Japan to release Fukushima's contaminated water into sea: reports | Hacker News Reader

Japan to release Fukushima's contaminated water into sea: reports

uk.reuters.com

53 pointsfelipelemos13 comments

The headline sounds a little misleading:

> The Asahi newspaper reported that any such release is expected to take at around two years to prepare, as the site’s irradiated water first needs to pass through a filtration process before it can be further diluted with seawater and finally released into the ocean.

> In 2018, Tokyo Electric apologised after admitting its filtration systems had not removed all dangerous material from the water, collected from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting when the plant was crippled. Slideshow ( 3 images )

> It has said it plans to remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is hard to separate and is considered to be relatively harmless.

Water is water, so if they manage to sufficiently remove the contaminants I don't see much of an issue.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Tho that only works up to a certain scale, after a while you reach saturation and then there's nothing left to dilute into.

Really no different to carbon emissions: For the longest time we thought we could just "dilute" these emissions into our atmosphere, decades later we have come to the realization that even the planets atmosphere ain't infinite and thus can be saturated by human activity.

Deposit your pollution across the largest number of human livers and pituitary glands as possible! Profit!

"A little?" buried deep in the article is the core piece of info.

>It has said it plans to remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium

If this is actually possible, doesn't it solve all the world's radioactive waste problems? Turn 100 tonnes of contaminated waste into 100 grams of actual waste and the rest is pure water.

For the most part, yes this works. We basically use the same process to refine radioactive ore into a more pure form. The method is generally with giant centrifuges since radioactive isotopes have different numbers of neutrons and therefore different weights.

In general what we call radioactive waste is also fissionable so can be used in subsequent reactors.

From 2019:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/09/12/its-reall...

“Putting this water into the ocean is without doubt the best way to get rid of it. Concentrating it and containerizing it actually causes more of a potential hazard to people and the environment. And is very very expensive with no benefit.”

“Unfortunately, the idea of releasing radioactivity of any sort makes most people cringe. But that’s the problem, only the perception of tritium is bad, not the reality. And in our new world of anti-science, such a wrong idea might rule over what is the right thing to do, wasting precious resources and time.”

The sun is irradiating our atmosphere and every second producing radioactive isotopes into our atmosphere. I wonder what the relative ratio of a fukushima release to that process is (yes there are important details like different radioisotope have different environmental bioavailabilities)

2.5 grams of relatively harmless tritium diluted in more than a million cubic meters of water.

And yet still they are making this kind of headlines and outrage.

Does not give me much hope for humanity.

This is totally fine.

the water cycle at work

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