His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
It seems that they are trowing money to the sea after paying yet for storing it for the last 11 years.
Same reason we don’t use nuclear reactors to turn lead into gold, even though we can: it’s far more expensive than it’s worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production
It's *ten* times more expensive than gold!
(If I remember correctly, medical ³He MRI's are done on a closed rebreather -- they literally want to recycle your lung air, it's that valuable).
Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... [Q6]
Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
“HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
> Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
Yes, you can beat the biological half-life if you eat whopping doses of the stuff. That's... not a common situation.
If you ate said factory worker, you'd be back to normal in a couple weeks, as long as you didn't keep eating factory workers.
Drinking (or inhaling) 50,000 gallons of the (undiluted, so best case in terms of volume) water from storage tanks would probably get you with kidney failure somewhat before the tritium does.
Huh? It has a half-life of 12 years.
A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.
More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.
Source: I’m a dropout and frequently encounter highly educated idiots