If you ate a whole kilogram of that fish it would be the equivalent of eating between 4-5 bananas.
If you ate a whole kilogram of that fish it would be the equivalent of eating between 4-5 bananas.
That being said, I am still travelling to Japan and enjoying their 'radioactive' seafood.
Millisieverts and becquerels and curies. Rads, rems, grays. Roentgens! (NG,NT)
Whenever I see a pop-sci article or video relating to radiation, it feels like one unit is chosen at random.
I know this isn't the case. Each one measures a different thing. And of course we have to have a pair of competing units for each thing because that's how we do all other units.
I had to go look all those units up before writing this comment.
There's little upside to accepting some technocrat's "Just trust me bro! I know what's good you for!" sales pitch, and there's unknown, potentially unlimited downsides. The people prepping your avocado toast and sanitizing your wastewater have bigger priorities than learning about all the details and dangers of all of today's novel technologies, nuclear or otherwise, and you haven't earned their trust, so they're understandably not going to risk theirs or their family's lives.
That's my rant in the general case of techno- and nuclear- skepticism. In this particular case, it's simply a political move by China.
China: We don't like Japan. Thanks for providing us cover for further sanctions.
Fisherman: This is going to hurt us because of China's reaction.
News media: Wow - look at all this controversy. Very newsworthy.
The concern with that wastewater is Tritium which has a half life of 12 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
Tritium is difficult to control for various reasons, one is that it is an isotope of hydrogen so it cannot be chemically separated from ordinary water. Those other isotopes you mention, particularly Strontium, are particularly dangerous because are bioconcentrated in the food chain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification
but tritium doesn't do that. If it is released in the ocean it is going to mostly diffuse into a very big mass of water and literally be a drop in the ocean compared to natural radioactivity. It is not going to be concentrated in the bodies of sea plants and animals so it doesn't pose disproportionate danger to the fuel supply. The thing though is that radioactivity is super-easy to detect, there are roughly 6*10^23 atoms in 3 grams of tritium and just one of those atoms going "pop!" can be detected and many forms of decay have a unique signature so even amounts that are small compared to natural background can be detected for people to have concern about.
Their filtering/treatment system doesn't work on tritium so I do believe for that it's simple dilution they're relying on.