No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.
Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.
The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.
ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.
i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.
totally sad.
Yet one litre of oil can contaminate over a million litres of water.
I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can’t find it.
While I can’t speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it’s very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it’s TREATED water that’s being released. That means they have a treatment system (there’s a fucking rabbit hole and half…) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone ‘yolo pump the water into the ocean’.
Tritium isn’t toxic, it’s mildly radioactive.
Tritated water is toxic just like heavy water. You’d just have to drink a truly ridiculous amount for it to be toxic, to the point that the radiation is a much bigger problem than the toxicity.
Edit: fully tritated water is actually worse, now that I think about it. The radioactive decay will periodically knock off a hydrogen atom, which makes it very reactive. That’s not what this is though.
Water is toxic, if you drink an only mildly ridiculous amount and don’t get some salt too. I say this having been hospitalized for hyponatremia several years back, due to unwisely drinking plain water instead of anything with salts in it when sick.
Oh for sure, I’m a nurse. Heavy water/tritated water is cytotoxic like a chemotherapy drug however, vs just messing up your osmotic balance. Your proteins conformiational structure from hydrogen bonds can’t function correctly with it and you can’t replicate your DNA/RNA because of the difference in size of the hydrogen and your cells die. Starts with diarrhea, ends with death. You need like a 20% proportion of it to see those effects though, so like I said, truly ridiculous amounts of tritated water. More than the entirety that they’re releasing.
I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should’ve been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.
I don’t understand why people think concentrating it and keeping large quantities on-site is preferable to heavily diluting and releasing it. A giant vat of radioactive water sounds like another disaster waiting to happen.
Because they don’t believe that they’ve removed the heavy metals that end up in the food web and sitting in the littoral area seabed until it’s picked up by lifeforms again. Tritium dilutes, but fission products do not.
Water eats beta- and even alpha particles in a small radius. Ionized water even more so.
The sea is vast. A pond is but a drop to the sea.
It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly, but it was a good gamble.
Nobody’s particularly concerned about the actual radiation of the tritium. It’s just that it is actively picked up by your body and used like any other water with the same biological half life of water at 7 days. It can cause some problems in that time. It’s not really a problem of it getting integrated into anything, since all it’ll do is knock itself off of and destroy whatever it gets incorporated into when it decays.
Yeah they talk about nuclear waste and how it needs to be stored for so long, without recognizing that fossil fuels spew their waste, including radiation, directly into the atmosphere, where it is causing apocalyptic global warming. Having it in barrels is actually a big plus.
I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.
I asked ppl there “is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?” And most of them were like “it’s not a common occurrence but it’s not inherently dangerous and it’s not that big of a deal”
To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.
Its also classic anti-nuclear power FUD.
I don’t doubt nuclear power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.
This here is also classic anti-nuclear power FUD.
This here is capitolist FUD, but I’m sure in all your great wisdom think humans can be trusted not to fuck up a 5th time.
All you said that was humans mess up everything we do, as if that were something meaningful to say. That is not an argument against nuclear. That’s an argument against absolutely everything humans do. It’s meaningless. Look:
I don’t doubt solar power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.
I don’t doubt coal power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.
I don’t doubt hydro power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.
I don’t doubt steam power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.
All of those are exactly as meaningless as what you wrote. So don’t go on snarkily about my “great wisdom” like you’ve made any point at all. Nuclear is safer than oil and coal and gas, which is where the majority of the world’s energy comes from right now. Fossil fuels are actively destroying our planet right now, and you’re spreading nuclear FUD about things that haven’t happened. That’s not helpful, and it doesn’t match the reality we live in.
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Anyway, I’m done with you. You sound like a shill.
Lol.
The famous last words of someone who has no point to make but can’t even admit it to themselves.
I wrote an honest reply to you and I even bothered to Google some sources for you to refer to. You didn’t even reply to what I said and just came back spouting more non sequitur garbage.
It’s shameful. You should do better than this. Be better than this.
There’s nothing more capitalist than pushing coal and oil.
And any rational green energy advocate knows it’ll take us decades to build enough solar/wind to fill the fossil fuels gap, but would only take us a couple years to fill that demand with nuclear and also produce fewer emissions. That’s simple numbers.
So are you just irrational or a coal-snorting capitalist yourself?
Show me this “fossil fuel gap” when it takes a decade for a nuclear power plant to run at full efficiency.
Best case scenario estimates are a complete replacement by 2050 if energy consumption doesn’t change. This requires aggressive investment in renewable production.
However, that’s unlikely to happen, as energy consumption is increasing, especially as vehicles across the globe abandon oil-based fuel for electricity from the grid.
The largest hurdle to nuclear power is simply regulatory. We could have nuclear plants built by 2030 with a ~30+ year life that would guarantee us the ability to fully phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewables by 2050 even as demand increases.
???
The USSR and Russia were huge players in nuclear technology and contributed a lot to the field. I actually can’t think of an energy source that has a closer connection to communism.
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It wasn’t even necessarily the design, although that didn’t help. It was the bureaucracy that stopped them from doing anything about the problem.
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Chernobyl was about the worst case scenario, and most of the blame is on dogshit soviet designs.
It’s happened three other times since then…
Edit: one other time
Where and when were the 3 other nuclear meltdowns? I wasn’t able to find anything with a quick search, maybe I’m not looking for the right terms.
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And anti-nuclear propagandists who are almost entirely paid by fossil fuel companies?
They’re dastardly clever. They’ve created a narrative that it’s fossil fuels companies who are actually pushing nuclear technology. I suspect they’re also behind the unusual opposition to hydrogen – if hydrogen is ubiquitous, it’s going to be green hydrogen more likely than not. By trying to stop that, fossil fuel companies are able to continue selling and using hydrogen from refinery operations.
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This is the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever seen against nuclear energy. “Sure it works, but people are evil!”
I can apply that to everything. Communism? I don’t doubt it works, but humans build and also destroy.
Nuclear is way safer than just about any other energy source.
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they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.
I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.
china is causing a fuss for political gain. a huge chunk of their fishing practices are illegal and violates international law anyway. their concern is theatrics to drum up their anti-japanese nationalism.
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I’m not doubting you at all, but can you provide a link for emphasis?
It’s a pressurized water plant like Fukishima was. Not quite 3x but still more than 2. Qinshan is a CANDU reactor, so that’s why its 10 times more than what they’re annually releasing from Fukishma. They release a lot of tritium because they use heavy water as a moderator. Any nuke plant that has a Lithium channel for producing tritium for nuclear weapons will also, of course, release a lot of it comparatively.
Thank you for the link.
Candu are designed to be messy, but the Canadians keep them clean(ish) somehow, never understood how, guess they just watched how much enrichment waste they burned, or they were just careful in reclaiming the tritium, it’s expensive after all.
The old “trust but verify” position. Agreed 100%. If everything is perfectly safe there should be no reason not to have multiple independent, third-parties with no skin in the game to verify. This is good for everyone as it reassures the fishermen, those buying fish, and really the rest of the world.
Is somebody preventing them from catching and testing fish?
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now do extraction, refinement, transportation, etc. for diesel
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I think that if the environmental movement emphasized how much radioactive material is released by coal and other fossil fuels, we’d have a lot less public resistance to phasing them out.
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Woah, it’s almost like the universe didn’t give us easily accessible energy for doing nothing.
Wow. Let me know when oil doesn’t need to be extracted, refined, and doesn’t produce waste.
Hell, coal literally contains trace uranium, and its waste products aren’t accounted as “radioactive waste” even though they are.
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If you have 100x emissions, but 1000x the efficiency of the fuel (numbers may be overblown), then it’s still better for the environment.
Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.
However, we could always either repurpose it or yeet it into space, away from any other close planet collision course.
Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.
Newer reactor designs are able to consume nuclear waste and use it as fuel. Look up breeder reactors. If we want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build more reactors ironically.
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While yeeting things into space sounds cool, I am sceptical of the viability of that strategy.
Putting things into space is very expensive and putting them in a solar orbit is even more expensive.
Isn’t nuclear waste also really heavy? And guess what that means, it’s getting more expensive.
It also isn’t very environmentally friendly to send shit into space and of course even less friendly considering how heavy nuclear waste is.
In my opinion, they should find a nice, stable continental plate and in the middle of that, drill some relatively small diameter boreholes. Drill them ten or twenty kilometres apart to a depth that exercises our current technology, drop sealed waste into the bottom of said holes, top them off to 200m below the surface with concrete, and then backfill the rest with dirt.
After that, remove all evidence of anything ever being there on the surface.
If you have the technology to drill a hole 3-4km deep then you have also the tech to detect radioactive material.
Small diameter boreholes that kind of distance apart are basically undetectable by geophysical survey with our current technology so nothing in particular would ever be seen.
The quantity of worldwide high level radioactive waste that can’t be reprocessed could easy be disposed of in this manner.
The high tech equivalent of a cat burying their shit. While I like the idea of yeeting stuff into space, this is also beautifully simple.
I remember talks of building places with the use of symbols or other non-linguistic messaging to keep future populations at bay, I think that was in Finland or something.
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Now do solar and wind. What materials are used, what wastes are produced, how much energy is consumed.
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If you think it’s whataboutism to ask for information that lets you fairly compare things on an equal basis, I’m not sure there’s anything I can say really.
You were downvoted because you told the truth about nuclear power, not because people thought you were responding to a question that wasn’t asked.
They were downvoted for telling a half truth. Technically true, but ignoring the context that makes it a good thing. Sure, it needs to be extracted, refined, and (to be clean) contained. All energy sources need the same, except dirty energy at least doesn’t contain their waste.
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Why do you specify lefties? Is there something unique about South Korean politics that make their left-wing reject science as much as everyone else’s right-wing?
Anti-nuclear has been mostly a left thing in the US at least despite the clean energy movement including many of the same people.
Same with the “not in my backyard” mentality. NIMBYs love all these new green technologies, so long as they all happen far away from them.
Uhh… no it hasn’t.
I’m genuinely curious why you think that’s the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
Please read. I’m leftist, but part of that is recognizing these issues. Anti-nuclear has largely been a left thing. The right only does it to protect fossil fuels.
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Why do they do this?
Is their right-wing more reasonable, or even more insane?
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If their reporting of the quantity of tritium is accurate, India’s candu style plants release more incidentally than this will.
Which is what the experts have been saying since the beginning, but the anti-nuclear propagandists explicitly ignore the experts.
Precious tritium
The power of the sun… in the palm of my hand
Precious spaceship fuel
Probably because the octopuses used it all for their science experiments. It’s a scientific fact that octopuses hoard tritium. Source: Spider-man 2.
Unsurprising.
in other news water is wet
Dangit, now how am I gonna get my piscine superpowers/fish shaped tumors?
Lol, I read that as swimming pool
Found the fellow Romand (French-speaking Swiss for the rest of the World).
Well I’m sorry to say that I’m a Schpuntz but at least I know what a “piscine” is :D
Nobody’s perfect /s
Fantastic news! so many people are so afraid of the word “nuclear”, and don’t understand how large of a volume the ocean is. the lethal dose of Fentanyl is like the size of a grain of rice. Put all of the known legal and illegal volume of fentanyl into the ocean and it would be undetectable.
The ocean is 1.335 × 10^21 litres. That number is stupid big. There are 7.5 × 10^18 grains of sand on Earth. If every person in Japan flushed a litre of the reactor water down their toilet, it would be diluted to nothing in no time at all.
Sample size: 64
Also, are there other things like Caesium-137 that pose a risk?
Not really. This video by Kyle Hill does an amazing job at explaining it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Cs-137 and other fission and activation products can be largely removed by treatment. H-3 is a bit trickier since it literally is part of the water. Luckily it’s a fairly weak beta emitter with a relatively short half life so causes very, very little long term harm.
All that other stuff was filtered out, but the tritium is near impossible to separate, because it is chemically identical to the hydrogen in normal water.
As for caesium, there are still detectable amounts of Cs-137 in most of the word from the thousands of atomic bomb tests. It’s half life is just 30 years, but it will still be detectable for a hundred years or so because of the huge amount we released.
People have been far more concerned about the efficacy of the ALPS system at extracting other contaminants than they are about tritium contamination. The ALPS system is unproven and the wastewater they’re releasing would be pretty toxic as far as other radioactive isotopes is concerned if the ALPS system isn’t doing it’s job perfectly.
