Most of the deaths of fire fighters who responded to Chernobyl were not from radiation sickness.
They were from bacterial sepsis from severe skin burns from beta emitters ("beta burns") due to having a layer of radioactive dust on their protective jackets and wearing them for hours after exposure.
A "few millimetres" of skin or any tissue is a massive wound path, particularly over a large area of something like skin, and it presents as a "burn" with the same treatment profile as any other.
Beta emitters are by far one of the most dangerous radioactive risks - precisely because they're incredibly not dangerous under fairly minor control conditions, but rapidly lethal if you're contaminated in the wrong way.
This is probably a completely safe way to deal with this material ultimately, considering dilution, but it's important to be very clear on why. Beta emitters are very dangerous under the right circumstances, more so then gamma.
The power density of the tritium due to the deposition of energy by the β radiation (electrons) is 325W/kg. Assuming the entirety of the tritiated water (2.1g) they're dumping is concentrated to a droplet and you're holding that in your hand, it will give off 0.7W, so to warm you body by 1°C you would halve to hold it for a week.
That said, tritium is dangerous, but its β radiation won't burn your skin. Ingesting large quantities of it, 10-20 times the annual limit of intake, can cause immediate issues like white cells death and increase chances of developing cancer by around 1%.
I agree the quantity is very minimal, and dilution will work - but the thrust of my post was opposing the description of how easy Beta-radiation is to stop (via how much skin it penetrates) - because that skin penetration is exactly why it's dangerous.
It's not IR and the rules are very different. Beta-emitters aren't dumping that energy into thermal heating, they're dumping it into the interior of your cells as a high energy electron or positron. Wherever that thing appears, it's quite likely to blow a hole through whatever substructure happens to catch it, which means despite being low overall energy, the delivery mechanism is quite different.
The reason I quoted "beta burns" is because they act like burns, but they're not thermal. They're the result of cell death happening in deep layers of the skin (or your internal membranes if you ingest/breathe it). It's just the effect is quite similar: cell death in relatively deep skin layers, and the side-effects - susceptibility to infection.
> It's not IR and the rules are very different. Beta-emitters aren't dumping that energy into thermal heating, they're dumping it into the interior of your cells as a high energy electron or positron. Wherever that thing appears, it's quite likely to blow a hole through whatever substructure happens to catch it, which means despite being low overall energy, the delivery mechanism is quite different.
Ok, I get your point now: even if low power, by being ionizing radiation, it can break molecular bonds, create dislocations in crystals, alter enzymes etc. However, the tritium radiation just not very penetrating. Even if it has enough energy to ionise several atoms, it deposits that energy superficially, where cells are already dead. The layer of skin sensitive to radiation is just too deep compared to the maximum distance the electrons can travel: 40 μm vs 5 μm. The sensitive tissues in the eye are even deeper: 3 mm.
In facilities that handle tritium there are containment systems but, really, there is no special radiation shielding. The only way for this radiation to to do real damange, is if the tritium is inhaled or absorbed into the skin. But even then, due to a series of factor like the low energy radiation and the short biological half-life, the dose per unit intake is very very low (~10⁻¹¹ Sv/Bq).
I'm saying most of this based on the book "Safety in Tritium Handling Technology", which I'm currently studying, but I really can't find any mention of accidents or concerns about what you say regarding tritium.
Tritium isn’t in normal water at any appreciable quantities, your probably thinking of Deuterium.
Tritium’s has a half life is only 12.32 years and is very light weight making it surprisingly deadly per kg. Releasing this quantity sufficiently far off shore is a minimal health hazard, but the stuff is a serious health hazard that needs to be handled appropriately.
That said, it’s also worth 30,000$/gram so it’s generally only a problem at very low concentrations.
Same rhetorical question here. At that price, it would seem it's worth concentrating it, so why not?
Of course, that would depend on the average concentrations in the holding tanks, so I consulted the source of much knowledge and it has an answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium (go to Fukushima Daiichi).
"<...>the Tritiated Water Task Force released a report on the status of tritium in tritiated water at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant<...>. [In 2016] <...> holding of tritium on-site was 760 TBq (equivalent to 2.1 g of tritium or 14 mL of pure tritiated water) in a total of 860,000 m3 of stored water. This report also identified the reducing concentration of tritium in the water extracted from the buildings etc. for storage, seeing a factor of ten decrease over the five years considered (2011–2016), 3.3 MBq/L to 0.3 MBq/L (after correction for the 5% annual decay of tritium)."
I wouldn't ingest it but do carry around a tritium keyring every day. It's been glowing non-stop for years now and probably has another decade or two left in it.
This is the great thing about homeopathy. Water from any major metropolitan area has homeopathic levels of any drug you're liable to think of. So just drink tap water and all your illnesses will be cured!
At one point CNN and Greenpeace were saying that the Carbon-14 in particular would "change human DNA", since the tritium levels would be diluted well below anything people could reasonably define as hazardous [1]. There are 63.6 GBq of Carbon-14 in the tanks total. Sounds like a lot but that actually comes out to 0.4 grams total. This entire amount is generated naturally every ~40 minutes in the atmosphere [2].
It does not work as you think. The study of water masses is a branch of oceanography. It just will travel directly to America or will be incorporated in clouds and rain again in the coast, but out of reach and untouchable by any law. Is "hiding the dust under the bed of the asthmatic guy 3.0".
Because the sorcery of making containers is a too complicated technology for modern Japanese, and they are too weak as a country to keep doing the correct thing, it seems.
Certainly not. The ocean is a little more complex than a glass of water.
The solution to this problem will came in the hands of science or will not happen. If we dismiss even the most basic science or use that time to make silly jokes instead, we will enjoy a brutal wake up call and return to reality when our flamboyant plans backfire. And they will do.
The entire planet will be very disappointed with Japan if they finally do that. Their public image as a modern country will suffer, for sure.
Don't expect simple answers to complex problems. Citation without understanding is just appealing to authority complex.
A scientific fact is true even if there is not still a monograph available reviewing all knowledge in that field. (Something much more common that people think).
The alternative would be citing thousands of articles and spending many hours creating the review for you. This is not the place for that and I will not do it for free, so please stop the bullshit of weaponizing citations as a strategy to stop the debate by drowning the readers in academic molasses.
Now returning to the theme...
What you claim is that something dumped in the sea will dilute and disperse homogeneously because "X" liters of sea water and the mantra "contamination plus dilution easy peasy".
I can assure you that this shouldn't be token for granted in the real life.
Some stuff will mix, other will behave in a different way. An example. Salt in a glass water will dilute for a while but its behavior will suddenly change after reaching some concentration.
Another example, If we dump a truckload of cannon balls in water, will they dilute and disperse?. Not. They will accumulate in the bottom, using just a small part of the water volume and remaining in the same location. And in absence of external forces can remain in the same place for basically "forever" rusting at a glacially slow pace for thousands of years. Radioactive metals will act in the same way when dumped in the sea.
We don't need a citation to understand than anything heavier than water will tend to sink, and tritium is heavier. Therefore in absence of other forces Tritium will sink until reaching a layer of its same density.
But not further, because salt is also heavier than water. Electrostatic forces or brownian motion will fight against gravity, so the result is not entirely predictable.
Oceans are vertically compartmentalized. Is something that anybody can observe empirically so citations are, again, unnecessary here
Lets replace now the cannon balls in our example by rubber ducks. They will be free to disperse horizontally. Right?
Again not. Not totally free, because the oceans have also horizontal barriers. If you dump a ton of rubber ducks in the ocean most of them will remain in the same current and travel together without leaving it. Will travel at a similar pace and reach the coast in a narrow interval of time.
Tritium dumped in a point will travel with the same mass water without leaving it for an undefined amount of time.
And in that equation we need to add also the effects of sea life, meteorology, temperature and topology of sea bottom. A mass water rich in tritium could end having jellyfishes rich in tritium also. Or be used as ballast and moved by a ship with a minimum dilution before to be discharged in front of a busy port. Is a chaotic model. We don't know what will happen so we should stop taking just the result that will suit better our wishes. Our plans are based into having zillions of liters to dilute the poison but the correct amount of dilutor will be much lower in the reality. We need to be aware of that.
Of course tritium also has a 12 year half life. This isn't exactly a long-lived problem. Certainly not when spread over a massive, massive, massive quantity of water, your reply nothwithstanding.
A reply, which, by the way, thank you -- I learned a lot and I appreciate the perspective.
Another way of looking at it, assuming the numbers are correct:
If a mad villain gets hold of Japan and force every Japanese citizen to drink an equal part of C14 distilled from Fukushima's waste water, every one will ingest about 503 Bq worth of C14.
That sounds like a lot, until you realize your body naturally contains about 4,300 Bq of naturally radioactive potassium. From Wikipedia:
> A 70 kg human body contains about 140 grams of potassium, hence about 0.000117 × 140 = 0.0164 grams of 40K; whose decay produces about 4,300 disintegrations per second (becquerel) continuously throughout the life of the body.
Literally, a thin person who drinks 503 Bq of C14 solution will still have less radioactivity going on inside their own body than a fat person who didn't drink it, just by virtue of weighing less (and having less potassium in their body).
I assume that carbon and potasium are not equivalently replaceable stuff for animal metabolism or we would have a very strange chemistry, so the comparison is not really very useful.
Radioactivity can harm you even without the chemical elements entering your body, so chemistry is a red herring. The claim is not that carbon and potassium are interchangeable, just that the their radiation should have comparable effects.
Increasing your chances of being eaten by a dinosaur by 1/8th also sounds bad. I'd gladly increase my chance of being eaten by a dinosaur by 1/8th for a dollar.
This article makes it seems like no big deal as all radioactive contaminants have been removed by the so-called ALPS except tritium (which has a half life of 12.43 years). However, that's simply not the case. TEPCO has been repeatedly lying to the public about the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and downplayed the impact but we now know that it's a INES Level 7 accident. The only INES Level 7 was Chernobyl disaster. But Chernobyl nuclear plant was an inland site - Fukushima is ocean-front power plant site that has the risk of leakeage to sea, so the long term effect is very likely to be much much worse.
Greenpeace released a report[1] recently, and to no one's surprise, most of the decontaminated area are still heavily contaminated today. Also TEPCO's current approach on clean up in unsustainable - certainly not with hundreds of the tanks to store contaminated waste water. Additionally, the cooling of nuclear fuel debris should be switched from water to air cooling. What this means is that there will be more waste water generated and more radioactive to be released into the environment and now into the Pacific ocean. It only takes 400 days for the water to be circulated around the global and the water can be evaporated and rain into inland areas too - the spread would affect more than just oceans.
Dr. Ken Buesseler, a senior marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he would prefer to see all the water treated properly before any is released. As he noted in his paper[3], there are actually a dozen more radioactive contaminants (perhaps more) in the waste water to be removed. WaPo has a more balanced reporting[2] on this.
So yeah, this news is anything but good. To be fair, Japan being a island nation cannot solve this clean up effort by themselves, they do need other countries to help and figure out a better permanent solution for the nuclear waste disposal here.
Is Greenpeace a reliable source on the subject of nuclear? It's not my sentiment. Greenpeace France at the very least are well known for their constant lies on the subject.
Japan is a highly populous nation. They simply don't have enough land that's far away from human habited area to permanently "store" nuclear waste. America has the Yucca Mountain, USSR/Russia has the Siberia. China has Gobi deserts.
Preferably a permanent solution is one that other such calamities could responsibly use as well without eventually ruining the world.
The impact of tossing it into the ocean is negligible , but
1) it sets a precedent unless the rest of the world reacts in a negative way and punishes the guilty (of which it seems TEPCO has plenty)
2) the negligibility of such action is rendered moot if the precedent set allows for such action to be considered a viable clean-up method in the future.
"A good permanent solution" should be one that can be enacted safely by future people confronted by similar issues.
'Out of sight, out of mind' has never been a responsible tactic, look at the ongoing legal struggle between countries behind the cleanup of the Ganges, for one example.
I don't have a better alternative, but I don't like the idea that system operators in the future may now view this kind of action as appropriate anywhere but the most dire of situations.
Detectable amounts of Fukushima radiation have already washed up on the shore of Washington State. After the Chernobyl disaster, detectable levels were in the air over the US.
Although they were detectable, the amounts were insignificant and posed no danger. After all, we're bombarded with background radiation every day.
The carbon 14 in all organic material is radioactive. That's why radiocarbon dating works.
Well a lot of countries did (and some still do) send liquid radio active wast into the oceans.
Supposedly it's all fine "because it get's diluted enough".
But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by.
But then it might be true on the bug picture and it just needs time to be diluted, in which case a one-time release (instead of continual ones I'm speaking about) might be fine.
More importantly is to learn from all the problems which made the catastrophe worse. A recurring theme is "known" problems not have been known by the people operating it (i.e. they didn't reach them) and emergency plans having gaps.
So like always it's more a human then a technical problem.
“But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by.”
This doesn't talk about the health problems because in this case that wouldn't quite make sense, but it does show that minerals/substances/chemicals/whatever can locally concentrate around an area even when it's connected to the ocean.
> The researchers said little is known about the effects of caffeine on wildlife, but the caffeine in Puget Sound is so diluted it probably has a minimal effect.
> But guess what, increased health issues of people "close" to the place it gets released clearly show that this isn't really the case. At least for the people close by.
There seems to be a survey of the European Commission that implies increased cancer risk around La Hague putting it in relation to the wast disposal. I say it seems because due to articles quoting studies quoted by articles and only listing the article as source and paywalls I can't trace it back without spending a lot of time and or money.
But looking at searches for medical/scientific papers you find very mixed result. Ranging from "there are more cases, but it's statistically not significant" to there is a statistical significant increase but it's not that strong and it's not possible to prove that it's because of radiation exposure (or radiation exposure alone).
Generally it seems that the articles I read had a very different interpretation of "close". As e.g. one of the studies I found, found increased cases for people in a 10km radius around the was disposal factory, which might very well be related to other things then them pumping some of the wast into the sea. Widening the radius caused increases to be non statistic significant, which seems to match with other studies I would.
But disclaimer: I just did a very short dive into it. E.g. I looked only at the abstract & summary/conclusion of papers etc. and spend maybe 20min on it or so. So not very reliable.
EDIT: Looking more into it finding like following quote become more common:
> There is some convincing evidence in childhood leukaemia of a causal role for environmental radiation exposure from recreational activities on beaches. New methods for identifying the environmental pathways, focusing on marine ecosystems, are warranted.
I don't believe this is correct. The tritium is constantly being made. They are pumping water into a highly radioactivity area to cool the rods, but making tritium in the process.
It is equally radioactive as it was 10 years ago, but now there is half of it left.
While i am very supportive of nuclear power, this idea of half-life seems misunderstood. what remains is just as radioactive... Just now there is less of it.
If there are half as many radioactive isotopes left then the material is also half as radioactive, as radioactivity is measured in decays per second (Becquerel [1]).
Lots of very clever people in the comment section, so please tell me in which universe is releasing 1.2 million tonnes of radioactive waste water into the ocean ever justifiable as good or even preferable? The impacts would be felt for at least ten years across the world. The best way is to contain it, as they have for ten years, and Japan has polluted land to store the wastes, the only problem is the expense. And if you could solve it with money, that's not a big problem at all for a government. I suppose with this move, Japan can even threaten the world for support to help them contain the waste.
Not sure how much it matters for the difference in risks after dilution, but beta radiation probably has short reach in water compared to air.
From the perspective of the people releasing the radioactive water, evaporating it would give them larger volumes of a material that is more difficult to manage before it disperses and in medium where more of the radiation reaches further.
Seems like the main environmental concern ought to be absorption into tissues though, and it's not at all clear to me that highly active marine ecosystems with long food chains is the preferable alternative there.
you would need a tritium refinement plant, like what we have in Ontario.
Tritium is also produced in heavy water-moderated reactors whenever a deuterium nucleus captures a neutron. This reaction has a quite small absorption cross section, making heavy water a good neutron moderator, and relatively little tritium is produced. Even so, cleaning tritium from the moderator may be desirable after several years to reduce the risk of its escaping to the environment. Ontario Power Generation's "Tritium Removal Facility" processes up to 2,500 tonnes (2,500 long tons; 2,800 short tons) of heavy water a year, and it separates out about 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) of tritium, making it available for other uses.[13]
you dont really want to just "evaporate the water" but "distill" it, same as making alcohol... the boiling points are very close and it is expensive to process that much water.
There's a longer article linked from this one which says Fukushima is generating 140 tons of contaminated water per day and has well over a million tons stored. Not sure if it's measuring the same thing but it seems they might need a much larger scale facility.
You seem to imply the ocean is a clearly better option — I’m not sure it is? Harm will come to us and other animals either way, the extent seems a bit hard to assess and depends highly on what one values.
The water can stop beta particles far more effectively than the air (2in v. 10ft), which minimizes the risk to life forms save for those which directly interact with tritium water, but even then, there's far more water in the ocean for tritium water to dilute into. In the air, the water will still get invariably pulled into the water cycle, wherein it condenses into rain, enters streams and lakes, plants, life, etc. where it can't as effectively dilute.
Would love for a nuclear or environmental researcher to fact-check me here. I'm out of my depth. I'm just applying the trivia that I know.
I'm just a physics student by incidentally I'm researching tritium right now. Tritium is one of the least toxic radionuclide because the β radiation it emits is very low energy, also the biological half life is only 10 days (it means it's quickly eliminated by the body): unless you ingest very large quantities of it, you're probably going to be fine. In fact, the range of the electrons is even less than you quote: around 5 mm in air and 6 μm in water, which means it's effectively stopped by the dead skin layer. If I were to decide, I would probably pick dilution in water over vaporisation.
> β BETA – can only be stopped after traveling through about 10 feet of air, less than 2 inches of water, or a thin layer of glass or metal. Additional covering, for example heavy clothing, is necessary to protect against beta-emitters. Some beta particles can penetrate and burn the skin.
I won't be surprised if you're right, but if a nonprofit getting government grants to promote the nuclear industry gets it wrong, I'd be pretty worried.
The problem is that the source is generalizing, which is fine for saying beta has usually shorter range and is less dangerous than gamma, but is too general to be applicable here.
Beta radiation just describes a certain kind of radiation, namely emitting an electron (or positron). However it doesn't directly tell you how much energy that electron has.
Wikipedia on Beta particles says that "Beta particles with an energy of 0.5 MeV have a range of about one metre in air; the distance is dependent on the particle energy." [1] Tritium beta decay just has an energy of 0.018590 MeV [2] and I wouldn't be surprised if reach isn't proportional but for example cubic (I don't know the formula) thus the huge difference in reach.
My understanding is that penetration depends on the energy associated with the the β particle [0] and tritium decay releases relatively lower-energy β particles [1].
The nonprofit isn't wrong... they're just saying "a .22 bullet can kill you" while parent is saying "tritium is like throwing the bullet instead of firing."
Exactly, the electron produced by the decay of tritium have an energy that is
distributed between 0 and 18.59 keV (the Q value of the reaction), with an
average of 5.68 keV (this is pretty low compared to other common radiation
sources). The rest of energy is shared between the neutrino (which practically
never interacts with matter) and the residual nucleus (which is very massive
compared to the electron and thus can't travel far). So, electrons are the
only source of concern here.
Electrons can deposit energy in two ways: one is by bremsstrahlung, which is
basically EM radiation (X rays, usually) emitted during a fast deceleration
caused by another ion; or by ionising neutral atoms and breaking bonds.
Bremsstrahlung is only significant at much higher energies, so this leaves
ionisation. The energy lost per unit length (-dE/dx) depends on the electron
energy and can be computed using the Bethe-Bloch formula.
Integrating this quantity yields the particle range R = ∫_E₀ ⁰dE (dE/dx)⁻¹.
An empirical formula that can be derived from this is the following:
R = 1/ρ 0.44cm E^(1.265 - 0.0954 log(E))
where ρ is the medium density (in g/cm³) and E the electron energy (in MeV).
In water you get: R = 4 μm for the average energy and 50 μm for the maximum
energy, which is extremely rare, by the way.
Note that to damage tissues, radiation must reach the radiosensitive layer of the skin at depths greater that 40 μm.
Harm was going to come to us, post event, no matter what.
Some argue we are not good enough at these things, meaning harm will come to us every time we generate energy this way. The only real question being us or future people, near or longer term harm.
Say we set that aside as a matter of ambiguity and just focus on type of harm. (My own take is we will generate energy this way, so we may as well fund serious risk mitigation of all kinds.)
We have only one option here longer term, and that is dilution.
Normally, we have two, the other being containment. (And, given we do make energy this way, strong investment in containment makes a lot of sense.)
And in this scenario, we have both contaminated water to deal with and a core likely to enter the water cycle itself at some point too. It will, at that time, irradiate water for a long time.
Is the harm in the atmosphere greater than in water?
It will go somewhere. IMHO, the water is a better shield and has far greater capacity to serve as a medium to dilute in than the air does.
First, water itself acts as an absorbent of the emitted radiation. So the only living things which take up the radiation are those which consume the water.
Second, unlike heavy metals, the uptake of heavy water isn't especially driven by biology. They don't soak up and concentrate the radiation.
Third, there is a lot more water in the ocean than the atmosphere. In the ocean it will dilute to nearly unmeasurable levels. In the atmosphere it will fall back down as rain and concentrate in our water supply, irrigation, and crops.
I am uneducated at the science behind it but wouldn’t evaporating method only result in the water being evaporated and not the “radioactive stuff” in it? Similar to how Bear Gryls would evaporate urine to make clean drinkable water.
The radioactive stuff in it is the water. This is super-heavy-water, formed with tritium instead of "normal" hydrogen. It's already been filtered to remove all other (radioactive) contaminants. There is no cost effective way to filter out the heavy water from regular water at the scale required though.
They have a lot of money, and can easily store the radioactive waste, but - out of sight - out of mind for the Japanese. I lived in Japan for many years, and the feeling I left with was that the Japanese do not care about the environment.
EDIT: Some do, but they are the minority, and easily dismissed by real Japanese.
The government had initially hoped to make a decision on the discharge of the treated water in October last year but later decided it would need more time for discussions amid staunch concern about reputational damage to marine products.
It doesn't say how they're going to release it though. Are they just going to flush it by the shore? Wouldn't you want to actually spread it out as much as possible and as far away as you can, rather than have it concentrated right next to where you and lots of fauna live?
> The following month, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, drafted a plan to dilute the water to below the legal limit for concentration of radioactive materials before releasing it in the sea.
Presumably that’s safe to dump into the sea shore when it’s that diluted.
Is there a single method of generating power that does not pollute?
Solar power requires mining cadmium and tellurium, creating plastic frames, solder, connections, etc -- and then replacing said panels as they become ineffective/broken/dirty. These end up in the landfill and buried.
Wind power require mining rare earth metals, manufacturing large quantities of fiberglass or carbon fiber composite bodies, and then, once they're damaged, ineffective or spent, they end up in the land fill and buried.
The question is one of efficiency: which power generation method yields the lowest amount of waste and lowest health and life risks per TWh of generated electricity.
That's not going to happen. We're going to pollute. That's what we do. So we have to make intelligent decisions about what we emit, where we emit it, and how much we emit.
It is always possible to dilute. Does not always make sense though.
No free lunches here.
No matter what we do, there are costs and risks. And no matter what, our nature tends to take us well down a path to a point of real pain before those costs change behavior too.
If we valued things differently, we would pollute and manage things differently, but we don't.
Maybe one day we will.
I agree with you, but am just being real about our nature.
Similar to the CO2 where the issue isn't any one particular car or plane, the issue in this case isn't the polluted water from one plant. The issue is the practice of dumping of stuff into the oceans. Allowing such practice to go forward will quickly lead to the ocean not able to "dilute" anymore to safe concentration the stuff we'd be dumping into it.
And on pure economics grounds - businesses and even regular people are getting fined even for accidental releases into water and air, and why should a nuclear plant be allowed to externalize its costs (which the dumping is) instead of bearing it? The do have an insurance after all.
So you are just using the "technically correct" phrase designed to make it sound dangerous?
Dilution amount totally matters in this context. For instance the EPA limit means if all of your drinking water was at that limit you would increase the amount of radiation exposure by 1.3% per year. Would that be "radioactive waste"?
>So you are just using the "technically correct" phrase designed to make it sound dangerous?
do you propose to use less technically correct phrase to make it sound less dangerous?
>Would that be "radioactive waste"?
may as well be. The biological impact of getting radiation sources into your body vs. being just exposed to it externally is very different (specifically significantly more severe) in case of alpha and beta sources.
Containment is another option we sometimes have available to us, when we cannot transform the waste otherwise.
In general though, dilution is the go to.
In this scenario, we will end up forced to live with dilution. Containment is crazy, and the core itself is likely to end up in the water cycle. Breakdown takes a looooong time.
A decade of listening to hippies say the most insane things about radiation from Fukushima, driven by cynical and breathless media mendacity, was a real black pill.
I've said this before: Fukushima was the worst environmental disaster in human history, because our media landscape amplified it into something which effectively cut off nuclearization of baseline power as something which Western nations which aren't France could do. I don't know precisely how many gigatonnes of carbon we're talking about but it is, without exaggeration, a double-digit percentage of the total. It could be gone and it isn't, and it's because of Fukushima.
The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible.
What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable. Such a shame.
> The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible.
Only if you instantly perfectly mix all radioactive material with all the water in the ocean, which won't happen.
Dumping (liquid) radioactive wast into the sea is common practice and often allowed due to dilution, but there are very strong indices that people living close to the dump site (and potentially not that close) will have noticeable increased health risk. Because clearly (common sense) it takes time for a liquid to be diluted and until then it is in a unhealthy concentration.
Anyway this is a one-time dump so it's a bit different from continuously dumping smaller amounts over decades. (Which now that I think about it Fukushima might be doing since it's creation anyway...).
> If I’m completely honest, I’d be perfectly willing to drink a glass of the water they’re planning to dump. I’m not heading all the way to Japan for it, and I doubt they’d let me do it anyway, but I’d drink it. Make of that what you will.
Yes, hippies, the perennial scapegoats for all our problems. It's unfortunate how they run energy commissions, governments, and military organizations around the world, preventing any progress.
And of course it was hippies who designed this reactor...
And it was hippies that enabled and encouraged burning coal and petrol without a care in the world for centuries before we got nuclear (and after), not engineers...
It would be foolish, of course, to blame hippies either for producing the misinformation, and, to a lesser degree, to pin the subsequent bad policy choices directly on them. They play a role in the latter, they do vote sometimes; a prominent role even, but not of course exclusive.
If you had been careful in your reading, you would have seen me do neither.
What I said was I had to listen to them talk about it for a decade. Which, if you keep thinking for a second: why is this guy around so many hippies?
Anyway, namaste bro. I'm a white guy who was raised as a vegetarian Hindu, I get to say that.
I really find it gross the extent to which fear mongering over nuclear happens. Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal, which kill far more people, even scaling by use.
Instead of using a source of power that's overall incredibly safe, and which produces relatively small amounts of highly manageable waste, people have pushed to switch to these incredibly environmentally harmful power sources. This is especially surprising from countries like Germany that, as someone who doesn't live anywhere near them, see them as technically adept.
My province in Canada got 60% of our power in 2018 from nuclear (plus 1/4 from hydro), and a different province got 95% of theirs from hydro, but then that's offset by other provinces that get 90% of theirs from natural gas and coal. Sure not every place is ideally suited for a lot of nuclear (though hopefully SMRs will help), but 90% is too high.
We need less fossil fuels and more nuclear to bridge the gap to more renewables.
For an interesting comparison of the deaths from nuclear energy, compared to other sources, I highly recommend "How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll" [1].
> Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal,
That won't happen in the UK for political reasons - the miner's strike and Thatcherism (and vast amounts of suffering) would be seen to be for nothing. The UK has put a lot of effort into renewables, and is currently building a new nuclear station.
I still avoid BP gas stations whenever I can even if it probably doesn't help. They bought most gas stations in the small town I was in at the time, next to the spill. Can't wait for nuclear & solar power to take over ;)
> The amount of radiation in that water is utterly dwarfed by natural potassium. You can use your search engine of choice to find the graphic, you will laugh. Negligible.
well there is a lot of sealine, which would disagree if they could. (they can't of course) it will have tons of impact on the sealife where the water will be released. it might be even going ways where we do not know.
it's basically a tradeoff. release it in the sea and pollute that or worse it could in some way contain freshwater.
it's not a black pill and such measures should probably taken with care.
> What isn't negligible is the terror which benefitted only a few people in journalism who sold some ads with it. The human cost is immeasurable.
if only human cost is bad, than I guarantee you that in 10-20 years you do not want to live on this planet.
we should never treat such a thing lightly no matter if it will only pollute 0.00001% of the plants inside the ocean.
Nuclear power is uneconomical, dangerous and unneeded. It is not the answer to the climate crisis, a solution that must work not just for rich countries with stable governments, but poor ones with unstable governments as well. The solution actually must work particularly well for poor developing countries as they are the biggest source of green house gas emission growth. Maybe it's just me, but the first thing I think of when I ask myself what a poor developing country with a potential unstable government needs is not Nuclear Power Plants.
If you can not see the price trajectory of solar, wind and grid-scale storage, then you need (better?) glasses, the price drops are Putting Moore's law to shame. The cost of nuclear has only gone up.
Minimizing the impact and long term effects of this is despicable. How dare you spit on the grave of the 1368 people that died as a direct and indirect consequence?
Nuclear power is expensive, unreliable and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.
Note: that doesn't mean to bring more fossil fuel power plants online.
Reality disagrees. By any objective measure, MW per MW I challenge you to find an energy source able to supply baseline (not a myth too) with a better safety profile then nuclear fission.
You have too much faith in humanity. The tech might be safe. the radiation might be no big deal. But people are dangerous, and governments a lot less that perfect.
Many of us who oppose Nuclear are not against the tech itself, but fear the people that will run it.
I am not myself against nuclear power as a technology but maybe just maybe it was a bad idea to build a nuclear plant in a place subject to earthquakes and tsunamis. Can't blame the hippies for that one. So instead of blaming people for being afraid by something as terrifying as radiation, maybe let's work on making this really safe this time, even safe from man made mistakes or say, environmental hazards. If you told me that aeronautics is the safest well understood technology but each time a plane crash we would have to evacuate the whole area of a plane crash for at least fifty years, I'd be worried about planes.
There are some radioactive elements in the water which decay relatively fast, so waiting a bit before releasing it is a good idea (and on radioactive scale 10years are just a bit).
Even if they release all of the Tritium water, they will not even cause a minuscule bump in the Tritium concentration of the ocean.
Plus, Tritium is a beta emitter and the particles have a range of merely a few micrometers.
Releasing that Tritium has never been a health or environmental problem, it has merely been a PR and political problem.