Suga says time ripe to decide fate of Fukushima No.1 water | Hacker News Reader

Suga says time ripe to decide fate of Fukushima No.1 water

japantimes.co.jp

44 pointsAfforess54 comments

One self luminous exit sign contains about 0.00074 PBq of tritium. The Fukushima stored water contains about 0.76 PBq of tritium(as of 2018), enough for about 1027 signs. I suspect there is far more tritium in the exit signs in Tokyo then there is in the Fukushima water.

If you want to more than net out the radiation release from dumping this water, close one small coal plant.

https://safecast.org/2018/06/part-1-radioactive-water-at-fuk...

https://www.everglow.us/pdf/tritium-exit-sign-fact-sheet-lan...

Is there actual risk here? I see the key phrase "reputational damage". Seeing how much uranium is already dissolved in the oceans, I think this is probably far less bad than e.g. micro-plastics.

Yes, reputational damage - see other comments below - if HN cannot understand the plan neither will the general public

If everyone starts dumping their nuclear waste like this, then yes. Which is why this not cool and Japan should do the right thing and just pay for solving this properly and responsibly. They took on the moral responsibility to do that when they started planning to build the reactor. Tough luck it didn't work out for them with getting some electricity on the cheap. Just bad luck or bad planning (leaning towards the latter).

Nuclear waste is inconvenient because handling it properly is very costly and as soon as you start accounting for that, nuclear stops being cheap. Or put differently, it's only cheap if you make the waste somebody else's problem. Not unlike people's tail emissions from their cars are somehow not their problem but we all get to enjoy the effects of global warming.

It's more a question of "can Japan get away with just dumping nuclear waste in international waters?". Answer: yes of course they can. People will whine a bit but nobody is going to do much more than that. Probably some marine life will be affected. And there's a chance that shows up in our food chain. (Japanese love sushi, just saying). But the Pacific is a big place so the chance of that is not super high. Or it happens in a few hundred years when that crap is still radioactive. By then it's the problem of a few generations after us. We might simply call that bad luck and claim that will not have a measurable effect. A few people dying in the future would be hard to measure or connect to this specific event. That doesn't mean it won't happen but just that you have plausible deniability. People confuse that with "it's fine". Depends if we are talking legalities here or moral responsibility.

> If everyone starts dumping their nuclear waste like this

This sounds weird, but I feel like Japan almost earned this privilege when it had a reactor by the ocean melt down.

I agree. I am not worried about perverse incentive to let your reactors melt down so you can dump the waste, because these are highly public events that cause much outcry no matter how the waste is disposed.

According to METI[1] on summer 2019, there where 1.1*10^9 L of contaminated water with radiation of "≦a few hundred Bq/L". Assuming 200, we get 0.22 TBq of radiation in total.

In comparison, based on reports of US Nuclear regulatory Comission, US reactors in 2003 dumped more than 1.50 PBq of tritium[2].

To me, the "less then few hundred Bq/L" seems a bit low, but I could not find any other sources.

Edit: This [3] reports that total tritium is about 860 TBq, so, apparently, I just don't understand correctly the "few hundred Bq/L" part. This would translate to 716667 Bq/L or ~ 12 times the Japans drinkable water limit.

[1] https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Environmental_contamin...

[3] https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...

These headlines really show how articles on nuclear waste do less to increase public knowledge than they do to increase confusion.

The public has 0 concept about how much background radiation is in the world around them, and how there are a LOT of daily activities that increase that exposure -- like flying in an airplane.

The waste here, dumped into the open ocean -- whose size is mind-bogglingly large -- likely increases radiation exposure to the average person as much as them stepping outside for 1.3 extra seconds per century.

I was going to say something similar: As long as they don't dump it all in one place and release it intelligently (accounting for ocean currents and mixing; basically hire meteorologists, oceanographers, and marine biologists) it should be quite safe.

It's not like they're dumping the uranium rods into the ocean; they're (mostly) just trying to find a way to get rid of all that radioactive water. When diluted across the entire ocean it shouldn't have any impact on ecosystems and it shouldn't accumulate in predators (that we eat) like other types hazardous waste.

Even dumping uranium wouldn’t be so bad if you ground it up really finely and dispersed it thoroughly. There is a lot of uranium in the oceans naturally. A few kilos here and there is literally nothing in comparison, as long as it’s not in one spot.

To be precise: there are about 4 billion tons of naturally dissolved uranium in the oceans currently.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Yes, but this happens for everything, not just articles about nuclear waste. Lots of headlines sound bad devoid of a point of comparison, and lots of articles, reports, and statistics can be mistaken as alarming in isolation, without understanding the nuanced context of their domain.

It's an unsolved problem in most societies to balance their desire to not withhold information from average citizens while avoiding widespread mistrust, outrage, or panic from those who lack the necessary background to place the information into context.

Stupid question: why don't we launch nuclear waste into space on a trajectory similar to that of the Pioneer probe?

Someone asked the same thing but it's buried: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740046

Hint: divide the mass of 1.2million tons of water with the mass of the Pioneer probe.

In short - launching heavy stuff to space is expensive and nuclear fuel is heavy (elements) pretty much by definition.

Also even the most modern rockets still fail from time to time and you nuclear waste being spread over a wide area by an explosion or unplanned atmospheric reentry is much worse than having a few guards watch an heavy duty inert fuel container four a couple decades.

And lastly today burned out fuel is still about 95% usable if you care to remove the impurities preventing further chain reaction that come from fission products. Not to mention all sorts of valuable materials that got created due to transmutation of part of the material via neutron capture in the reactor core.

Ahh, the boogeyman.... This water containstraces of various contaminants. Most of which are substantial dimensionally. If you chose a dense ion exchange membrane (sea water desalination membranes are low density to maximise water throughput) - this denser membrane will allow all the water to be stripped of contamination. You will get a clean stream and a dirty stream and with cascaded membranes you will separate the contaninated water into a releasable stream and a contaminated stream that is .001% of the volume of the clean stream. This contaminated stream is very small and can be stored for 1000+ years in less space than it now consumes. The clean stream is releasable.

TL;DR

"The government is considering releasing water in small quantities at a time into the Pacific off Fukushima Prefecture over a period of about 30 years, after diluting the concentration of tritium to about one-fortieth of the maximum set out by national standards."

And yet we're left with this incredibly outrage-inducing headline that only a small fraction of readers will look further into.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26741539

30 years from now, we might have to spend a lot of money harvesting all that tritium back out of the ocean to feed our fusion reactors.

Tritium’s half life is \approx 12 years.

It's also a low-energy beta emitter, not dangerous externally, and has a short biological half-life in the human body (days), so it there is not a long term bioaccumulation risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium

Fusion reactors will create their tritium from Lithium. Tritiums half life is just to short.

https://archive.is/CNYPA

Wait... so Godzilla is going to end up being a documentary?

The bad headline here seems to be editorializing on the part of the HN submitter. The actual article link headline is "Suga says time ripe to decide fate of treated Fukushima No.1 water".

Renaming "treated Fukushima No.1 water" as "radioactive waste" here is misleading and causing poor discussion by commenters assuming a concentrated high-level nuclear waste product as opposed to low-level contaminated rainwater as is the actual case.

You drink it then. It was editorialized correctly, the government is planning on dumping radioactive water into the ocean. Saying that the water is "treated" and thus not a problem is equally misleading.

And the question is would it even remotely effect the overall background radiation already present. Radiation is generated from multitude of sources and adding this got be homeopathy levels of dilution.

(Submitted title was "Dumping Fukushima radioactive waste into ocean “most realistic” gov policy")

Editorializing titles like that will cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. It's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Unlike on some other social news sites, submitting an article to HN confers no special rights over the submission and particularly no right to frame for others how they should interpret an article or a situation. Titles are the most powerful influence on threads—by far, actually—so this is a big deal.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

If you felt that the article's original title was misleading, it's ok to change it, but you should do that by making it more neutral, not by replacing it with your own view. In this case your objection can easily be addressed by taking out the word "treated".

Unlocking new levels of "socializing losses"

Depends how much, and how well they disperse it. The oceans are actually fairly radioactive as is; there’s an estimated 4 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved into the oceans naturally. If you disperse the waste thoroughly, it wouldn’t realistically move the needle one iota, at least as a one time expedient.

Concentrated in one spot, or as a regular disposal mechanism is not recommended, obviously.

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, and especially not ideological clichés. If you have a substantive point to make, that's great, but just dropping tropes guarantees a lower-quality thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Okay, so this is basically day zero, for anyone who wants to eat fish? After this, only with a Geiger counter?

Hard to know without more info. It likely depends on the rate with which they release it and the currents, i.e. how the radioactive water dilutes with the ocean. What should matter for the fish consumption there should be the local concentration.

No, because this will blend into the existing background radiation already present in the ocean.

I'd worry a lot more about other pollutants we've been dumping for decades. You get more radioactivity exposure from the world's active coal plants than a bunch of Fukushimas.

Honest to god, isn’t shooting it just any direction in space safer?!

Unless the rocket explodes and spreads it everywhere.

Most likely would spread it into the ocean. So same thing as status quo.

(Not like it’s actually a problem FWIW.)

> more than 1.2 million tons of treated water

Good luck with that. That's about 100 times more than the mass of all cargo send into space so far.

I read a book or something online by Michio Kaku where he was passionately against launching any kind of nuclear material because of the possibility of the rocket exploding before reaching space.

Safer option would be to bury it deep underground. Much ado has been said about this approach due to long-term uncertainty, but even 100-1000 years of safe storage is better than dumping it into the ocean, or having it explode on the launchpad - at least imo. Future us can always go back and improve storage as technology brings new possibilities.

> The treated water has been building up because more than 100 tons of groundwater seeps into the wrecked reactor basements every day, mixing with highly radioactive debris.

If you can put 100 tons a day into orbital escape velocity, various governments would love to talk to you.

I know a guy https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU

I would rather not talk to them so I'll keep my secrets to myself :X

Seriously though, obvious and good point. Thank you for calling me out.

Yes, but you'd have to get it into space first. Rocket equation tyranny is expensive to get past.

How is that in any way realistic?

It is treated water that they're thinking of releasing. Still radioactive, but not Fukushima radioactive.

You don't want it to end up on an Earth orbit (let alone a decaying one) so you'll want to give it escape velocity. That's a lot more velocity than usual. And fission byproducts are heavy..

"Shooting it just any direction into space" is overwhelmingly likely to be suborbital, meaning that it will just crash back into Earth somewhere. An orbital trajectory might be safer, but it's probably not what anyone has in mind.

An escape trajectory is in practice impossible for this much mass.

we are talking about 1.2 million tons of water.

It’s about $2-3.000 per kg to launch stuff into out of space.

So it’s about $2.400.000.000.000-3.600.000.000.000, not to talk about the environmental impact of all the rocket fuel being burned in the atmosphere.

But what if the cost is reduced to $10-30/kg (the latter for escape)?

https://youtu.be/C8JyvzU0CXU

Absolutely not. A Challenger like even would be catastrophic with a payload like that even if the size and weight of the payload would not make it impossible for a liftoff with current technology.

The other part is that there are safe ways of getting rid of the contaminated water on Earth.

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