Japan starts release of Fukushima’s treated radioactive water
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
> That water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organization drinking water limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre, according to Tepco. A becquerel is a measure of radioactivity.
> Monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has backed the plan, will be on-site for the discharge, and samples of water and fish will be taken.
Umm, what's the controversy here?
Yes, people are that afraid of nuclear.
If we'd built the capacity then, we'd have a whole lot less carbon in the atmosphere today.
I don't necessarily agree with the Greens but I remember this perilous time very well. And it was the incumbent non-Green powers who created this situation.
Furthermore, this is not the only theme the Greens pressed on and I must admit our country is already much much better for it ( cleaner air, cleaner waters ).
How much? Of what?
Same for the classic "look at that ugly city, so bad for the environment!" Bay area types who forced suburban sprawl.
Many facilities (back then and now) where unsafe (e.g. Ukranie) and are still a threat (e.g. France)
Add to that the short sighted actions by everyone involved. (DROPPING barrels in an abandoned mine for final storage, just to find out it does not only totally leak, but advisors precisely warned about it beeing not a suitable location (germany))
For me that's enogh to loose trust in governments and companies beeing able to run such an operation. Fukushima beeing the final nail to this coffin for many.
Maybe when we can proof the reliability, safety and waste efficiency of modern reactor systems, we can rebuild this trust. But either way, we are surely talking 20-60 years. It's scorched earth.
And this is a massive political issue with which the Green parties collect millions of votes. Meanwhile "of 265 US power plants that monitor groundwater, 242 report unsafe levels of at least one pollutant derived from coal ash" - so instead of the small potential of ground water contamination from a small number of nuclear plant waste barrels, people passively chose the almost certainty of ground water contamination by leachate containing arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, molybdenum, selenium and thallium - a chunk of it radioactive.
But it got votes.
The design, deployment, regulatory/political hurdles, and the long operational lifetime of nuclear power plants, make that any improvements take a loooonng time to bear fruit.
Inertia of the installed base with its problems (and history), makes new development near-impossible.
That situation propably won't improve until newer designs accumulate a multi-decade track record of safety, or fusion power gets commercialized.
China's statements are sleazy in my opinion. The way they word things makes it sound like Japan is irresponsibly doing whatever they like without oversight, and the world should be doing something about it.
Just a few minutes ago, The CPC (Communist Party of China) stated that it is suspending all imports of Japanese seafood to protect consumers.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-66599189
> As expected, China has imposed a blanket ban on all Japanese seafood.
> Beijing announced some restrictions last month, but they were limited to 10 prefectures in Japan, including Fukushima and Tokyo. Earlier this week, Hong Kong announced a similar 10 prefecture ban on ‘aquatic produce’.
> South Korea, too, still blocks seafood imports from the Fukushima area. It's a ban that's been in place since 2013 and, although the government's political stance has softened, it is one that it has no intention of lifting.
> These are major customers for Japan and represent a lot of lost business. Nowhere buys more Japanese seafood than mainland China, which imported more than $600m worth last year. Remarkably, Hong Kong is only just behind - spending $520m on marine produce from Japan.
> Given China's consistent and vocal opposition to the wastewater release, it's a scenario that Japan's government probably envisaged. In the short-term, it admits businesses will take a 'significant' hit.
> In this sense, China understands the economic leverage it has over Japan and the question is whether Hong Kong will follow the mainland’s lead with another all-out ban.
> Either way, we're talking about major disruption for Japan's seafood industry and for restaurants in Hong Kong and China.
Annual release of tritium:
2020: South Korea Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant and others Total: 365tbq or 1,022mg
The total amount currently stored at Fukushima is around 860tbq, intended to be released over the course of 30 years.
So divide by 30 and that is around ~28tbq a year.
Either way, the halflife of tritium is around 14years, and it's everywhere in the ocean. This is actually a nothing burger.
The only materials that aren't filtered out are Carbon14 and Tritium, if I remember correctly.
For the latter, obviously yes. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) has done it's own independent tests, as well as actively monitored japanese tests while on site.
> Radioactive materials such as cesium, strontium, iodine, and cobalt are purified by ALPS through co-precipitation treatment using solutions and adsorption on activated carbon and adsorbents. Almost all radioactive materials are removed through repeated treatment by ALPS, but tritium, which is a radioisotope of hydrogen, exists as a part of the water molecule and cannot be removed through treatment by ALPS and other equipment.
It's only tritium that can't be removed (and that is why it is released by other nuclear power plants - in larger quantities that is planned here - as part of normal operation).
[1] https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/06-03-05.h...
Bottom line point stands, more is released regularly and this is nothing compared to the initial deluge of untreated material from the accident itself.
Fear of radiation, fear that the Japanese government / Fukushima’s owners can’t be trusted to release only what they say they will. Personally it seems safe to me and I’m confident the IAEA’s monitoring will be effective, but then again I’m living on the other side of the planet, so …
Especially given the fact that Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan at the time of the Fukushima accident, had to go to the TEPCO HQ to force them to continue the response instead of giving up and watching a full meltdown. Japan has a lot to do in order to regain the lost trust.
The government has basically designated the nuclear agency seat as a "Send the guy we don't like there" seat. Only incompetent idiots have been placed there since Fukushima.
Add in all the BS red-tape that the government made up, the notoriously slow bureaucracy, and sometimes even sabotage? (Combine that with the new nuclear regulation agency created after Fukushima, which complicates it further) It's not happening without a strongman leading the charge and really forcing it.
Would be great if we could copy-paste France's setup. But Japan is obtuse and inflexible.
As a Japanese citizen, I would feel safer seeing the TEPCO corporation dismantled, and it's leadership behind bars. But the courts declared them not guilty.
A late addition, but I should also add info about Onagawa Nuclear Powerplant. It survived the exact same disaster with no melt down, only because the manager staunchly refused to back down on constant safety training and disaster drills. Of course, to the frustration and chagrin of upper management.
and also
https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
They seems to be more willing to put money on propaganda instead of actually dealing with the problem. Just check the page 7.
- Discharge into the sea: 3.4 billion yen
- Vapor release: 34.9 billion yen
- Hydrogen release: 100 billion yen
- Underground burial: 243.1 billion yen
And for propaganda, 70 billion yen
> Total decontamination costs have exceeded 4 trillion yen as of the end of December. Going forward, additional costs are projected to grow by trillions of yen. [1]
Is ¥70 billion a lot? Sure. But to put it in perspective, more than $14 billion (¥2 trillion) was spent on federal election campaigns in the US in 2020 [2]. Gaining public favor is expensive in a democratic country. And misinformation is a real problem with real costs (e.g. to Japan’s fishing industry) - so it makes sense economically as well as politically.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
You can trust the IAEA to actually do monitoring, and also believe that monitoring might be not effective enough. The IAEA failed to effectively monitor the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade, so why should we expect the opposite?
> I feel like anyone should be able to conduct independent testing on water and fish samples from the area.
You have to tap into the wastewater source, which is much more hard to do independently and also why the IAEA had to show up. The wastewater will then be subject to the ocean currents, so the actual effect would be inconsistent and delayed (up to 10 years, according to simulations). At that point nothing could be done about the year-long dump.
Wwhich decade was that then (more to the point why did they fail to monitor if they were montoring?)
There's a big difference between easy monitoring of peacetime allied country nuclear reactors and monitoring the enrichment program of a country actively attempting to develp weapons grade material in the absence of any binding agreements.
2009--2019 if my understanding is correct. Note that this period does overlap with major sanctions against Iran, and since the IAEA itself later acknowledged the breach of agreements in this period, it's fair to say that the IAEA monitoring was not as effective compared to Western intelligences.
> There's a big difference between easy monitoring of peacetime allied country nuclear reactors and monitoring the enrichment program of a country actively attempting to develp weapons grade material in the absence of any binding agreements.
This doesn't matter, because it does show that countries can hide (or more accurately, delay the detection of) evidences if they are really willing to do so. And the absence of any binding agreements actually gives Japan more incentive to do that.
Do you have a source for these simulations?
[1] https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...
[2] https://sciwatch.kiost.ac.kr/handle/2020.kiost/43977 (no actual paper available, I inferred its details from [3])
[3] https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_internatio...
That’s what I mean when I say anyone who really wants to can conduct their own tests and sound the alarm. Hell, if the Chinese government wants to pay me I’ll go take a boat off the coast of Fukushima and collect some water samples for them myself.
How can they verify whether you actually took the sample from the coast of Fukushima then or not? wink
But seriously, yes, independent groups can take and measure samples and alram in advance. Alas, many such alarms tend to be ignored. Jurisdictions matter here, and there is a reason that Japan didn't try to dump all the wastewater until South Korea (among others) somehow changed the opinion.
I’m a random person or bot on the internet and I said so, that should be all the assurance anyone needs.
In Ontario Canada:
20 Bq/L limit proposed by the Ontario Drinking Water Advisory Council (ODWAC)
190 is 10 times that limit.
This isn't only about drinking water it's about eating seafood that has absorbed these chemicals (or eaten many fish who have absorbed them). I could understand the caution around seafood in that area for a period of time.
The ocean's average radioactivity is 12Bq/L, and there's a _lot_ of water. A single banana is 20Bq already.
Dump a few million litres of 10000Bq/L water in the ocean over a few years, and the average radioactivity goes to... Still 12Bq/L
This is unlike, say, naturally radioactive carbon or potassium isotopes, that have a relatively constant concentration in the animal's body over it's life time - if a fish eats some high potassium food, it will excrete an equivalent of his own equally radioactive amount to maintain homeostasis.
It's for this exact reason the net "banana dose" of radiation, unless you are potassium deficient, is in fact zero.
https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1694248709180084514
TEPCO did not detect any iron 55 or selenium 79, yet they are included in their estimates, at the worst possible doses, explcitly for safety. The amounts rejected and the radiation it exposes you to is about as harmful as living a few floors higher up that what you do. It's nothing.
And as the article notes, there are active Nuclear power plants in France and China (and South Korea [2]) that discharge even more tritium per year than is planned at Fukushima. Should people also be cautious about eating seafood from those regions as well?
[1] https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
[2] https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/17/173%EC%86%A1%EA%B7%9C...
The waste water of nuclear plant will not directly touch the nuclear materials. However, the water Japan released did.
Drinking salty sea water is generally not recommended.
La Hague's retreatment plant puts out 13000 TBq per year, and no one ever cared, nor did anyone see changes in the environment.
Not to mention that humans do not metabolize Tritium, it'll never stay in the human body for more than a few hours. You're more likely to die from the salt in that water than the tritium.
With one caveat: homeopathy says that the water has to be diluted by a certain process which involves tapping it ten times during full moon or some non-sense like that.
In the ocean: bacteria food -> plant food -> fish food.
Seriously, I have a hard time assuming good will from your post if you do not try to differentiate the amount of dilution happening in a 100km2 50m deep lake vs a 100,000,000km2-sized 5,000m deep ocean.
Did you see Godzilla ? /s
Geopolitics at it's worst.
EDIT: Typo
Japanese domestic politics at it's worst.
I keep seeing this nonsense about "why not dump it into the dirt", as if that ever made any sense. The answer is always simple, there is already a massive amount of Tritium in the ocean.
The water, is also literally sea water. It is salt water taken from the ocean, now with some radioactive isotopes of hydrogen (H20 remember?) which is called tritium. The dilution process literally takes sea water, and mixes it.
Dumping salt water into a local lake or river, or the dirt is literally what starts ecological disasters. But you didn't even do basic research did you?
...
>But you didn't even do basic research did you?
It makes sense BECAUSE that's exactly how dilution works. Diluting in Japanese lakes (or just the closest) is still as safe as diluting the fucking ocean because japanese lakes are also fucking massive relative to volume of water to be released. Politicians chose ocean because domestic politics. Use your brain and do some basic math. Dump all 1.25 tons / 1.2B litres / 660T becquerels into Lake Inawashiro @ 5.4km3 / 5.4T litres and it'll work out to ~120 becquerels of tritium per litre, still less than WHO limit of 10,000 per litre for drinking water. Diluting 1/5400 of the one lake with some salt water, +0.01% salienty, which is... drum roll fresh water territory. That's dumping everything at once. Now spread it out over 30 years. Spread that out over even more bodies of water and it's even more trivial. JP gov chose negligible domestic ecologic disaster with terrible domestic optics that will affect domestic sentiment and governance for negligible chance of international disaster with more managable optics. Which is still based on assumption that TEPCO can be trusted for decades and release will indeed be negligible. But we both know that's far from certain given reputation, hence JP gov would rather hedge by offloading potential political fallout into international commons, because they can't trust TEPCO not to fuck around on the time scale involved, so best not even risk something as sensitive as more radiation drama on JP soil. They'd rather risk losing 100s of billions in fishing exports than potential domestic ire. Which is fine. But also recognize this issue has as much if not more politics considerations than science. But you didn't even do basic political/geopolitical thinking relative to science did you?
Problem 1 : Water extraction
Extracting large volumes of water, is naturally not a ecologically friendly practice. It's actually one of the large barriers stopping us from solving water issues via large scale desalination. Ecological damage includes animals being sucked in, to higher water temperatures causing algae blooms. (Moving all that water, does overall increase the water temperature) Furthermore, it may actually case over-oxygenation of the water, which can cause it's own set of problems. But I'm not a specialist so I will leave that topic as "I have heard of this thing".
Problem 2 : Actual dilution
That's not all though. You need to ensure local PH balances are stable. Since we are starting off by using ocean water (it was the closest and most viable option), you now have to do an ecological analysis of the lake, and make the water match the lake's overall water profile. That requires a whole other set of equipment, and imported materials to balance it out. Of course, "it's relatively speaking, a drop in an lake", but that's the thing, it's a lake. It doesn't have ocean currents.
The Lake is overall a enclosed environment, when compared to the ocean. And it is one hell of a lot more expensive than the ocean, which is right next door!
Now lets take your number, 120 becquerels of tritium per liter. Lets ignore the WHO safe level for a moment. Since our goal is diluting it, preferably, we won't appreciably change the per-liter value of tritium in fresh water. But that's not the case is it? The natural background amount of tritium in 1cubic liter in surface water is around 0.4–1.2 Bq/L. So your proposal, increases the amount by 100x. That misses the entire point of "dilution", which is why I said it doesn't count. When you dilute something like this, the whole point is to dilute in a manner that makes environmental effects negligible. Your proposal, misses the entire point.
Further more, they are only releasing ~28becquerels (officially it is 22becquerels) per year into the ocean, to ensure proper dilution. Divide 28 by 365 days, that is 0.077becquerels per cubic liter (rounded up), in an entire 24 hour cycle! Which would bring it very close to the natural background! This is dilution! This is the bloody point of it all!
Dumping it all in a lake, makes this completely pointless!
Problem 3 : Logistics (AKA, why are we even transporting this?)
This one is simple. Why in the actual hell, would you spend time and risk a truck flipping, rather than just use the pipe you already have and release into the ocean? And this ties into the two previous comments. You have to extract water from the lake, bring it to the water storage facility, mix it, then transport it back.
Or take sea water, desalinate it, then get it to the correct profile, then transport... The amount of extra steps, and chances for human error are significantly higher. It's impractical, and a waste of time.
Problem 4 : Local Resistance (Or domestic politics)
Naturally, locals don't like it. It doesn't matter if it's safe, or checked by independent auditors or international organizations. Humans are overall, emotional, social creatures. Not logical ones. Local pressure is naturally easier to evade if you say "It won't be your problem in the future", which is unfortunately how humans work. Hell, if I had the money, I'd buy the lake (which isn't possible), and let them dump it there (Which I cant, because the fresh-water underground water table is legally protected). Of course, I would tell them "It won't be a problem in 14 years, due to the half-life", but they won't care.
Non-salt water is also significantly more valuable than salt water. It's the difference between incredibly energy intensive and expensive desalination and, just not needing it. People care more about non-salt water than salt water.
I'd happily drink it, assuming it's boiled and de-salted. (And I am not being facetious)
Ultimately, regardless of feasibility, it's simply a solution which they didn't even consider, because again, as you recognized why would they. That's politically suicide even if it's deemed ecologically sound plan. Which circles back to your first point, does any country dump tritium in their local lake? Not publically, and Fukushima is notoriously public politics. But you know what most try to do with nuclear waste? They attempt to engineer supremely expensive local storage solutions, and frequently fail only to spend stupid resources to warehouses it domestically, instead of dumping that into the commons. It's 60 olympic swimming pools worth of water. It's trivial storage problem for nation state. Hence problem 1/2/3 isn't even a problem especially if they bothered with local dumping studies which again, is 3 tankers per day for 30 years. It's nothing. Desalinating 1.25m tons is also trivial, and not even that costly. A 10m gallon / day plant cost less than 100M and sort filter that in a month. Which is peanuts versus aggregate clean up cost, and even potential lost fishing revenue. Cost isn't driving this decision to release, politics is. And it's not regional geopolitics because JP isn't releasing this water out of spite for her neighbours. Let's not forget, it's not PRC but most of region as well as countries across the Pacific not pleased with this decision.
Which ultimately circles back to point 4, and my broader point. LOCALs don't like it. LOCALs vote. Can't risk LOCAL votes even if they're irrational, and EVEN worse if their rational distrust of TEPCO becomes reality down the line. IIRC even more containated water already leeched into ground water. Risk of future leaks, however "safe" this water is, and heads will roll. So the politically expedient solution is to dump into ocean and remove any potential risk. The political math is simple, they would never even consider local disposal or long term local storage due to the risks, so into the ocean it goes. Which again, is fine. Fine in the sense that it's a calculated decision. But let's just acknowledge that's whats actually driving decision making. Less science and more domestic JP politics. They didn't have to dump this water. A 5T economy can afford to store it indefintely and ignore geopolitical shit show. But domestic JP politics want that water gone from JP territory, so into the ocean it goes.
And also like Prickle says it's all moot because releasing it into the ocean is the better solution - in terms of cost, risk, dilution effectiveness, and political feasibility. Maybe their fishing industry would be impacted less if they dumped it in a lake - although I suspect the effect will be temporary as the global market reconfigures itset, and South Korea already bans fish and agricultural products from Fukushima, and Japan was already headed toward a trade war with China for other geopolitical reasons. There would also be economic impacts as a result of dumping it in Lake Inawashiro - for example to tourism in the Lake Inawashiro area. Is that a good trade-off? I don't think the answer is as obvious as you claim.
And I don't know how you can claim "it's simply a solution which they didn't even consider" - were you there in the room when the engineers were drawing up ways to treat the wastewater before deciding on this one? Honestly I find it perplexing that you are so fixated on this notion that because they didn't choose some suboptimal solution to dispose of waste water, somehow that is emblematic of "Japanese domestic politics at it's worst".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
It was just a retort to OP comment of regional reaction to JP release being geopolitics at it's worst when incentive calculus points to decision to release being JP domestic politics at it's worst (even if it's also politically optimal/expedient). As far as being in room, I don't see how that's relevant. All we have is what has been publicly communicated and it was between aerial release and water, both of which = release into commons, what solution makes to public discourse is as important as what doesn't - the numbers released so far suggest domestic storage/disposal was feasible, but again, that's a politically non-starter. I find it perplexing people can judge what's optimal/suboptimal based on science when this is predominantly a political issue due to domestic and regional trust of TEPCO. The fundmental issue is people, including japanese does not trust TEPCO even with oversight to behave correctly long term. So the politically expedient thing for JP politics to do is dump in commons to avoid potential domestic blowback, because local storage not politically viable option. And natural regional geopolitical response to that would be fishing bans because JP made a potential domestic problem a regional one. How optimal the solution is a function of politics/incentives. In this case one that involves radiation that sensible geopolitical response would be to keep that shit in your borders regardless of cost. Yucca mountain fine example, it's a fucking shitshow but it's still US at least keeping their nuclear waste on domestic soil, it's US gov eating the cost, as they should. But IIT we have useful idiots whose like, punishing said dick move is geopolitics at it's worst.
Fundamentally, the complaint is that the tritium water will cause environmental damage. => And will lead to damage to humans. If we go down to the roots of the issue, it has not, and never was centered around whether the bq/L was below human drinking limits. It has always been about whether the bq/L amount is safe for the environment. That's why I brought up the natural range in the first place. If anything, claims about it being safe to drink have been a distraction brought up to placate protestors. (And it misses the point)
Therefore, the powerplant should be (and has been) required to reduce environmental effects. When it comes to controlling the Catastrophically F'd reactors, they've been less than capable to say the least. But that's not explicitly related to the tritium water we are discussing about right now.
So, the goal should be to minimize environmental damage. In order to better ensure that, the Tritium water should not cause a major change in composition of the water. Therefore, the bq/L of tritium in water, should preferably, not change beyond the naturally expected amount. (ie: 0.4–1.2 bq/L) Hence why I brought up how your solution violates that basic idea, while the sea release does not. I even showed you the very basic napkin math that made me come to that conclusion.
You do realize, one of the other proposed solutions was actually release by air? After all, Tritium is an isotope of Hydrogen. That plan was specifically dropped because the amount of expected tritium per cubic liter of air, would be greater than when released in water. The decision from the start, has been about minimizing the becquerels per cubic liter. Certainly, the government would accept nothing else.
I should point out, the water is more dangerous when stored. By default, the stored water has a significantly higher concentration until it is diluted. Certainly, higher than the safe level. A leak from the tanks would cause significantly more environmental damage. Just like with aircraft design, where every contingency is considered, we must also consider every contingency for when that containment fails. History has shown us multiple times, that inevitably, even the best built systems are destroyed by human error.
Quite frankly, your complaints are more arbitrary than mine. You are proposing that Japan should take the concerns of uninformed individuals, over the concerns and claims made by professionals.
We can see pollution in water, on land, but not in the air.