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Japan to release Fukushima water into ocean starting Aug 24 (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

So I googled what the background level of Tritium is in seawater. The general consensus is that this various based upon where in the world you are, but it's typically around 500 - 750 becquerels of tritium per m^3^. The amount they're releasing is 190 becquerels of tritium per m^3^, or in other words, they're reducing the average tritum radioactivity of the water...

So why is this news? Why haven't the journalists gone, "Stupid people don't understand how radioactivity and volumetrics work, and are complaining about the Japanese releasing water that is so highly treated it's cleaner than the ocean average."?

--edit-- Not going to edit the above, but @[email protected] correctly pointed out I'd got my units wrong... and then they got their units wrong replying. And that's why we need good journalism who can actually look into this fucking stuff properly, and give reasoned responses!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Actually we both screwed up by a factor of 1000, the article states 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, not cubic meter.

~~Seems like you have the right order of magnitude, but~~ the sources I've seen gives the ocean close to 0.5-2 TU, or "Tritium Units" which correspond to 180 Bq/m^3. ~~So I wouldn't call the water being released as cleaner, just basically on average with the ocean already.~~

https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/fac/etg.tmp/text/woce_method.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718348034

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why I should stick to computing ;) Thanks for the update.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Still the comment should be and stay top because it's far more informative than most of comments usually

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks - I did edit it to say whoops, but it's still pretty informative I'd say. People get silly about radiation and then go out and tan in the sun for a few hours :P

[–] Sterile_Technique 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I know just enough about radioactivity to know that I don't know enough about radioactivity to form an opinion on this.

Will there be enough radiation to actually fuck anything up? Or is this just a scary headline sensationalizing something that's actually benign?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ehhh, it's been as cleaned of radiation as possible. My dad did nuclear inspection for a living, including disposal, so I asked him about this when it first hit the news.

In theory, as long as they follow existing protocols, the water isn't going to be harmful. But that's the question, really; have they followed protocols? They have oversight, so it shouldn't be possible for then to half-ass it.

There really isn't a way to remove tritium though. The levels of that should be low enough to be unimportant.

It's going to be higher than background radiation, but well under international standards. It isn't something to be happy about, but it's as low risk as it gets. Tokyo pumps out way more dangerous things every day just by being a busy city.

[–] INeedMana 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's sad that nowadays when we read about a limit considered safe by an organization, we have no way of knowing if it came from real studies and analysis or is it just a lobbied value that big players are using to weed out smaller competition because current technology can't get below the really safe limit anyway

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Well, in the case of radiation levels, the science goes back far enough, and with enough duplication/replication that it is as solid as anything that's an ongoing endeavor gets.

Like, everything is unreasonable technically going to be "to the best of current knowledge" because science is a process, and even when there's mountains of evidence, there could be newer evidence that contradicts previous conclusions.

But the general dosage limits have been in place and matched predictions for at least my lifetime (around 50 years), since those standards were used by my dad at that time and are still the same. A lot of the nuclear stuff wasn't done for profit, nor were the standards. So it's a tad bit better than something like petrochemical data.

I'd phrase it like this; I wouldn't want to go swimming in the tank the water is stored in, but I wouldn't worry about swimming in the ocean a few days later at all. The levels are just so low at that point that any danger is a non issue compared to things like smog.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organisation drinking limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre, according to Tepco. A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity.

[–] NOT_RICK 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL what a becquerel is

[–] Noodle07 -1 points 1 year ago

Somehow it has nothing to do with the mackerel

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The biggest issue with these topics is the lack of trust toward the scientists, or even forgetting that there are any scientists working on the project. It's not as if the prime minister woke up to the idea of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because Capitalists have been using scientists to push their agenda for almost a century now this is an article about the oil and tobacco industries using the same scientists.. If you google scientists supporting fossil fuels you can find way too many other examples as well.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's a fair argument. Although I am against making a generalization, especially since the IAEA who greenlighted the operations seems to be fairly independent

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, I don't assume that they didn't do their diligence. I am just explaining why people wouldn't automatically trust things solely because they have the title "scientist", even it is a group of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The thing is that TEPCO and the Japanese government had such a conspiracy of silence going on, and such an insistence that their implementation of nuclear power was safe, that nobody believes a word they say - nor should they.

Myself, I think the release is probably safe. But I'm not an expert, and I'm not really qualified to read scientific studies (which is an important thing to know about yourself), and I wasn't lied to by the people now telling me this is totes harmless about how Fukushima was totes harmless until oh, it wasn't.

Shit's complicated.

[–] bouh 2 points 1 year ago

Correction: capitalism has been using scientists work. Scientists are people who need to eat too. They don't have they word to say.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

TOKYO, Aug 22 (Reuters) - Japan said on Tuesday it will start releasing more than 1 million metric tonnes of treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant on Aug. 24, putting into motion a plan that has drawn strong criticism from China.

The plan, approved two years ago by the Japanese government as crucial to decommissioning the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) (9501.T), has also faced criticism from local fishing groups, who fear reputational damage and a threat to their livelihood.

"I promise that we will take on the entire responsibility of ensuring the fishing industry can continue to make their living, even if that will take decades," Kishida said on Monday.

Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in July that Japan had shown selfishness and arrogance, and had not fully consulted the international community about the water release.

South Korean activists have also protested the plan, although Seoul has concluded from its own study that the water release meets international standards and said it respects the IAEA's assessment.

The water was used to cool the fuel rods of Fukushima Daiichi after it melted down in an accident caused by a huge tsunami in 2011 that battered Japan's eastern coast.

The original article contains 552 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They have to be doing this because of storage and safety costs.

Doesn’t tritium have a half-life of about 12.3 years? If they delayed the release until, say, after approximately 12 more years, surely half of the tritium in a given sample will have decayed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, the article is FUD. They're releasing far less than most other reactors release, especially from their neighbor China. It's well below established limits and is highly unlikely to cause any real damage.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From the IAEA:

“Tritium emits weak beta-particles, i.e., electrons, with an average energy of 5.7 keV (kiloelectron-volts), which can penetrate about 6.0 mm of air but cannot penetrate the body through human skin. It may present a radiation hazard if inhaled or ingested but is only harmful to humans in very large doses.”

If a primary producer like phytoplankton is affected, isn’t it likely to impact impact all species that rely on them as a food source?

How about the real concern regarding the question of chronic exposure? If organisms are consistently taking in tritiated water over extended periods, does that constant exposure increases the chances of tritium being incorporated into critical molecules like DNA or proteins? Do we know the likelihood of that leading to long-term biological effects?

Can’t the tritium in tritiated water be incorporated into organic molecules during metabolic reactions? Have we observed the effects of tritium during biosynthesis, where water is a reactant or byproduct? During photosynthesis in phytoplankton, do we know the extent of tritium from tritiated water being incorporated into glucose or other organic molecules?

When marine organisms ingest or absorb tritiated water from their surroundings, it will circulate through their body just like regular water. Since tritiated water behaves chemically like regular water, it would surely be used in all physiological and biochemical processes within the organism.

Do we know the possibility for tritium to become incorporated into marine sediments, especially if it binds with organic matter? Could this create localised hotspots where tritium concentrations are higher than in the surrounding water? If so, won’t benthic organisms (those that live on the ocean floor) be exposed to these at those higher concentrations?

My biggest concern is the possibility of bioaccumulation in the food chain. Granted this would mostly impact small organisms to start, but they would then be consumed by larger predators, and how long before this leads to increased concentrations in apex predators?

I think it’s incredibly foolish for anyone to release water of this nature, Japan or otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a lot of great questions that I hope there are answers to. But from the article:

That water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organisation drinking water limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre

So it's about 2% of the limit for drinking water. Assuming there's some correlation between drinking water and ocean water for acquatic life, I think it's reasonable to assume that this is a trivial amount of tritium.

Yes, some aquatic life is likely to be impacted, but whether that amount is actually statistically significant is another question entirely.

Despite assurances, some neighbouring countries have also expressed scepticism over the safety of the plan, with Beijing the biggest critic.

Here's an article where Japan claims China releases many times more tritium than Fukushima will. I don't have access to this article, but if you do, it seems like it should be useful in comparing with the claims in the previous source.

So I think it's a lot of FUD either from China, anti-nuclear power groups, or both. To me, it seems like something that should probably be studied, but not worried about until we actually have reason to believe it's problematic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's a lot of tritium, versus baseline. Continental precipitation tritium is ~10 TU, the maximum ocean surface readings at high runoff locations (elevation runoff, not industrial) are ~2TU, most ocean readings are ~0.25 TU.

1 TU = 0.15 Bql

So this is >125x what is found in uncontimanated freshwater, or >625x what is found in the worst measured ocean runoff locations, or ~5,000x average ocean readings, and >8,000x Southern Ocean surface waters.

This is also after all the atomic bomb tests, that added most of the tritium in the environment today. here is a cool paper about using tritium to measure ocean currents that I got most of my data from.

It may be safe for humans, but I don't think you can handwave away potential dangers to aquatic life based off that.

Additional info taken from references to this book.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again, the main opponent here is China, who allegedly puts way more tritium into the water than Japan. So it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

South Korea doesn't seem to have an issue with it, and S. Korea is also an economic rival of Japan. But maybe S. Korea is less affected because of currents, IDK.

So we should definitely study the effects, and I'm sure there are plenty of interested parties doing just that, but we shouldn't be going on the attack until there's actual data pointing out harm. Right now there's mostly FUD, and until that becomes fact (i.e. an adjustment to WHO or a similar body's standards), I think we should monitor it closely but go forward with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just informational.

I haven't done studies on the ocean life where it's being released, nor the currents of where its likely to travel before being diluted. There will very likely be an impact for some sea life, but everything in life has a cost/benefit weight.

I don't think anyone is in a real position to weigh in, unless they personally know the people who did the research and conducted surveys before making the decision. Only because as we have seen time, and time before, capitalism incentivizes scientists to agree with what is best for the economy at best, and an increase to a few people's investment portfolios at worst.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

If any of this were true, it still wouldn't matter. The global oceanic ecosystem is already going to collapse in the immediate future, and there is no real world possibility that anything is going to be done to stop it.