Northwest Slobovia wrote:Shanghai industrial complex wrote:Japan’s government has reportedly decided to release more than 1m tonnes of contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea, setting it on a collision course with local fishermen who say the move will destroy their industry.
Media reports said work to release the water, which is being stored in more than 1,000 tanks, would begin in 2022 at the earliest and would take decades to complete.
Let's see... a cubic meter of water weighs a ton, so a million tons would make a block of water a 100m on a side. Just slightly smaller than the Pacific ocean.
Even released over a single decade, it's less than a drop in the bucket. And all it contains is a little tritium, with a half-life of just over a decade? That's not a threat to the Japanese fisheries industry, that's just typical nuclear hysteria.
You do know that's an article from 2014, right? So it has nothing to do with this plan, and by now, simply reflects the status quo.
Nor will the water from this release flow as a unit, it will disperse throughout the Pacific long before it gets anywhere near the US. Sure, traces will show up, but traces of tritium show up everywhere.
Good to see you, old-timer!
If that much water was released all once, near or at the coast of Japan, it would pose more risk to Japanese (coastal) fisheries. The assumption that it would become quickly diluted in the whole ocean is not at all sound.
Chemically it's just water (salty or fresh makes a difference though) and wouldn't get any benefit of osmosis if it's salty. On the other hand if it's fresh it would spread more surface-wise than down into the greater volume of the deep ocean. In either case it wouldn't mix with the ocean other than by currents and eddies.
How does spreading the release out over time help? It prevents any one fish from getting a dose of isotopes sufficient to spoil it as food. The total amount accumulating in all fish over "decades" will be the same, but the likely amount in any one person's fish dinner will be much less.
"Decades" still seems overly cautious? Remember that table-sized fish are generally predators, so they accumulate isotopes from smaller fish, who accumulate, etc, down to plankton or krill. I don't know how long that takes (biology of any sort being a thin subject of mine) but it could well be a decade.
As I understand it, Tritium is considered low-risk mainly because of its short half-life. Levels that could cause long-term harm (and early death typically from cancer) are detectable in food, water or air, and lower levels aren't a huge problem unless they're very sustained. Because of the short half-life.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but pressing on with my weakest subject ...
Hydrogen is the most common element (numerically) in the human body. So right away we can guess that a small number of Tritium atoms are not going to pose the sort of risk that the same number of Calcium atoms would.
Hydrogen is so common because of the high water content of the body? Isn't it likely that most Tritium entering the body would be part of a water molecule, and almost always spend its time in the body being part of the blood. Maybe biochemical processes have to split the water to get useful Hydrogen, and that ends up in cells (which aren't ever-lasting anyway, except in nerves), but still most of the Tritium is going to leave the body again in pee. Does this sound right?
Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2020 3:00 pm