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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"

Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!

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Tritium is not the only radioactive isotope present though:

https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reac...

> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90, TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water

The idea is that the strontium-90, carbon-14, etc can be filtered out, leaving just the tritiated water to be discharged.

According to the article I cited:

> Greenpeace said it had confirmed with Tepco that the system was not designed to remove carbon-14

Maybe there are updates on this matter but I couldn't find anything online.

Sounds like you're right about the carbon-14:

"C-14 also cannot be removed by ALPS, but its concentration is far lower than its regulatory standard for discharge."

Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...

Is the carbon-14 an actual health concern, or just a PITA for future archeologists?

Nitpicking: The archeologist already have tables to fix variations of the C_14 vs C_12 in the past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_calibration

Except if you consider the "entropy" of doing that, you have an enormous amount of energy inputs required.

And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).

This is a complete non-issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fission

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