactor is being pushed this year unless you're willing to guarantee with incredibly steep financial penalties that if you start building a reactor today, you will be done on time, and within your budget.

Otherwise, move out of the way while we build out solar, wind, and utility-scale battery storage, all proven to work with existing tech, needing no liability waivers from the government nor permanent spent fuel storage that doesn't (and won't ever) exist.

[+] mcv|10 years ago|reply
The main thing I learned from it is that even in modern, high tech countries withe tech to handle it safely, corporations will always cut corners.

It's not just the technology itself that's unsafe, it's the fact that it's handled by profit-driven corporations.

I think nuclear energy may be unavoidable as transitional tech until we can move entirely to cleaner technology, but it very clearly needs very tight regulation, and it's not the end goal. (At least uranium fission isn't; I keep hearing positive stuff about thorium. But even then, wind and solar already works; we need a lot more of that.)

[+] lmm|10 years ago|reply
It's really not very dangerous, even in the worst case, compared to the alternatives for baseline power.

Supposing we just ignored the radioactivity and did nothing, compare the number of deaths and environmental damage per kwh to what business as usual for any alternative would cause (coal mining? Oil drilling? Flooding land for hydro-electric? Mining the stuff that solar panels are made of?).

[+] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
Hyman Rickover designed a very clever reactor for nuclear subs. But scaling it up 100x was naive at best. So was doing that with the graphite core design. Maybe there are inherently safe designs.
[+] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
If it's just tritiated water, is there a good reason it can't just be dumped into the ocean? It won't bioaccumulate, right?
[+] joshuapants|10 years ago|reply
As they say in the article, tritium is usually not considered a health hazard, but organizations are starting to question that standpoint. It would, as they also say in the article, be politically unpopular to do so regardless of what the actual effects are.
[+] lsiebert|10 years ago|reply
Tritium is actually useful for luminescent devices like emergency exit signs.

Which now that I think about it, is a little ironic.

[+] curtis|10 years ago|reply
Actually, you may be on to something.

According to Wikipedia, Tritium is worth $30,000 per gram [1]. I can only assume that we can separate super-heavy water (T20) from regular water since we can separate heavy water (D20) from regular water. I don't know if $30K per gram is enough to cover the separation cost, but it seems like it might...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Self-powered_lighting

[+] stretchwithme|10 years ago|reply
Freeze it and drop it in an antarctic glacier that will take a long time to melt.

Bury where there's already plenty of radioactivity. It does occur in nature, I hear.

The more radioactive it is, the shorter the half-life, right?

[+] krschultz|10 years ago|reply
The half life is 12.3 years. If the amount of water was not growing it wouldn't be a huge problem. The tanks they are building will probably last at least 40+ years before having to be replaced, at which point we're talking about water that is not all that dangerous. If you release a tiny bit at a time it shouldn't be a problem.

However the water keeps accumulating. I don't think that part is sustainable. Until they fix the root cause of a seemingly endless amount of water that needs to be stored, this is going to be a problem.

[+] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
The half-life of Tritium is 12.3 years. So as long as substantially everything with longer half-life has been removed, storage for a century or so would suffice.

Maybe put it in a bunch of large bags and tow it to Antarctica. But you'd need to avoid the bits that are already collapsing.

[+] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
Um... how about separate out the tritium? It goes for like $30k per gram, doesn't it?

Corner the self-illuminated exit sign market!

[+] kijin|10 years ago|reply
According to this [1], the amount of tritium that currently exists in Fukushima is no more than 4 grams.

At first I thought that might have been a unit conversion error, but Wolfram Alpha [2] seems to confirm the tiny mass.

So if it costs more than $120k to separate it from the rest of the water, it would not be worth the effort.

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

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+1+petabecquerel...

[+] sixdimensional|10 years ago|reply
Are there any bacteria that consume tritium? A quick google search of "tritium bacteria" shows some relationship between bacteria and tritium - in some cases it kills bacteria and in others, there are bacteria that can consume it.

For example: "Possible use of A̲l̲c̲a̲l̲i̲g̲e̲n̲e̲s̲ p̲a̲r̲a̲d̲o̲x̲u̲s̲ as a biological monitor"

[+] j-pb|10 years ago|reply
The bacteria might be able to harness some energy from radioactive decay, but it won't speed up that process. Afaik, chemical processes should have zero effect on the decay rate.
[+] rip747|10 years ago|reply
maybe I'm missing something. Is there any reason why they couldn't just pop the lids off the tanks and let nature do what it does, evaporate the water. Figure it could take a couple of years or so for all the water to evaporate and at the same time rain water would dilute whatever is in there.
[+] zamalek|10 years ago|reply
Instead of trying to find out what to do to dispose of it, couldn't we possibly find a use for it?
[+] icanhackit|10 years ago|reply
Could you create robust, modular storage vats that double as interlocking elements of a sea-wall to hold back future tsunamis? I imagine it'd be expensive but you're killing a few birds with one stone. If containment in a single vat fails then the radioactive water is dispersed in a vast sea as opposed to a small land area.

I also wonder if you could blast pellets of radioactive waste with a very big laser like the one at the NIF [0]. I don't know much about physics so I accept this could be a disastrous or futile idea but if anyone can comment that would be great.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

[+] tdy721|10 years ago|reply
The NIF is not the answer here. I suspect that the facility will only "Blast" a few grams or kilograms of material in its lifetime, we need to deal with TONS of water.
[+] Nogwater|10 years ago|reply
Sounds like a really expensive way to make radioactive steam. :)
[+] jkyle|10 years ago|reply
We could feed to lizards and moths and stuff.

That always seems to turn out well in the movies.

[+] notatoad|10 years ago|reply
Is there a reason it can't just stay in the tanks indefinitely?
[+] joshuapants|10 years ago|reply
I think the biggest problem is that it isn't just a few tanks of water, it's a constantly growing amount. It's expensive and impractical to keep building tanks, it's expensive and impractical to filter out the tritium, and it's questionable whether just pumping it out to sea is acceptable (I imagine that if they were able to dump it far into the ocean away from any land it would be more palatable, but that would also be, you guessed it, impractical and expensive).
[+] mattzito|10 years ago|reply
Well, IANAPP but a quick google skim shows that the half-life of tritium is 12 years, roughly. That's a long time to store something to get down to levels where you could feel confident dumping the water out, or accepting the risk that it would end up in the groundwater.
[+] luckman212|10 years ago|reply
My interpretation is that the water continues to accumulate, so the problem isn't only what to do with the existing contaminated water, but how to avoid having to build an endless amount of storage tanks.
[+] kansface|10 years ago|reply
There will be another earthquake/tsunami before it decays.
[+] velodrome|10 years ago|reply
A few of the tanks are leaking...
[+] brianwawok|10 years ago|reply
Does tritium evaporate? Or could we condense all the tanks from say 1 million gallons of water + 1 pound of tritium, down to say 100 gallons of water and 1 pound of tritium? Seems the volume of water is what makes it tricky, not the actual tritium.
[+] jbert|10 years ago|reply
Does it have to be an open system?

Can't the already-contaminated water be used for cooling in a mostly-closed system?

And if the expansion due to rainwater is significant, perhaps some kind of large tent arrangement?

[+] myrandomcomment|10 years ago|reply
Ah, the age old dumbasses that think the world nuclear is bad. At the current contamination level of the water, dump it in the ocean. No one will notice. It is water and alpha decay.
[+] savage_platypus|10 years ago|reply
Nuclear has a lot to learn from the oil and gas industry, especially that dilution is the solution to pollution.
[+] csense|10 years ago|reply
The tanks aren't endless compared to the ocean. Just dump it in the middle of the Pacific or something.