I mean, Yoon is right on this. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they’re releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose of less than 4 mrem (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.
But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn’t really understand radiation, and fear sells.
Japan also literally dug a giant cave under the sea bed they are slowly draining the water into very slowly. It literally will have no contact with sea life. All of this fear mongering is incredibly stupid, and demonstrates that it doesn’t matter how much effort you go through to do something safely.
If Japan wanted to be beyond reproach, they would have held the wastewater for a few more years. The discharge will take decades anyway, so it’s not like the risk profile has been reduced.
Half life of most of these things isn’t that long, so you could slash the concentrations to the point that you could drink straight out of the tank eventually.
The half life of tritium is 12 years, and they were on the verge of running out of storage space, as well as space to put more storage. And you can still drink it straight from the tank today with zero bad effects.
Sorry but capitalism is a death cult. The pandemic taught us that. Just because the powers that be want to throw money at messaging to tell us it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s safe. I’m gonna need more than that before I order any 해물탕
Capitalism is a death cult. But what were they supposed to do? Hold it so it seeps into the water table? Shoot it into space? This is the only logical explanation.
Random insult is cool. That aside, yes! You’re right! That’s exactly what I’m saying: I would need to hear it from someone other than a politician. That perspective is worthless. Is this really that controversial of a point?
You smell like a shoe. (since we’re just adding random snark to the ends of our otherwise decent messages)
You’re mostly right, but his particular thing actually is safe. The water they are releasing is very very slightly more radioactive than normal water, but it’s so diluted it is harmless. As said by another commenter, if you only drank the water they are releasing you would have the equivalent extra radiation exposure as a flight across the US, or an x-ray or 2. And they are releasing it slowly into the entire ocean, it legitimately will be safe.
According to www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc1507, the variation of other radioactive isotopes in Fukushima wastewater is rather large between tanks: while tanks are on average within legal limits, different tanks may have different quantities of these radioactive isotopes that bioaccumulate in fish.
Moreover research into bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes is rather limited (because, y’know, people don’t usually dump nuclear waste into the environment), so it’s really not super well established how fish process these things.
Plus, Tepco’s track record of not cutting corners isn’t looking very good… But this will save Tepco and the Japanese government billions of dollars, so I guess go them?
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