Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarising move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.
China is “highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by… Japan’s food and agricultural products,” the customs bureau said in a statement.
The Japanese government signed off on the plan two years ago and it was given a green light by the U.N. nuclear watchdog last month. The discharge is a key step in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant after it was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195419846/fukushima-radioactive-water-japan#:~:text=The government has been working,radioactive contaminants from the water.
Tritium isn’t the only thing coming out of the water
I recommend reading the article again. They got anything but the tritium out of the water. Which is comparable easy to accomplish, and also important. The remaining tritium is as harmless as radioactive things can get in the first place.
A radiation scientist here reminded people of those radium-based glow-in-the-dark wrist watches, and compared the radiation caused by this wastewater release to adding about 70 to 80 of those watches to the pacific ocean.
Read your article. Tritium is the only isotope left.
US psyops trying to gaslight the content of the article. There are trace elements of other contaminants… Of unknown concentration, and we have to take TEPCO’s word that it’s “like, totally safe man, just like our nuclear reactors”
There’s 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean, I’m pretty sure a couple milligrams of trace elements isn’t going to change anything.
Oh, because that’s a great answer to a localized ban.
Guess what? Most of the volume of the ocean isn’t chilling in Japanese territorial waters.
currents exist
even without currents mixing the water, diluting trace elements into the fucking ocean is fine
Not at concentrations noticeably higher than normal ocean water.
Lower*
[citation needed]
But he does think that non-tritium contaminates missed by the ALPS system could build up over time near the shore.
“Nearshore in Japan could be affected in the long term because of accumulation of non-tritium forms of radioactivity,” he says. That could ultimately hurt fisheries in the area.
US psyops trying to gaslight people again?
The radioactive content of the released water is lower than that of seawater. How is it going to build up
Ah yes, because the only danger of nuclear meltdown industrial wastewater is tritium.
One big concern is that the ALPS system is imperfect: it supposedly removes other radioactive contaminants to within legal limits, but those legal limits ARE higher than that of seawater. The ALPS has also been custom-designed for this project: it is a bespoke system that hasn’t been tested in production.
Plus, this is coming from the same private entity that mismanaged the Fukushima plant enough to cause the disaster… How much faith do you have in them to not fuck up again? Tepco’s optimizing for their bottom line, not for what’s best for society.
Everything is imperfect. The ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium and that only contributes a small fraction of the natural radioactivity of the ocean. This is not a public health concern and insisting on some stupid demand for perfection when the water you’re exhausting is less radioactive than the water you’re putting it into is fucking idiocy