> That water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organization drinking water limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre, according to Tepco. A becquerel is a measure of radioactivity.
> Monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has backed the plan, will be on-site for the discharge, and samples of water and fish will be taken.
Umm, what's the controversy here?
Fear of radiation, fear that the Japanese government / Fukushima’s owners can’t be trusted to release only what they say they will. Personally it seems safe to me and I’m confident the IAEA’s monitoring will be effective, but then again I’m living on the other side of the planet, so …
As a Japanese citizen, I would feel safer seeing the TEPCO corporation dismantled, and it's leadership behind bars. But the courts declared them not guilty.
A late addition, but I should also add info about Onagawa Nuclear Powerplant. It survived the exact same disaster with no melt down, only because the manager staunchly refused to back down on constant safety training and disaster drills. Of course, to the frustration and chagrin of upper management.
and also
https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
They seems to be more willing to put money on propaganda instead of actually dealing with the problem. Just check the page 7.
- Discharge into the sea: 3.4 billion yen
- Vapor release: 34.9 billion yen
- Hydrogen release: 100 billion yen
- Underground burial: 243.1 billion yen
And for propaganda, 70 billion yen
You can trust the IAEA to actually do monitoring, and also believe that monitoring might be not effective enough. The IAEA failed to effectively monitor the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade, so why should we expect the opposite?
> I feel like anyone should be able to conduct independent testing on water and fish samples from the area.
You have to tap into the wastewater source, which is much more hard to do independently and also why the IAEA had to show up. The wastewater will then be subject to the ocean currents, so the actual effect would be inconsistent and delayed (up to 10 years, according to simulations). At that point nothing could be done about the year-long dump.
Especially given the fact that Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan at the time of the Fukushima accident, had to go to the TEPCO HQ to force them to continue the response instead of giving up and watching a full meltdown. Japan has a lot to do in order to regain the lost trust.
The government has basically designated the nuclear agency seat as a "Send the guy we don't like there" seat. Only incompetent idiots have been placed there since Fukushima.
Add in all the BS red-tape that the government made up, the notoriously slow bureaucracy, and sometimes even sabotage? (Combine that with the new nuclear regulation agency created after Fukushima, which complicates it further) It's not happening without a strongman leading the charge and really forcing it.
Would be great if we could copy-paste France's setup. But Japan is obtuse and inflexible.
China's statements are sleazy in my opinion. The way they word things makes it sound like Japan is irresponsibly doing whatever they like without oversight, and the world should be doing something about it.
La Hague's retreatment plant puts out 13000 TBq per year, and no one ever cared, nor did anyone see changes in the environment.
Not to mention that humans do not metabolize Tritium, it'll never stay in the human body for more than a few hours. You're more likely to die from the salt in that water than the tritium.
In Ontario Canada:
20 Bq/L limit proposed by the Ontario Drinking Water Advisory Council (ODWAC)
190 is 10 times that limit.
This isn't only about drinking water it's about eating seafood that has absorbed these chemicals (or eaten many fish who have absorbed them). I could understand the caution around seafood in that area for a period of time.
And as the article notes, there are active Nuclear power plants in France and China (and South Korea [2]) that discharge even more tritium per year than is planned at Fukushima. Should people also be cautious about eating seafood from those regions as well?
[1] https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
[2] https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/17/173%EC%86%A1%EA%B7%9C...
The ocean's average radioactivity is 12Bq/L, and there's a _lot_ of water. A single banana is 20Bq already.
Dump a few million litres of 10000Bq/L water in the ocean over a few years, and the average radioactivity goes to... Still 12Bq/L
This is unlike, say, naturally radioactive carbon or potassium isotopes, that have a relatively constant concentration in the animal's body over it's life time - if a fish eats some high potassium food, it will excrete an equivalent of his own equally radioactive amount to maintain homeostasis.
It's for this exact reason the net "banana dose" of radiation, unless you are potassium deficient, is in fact zero.
Seriously, I have a hard time assuming good will from your post if you do not try to differentiate the amount of dilution happening in a 100km2 50m deep lake vs a 100,000,000km2-sized 5,000m deep ocean.
Drinking salty sea water is generally not recommended.
The waste water of nuclear plant will not directly touch the nuclear materials. However, the water Japan released did.
Just a few minutes ago, The CPC (Communist Party of China) stated that it is suspending all imports of Japanese seafood to protect consumers.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-66599189
> As expected, China has imposed a blanket ban on all Japanese seafood.
> Beijing announced some restrictions last month, but they were limited to 10 prefectures in Japan, including Fukushima and Tokyo. Earlier this week, Hong Kong announced a similar 10 prefecture ban on ‘aquatic produce’.
> South Korea, too, still blocks seafood imports from the Fukushima area. It's a ban that's been in place since 2013 and, although the government's political stance has softened, it is one that it has no intention of lifting.
> These are major customers for Japan and represent a lot of lost business. Nowhere buys more Japanese seafood than mainland China, which imported more than $600m worth last year. Remarkably, Hong Kong is only just behind - spending $520m on marine produce from Japan.
> Given China's consistent and vocal opposition to the wastewater release, it's a scenario that Japan's government probably envisaged. In the short-term, it admits businesses will take a 'significant' hit.
> In this sense, China understands the economic leverage it has over Japan and the question is whether Hong Kong will follow the mainland’s lead with another all-out ban.
> Either way, we're talking about major disruption for Japan's seafood industry and for restaurants in Hong Kong and China.
Annual release of tritium:
2020: South Korea Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant and others Total: 365tbq or 1,022mg
The total amount currently stored at Fukushima is around 860tbq, intended to be released over the course of 30 years.
So divide by 30 and that is around ~28tbq a year.
Either way, the halflife of tritium is around 14years, and it's everywhere in the ocean. This is actually a nothing burger.
Yes, people are that afraid of nuclear.
If we'd built the capacity then, we'd have a whole lot less carbon in the atmosphere today.
I don't necessarily agree with the Greens but I remember this perilous time very well. And it was the incumbent non-Green powers who created this situation.
Furthermore, this is not the only theme the Greens pressed on and I must admit our country is already much much better for it ( cleaner air, cleaner waters ).
Same for the classic "look at that ugly city, so bad for the environment!" Bay area types who forced suburban sprawl.
Many facilities (back then and now) where unsafe (e.g. Ukranie) and are still a threat (e.g. France)
Add to that the short sighted actions by everyone involved. (DROPPING barrels in an abandoned mine for final storage, just to find out it does not only totally leak, but advisors precisely warned about it beeing not a suitable location (germany))
For me that's enogh to loose trust in governments and companies beeing able to run such an operation. Fukushima beeing the final nail to this coffin for many.
Maybe when we can proof the reliability, safety and waste efficiency of modern reactor systems, we can rebuild this trust. But either way, we are surely talking 20-60 years. It's scorched earth.
Did you see Godzilla ? /s
In the ocean: bacteria food -> plant food -> fish food.
With one caveat: homeopathy says that the water has to be diluted by a certain process which involves tapping it ten times during full moon or some non-sense like that.
Geopolitics at it's worst.
EDIT: Typo
Japanese domestic politics at it's worst.
I keep seeing this nonsense about "why not dump it into the dirt", as if that ever made any sense. The answer is always simple, there is already a massive amount of Tritium in the ocean.
The water, is also literally sea water. It is salt water taken from the ocean, now with some radioactive isotopes of hydrogen (H20 remember?) which is called tritium. The dilution process literally takes sea water, and mixes it.
Dumping salt water into a local lake or river, or the dirt is literally what starts ecological disasters. But you didn't even do basic research did you?
...
>But you didn't even do basic research did you?
It makes sense BECAUSE that's exactly how dilution works. Diluting in Japanese lakes (or just the closest) is still as safe as diluting the fucking ocean because japanese lakes are also fucking massive relative to volume of water to be released. Politicians chose ocean because domestic politics. Use your brain and do some basic math. Dump all 1.25 tons / 1.2B litres / 660T becquerels into Lake Inawashiro @ 5.4km3 / 5.4T litres and it'll work out to ~120 becquerels of tritium per litre, still less than WHO limit of 10,000 per litre for drinking water. Diluting 1/5400 of the one lake with some salt water, +0.01% salienty, which is... drum roll fresh water territory. That's dumping everything at once. Now spread it out over 30 years. Spread that out over even more bodies of water and it's even more trivial. JP gov chose negligible domestic ecologic disaster with terrible domestic optics that will affect domestic sentiment and governance for negligible chance of international disaster with more managable optics. Which is still based on assumption that TEPCO can be trusted for decades and release will indeed be negligible. But we both know that's far from certain given reputation, hence JP gov would rather hedge by offloading potential political fallout into international commons, because they can't trust TEPCO not to fuck around on the time scale involved, so best not even risk something as sensitive as more radiation drama on JP soil. They'd rather risk losing 100s of billions in fishing exports than potential domestic ire. Which is fine. But also recognize this issue has as much if not more politics considerations than science. But you didn't even do basic political/geopolitical thinking relative to science did you?
We can see pollution in water, on land, but not in the air.
