Japan to release Fukushima water into ocean | Hacker News Reader

Japan to release Fukushima water into ocean

reuters.com

20 pointsjacktang27 comments

The actual data:

> That water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organisation drinking water limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre, according to Tepco.

Google tells me regular seawater is 14 Bq/l.

Anyone with physics knowledge want to do the journalist's actual job and chime in? 10x worse than average sounds bad but 50x better than safe sounds good. What's the actual effect here? Is the tritium itself the problem (vs. I'm assuming, usually potassium)?

It's a mixed bag.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1029/ML102990104.pdf

Who is 10000, but this varies with EU having a 100 bq/l limit, US a 740 limit, Canada 7000/l

So going by WHO recommendation it's fine, but 2x what the limit in Europe is.

Looks like normal levels are 5-15 /l depending where it's measured.

So: this is probably 10x what you'd encounter naturally but allegedly way under the limit depending on who is making the recommendations (with EU somewhat of an outlier)

But the ocean is vast. So wouldn't this mix in and ultimately be an imperceptible change in the average?

Maybe globally and eventually, but at first the nearby nations could possibly have elevated levels in their surrounding waters for the time being.

My intuition could be way off, but I think there's more than 10x more water (even at some ridiculously thin surface depth) between Korea and Japan than there is in the Fukushima tanks.

Wikipedia says 210 km³ flows into the Sea of Japan yearly. The article says the total stored water is "one million metric tons", which is... probably within the measurement error of the total SoJ flow.

I wanted to math this out.

East china sea: ~770,000 square km surface area; 350m average depth = 269,500,000,000 cubic meters of water

First discharge = 7,800 cubic meters over 17 days == approx. 459m^3 released / day == 1.70315399 x 10^-9

They might find five or six extra tritium atoms per liter of water.

Does this one off make it okay to dump into the ocean generally? No obviously not, the ocean is not just a magic dumpster to make bad things disappear. But in this case, tritium already exists naturally in sea water, and the introduced concentration has already been minimized.

If your personal heuristics for avoiding risk push you towards avoiding Japanese seafood over this, that's fine, but you should actually be avoiding all seafood.

In theory yes. In the real world I would not be surprised to hear that there are higher concentrations in specific areas due to currents and whatnot (ie it would take a while to evenly spread out)

“190 becquerels per liter”

Oh gee oh wow!

1 millicurie (mCi) = 37 megabecquerels (MBq)

1 PET/CT scan is between 4-20 mCi.

So I guess if you drink, snort, bathe and just enematize yourselves with 48,684 liters of this poisonous horrible water it will be the same as getting a single PET CT.

The amount of whining, specifically Chinese whining, is absurd. Especially as their shitty air pollution blankets the entire Pacific.

These people have to breathe canned air Space Balls style but they have time to cry and complain about 190 becquerels that are going to be diluted to homeopathic concentration rapidly.

Why don’t they find time to worry about radon gas? We all are probably breathing in enough of that shit to actually give us lung cancer but it doesn’t bother most.

Apparently even 1 banana smoothie will deliver an order of magnitude more radiation than drinking 1l of that water. https://ionactive.co.uk/resource-hub/blog/a-banana-smoothie-...

Why release it and not keep it for domestic use then?

> The amount of whining, specifically Chinese whining, is absurd. Especially as their shitty air pollution blankets the entire Pacific.

Not just Chinese, South Koreans too https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/protests-mount-so...

You should drink that water if you complain about them being upset

That’s fine, I’ll drink it. You going to get your hands on some and send it to me? You can post it on your telegram/signal/X accounts

This isn’t a gotcha. I’ll absolutely drink it.

>The amount of whining, specifically Chinese whining, is absurd.

China needs to cool it with the xenophobia.

> The amount of whining, specifically Chinese whining, is absurd. Especially as their shitty air pollution blankets the entire Pacific.

There are also multiple Chinese/Korean NPPs that have each released in one year multiple times the amount of radiation contained in the Fukushima annual release plan (22 trillion Bq). This isn’t because of any incident they had, these are just normal operations for these plants. These moves have very little to do with science and are just East Asian political posturing as usual.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/fukushim...

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/world/asia-pacific/20230623-...

https://japan-forward.com/china-and-south-korea-too-release-...

Sounds like an origin story for Godzilla

Why does it have to be released?

Concentrated = Slightly Dangerous And Hard to Manage

Diluted = Very Safe

It doesn't HAVE to be released per se but it's a non story. The issue is the optics and not the technicals.

It has to go somewhere, and this isn't the first time they've done this.

Goodbye seafood. Hello fish farming?

Looks like I'll have to ban Japanese products (Tea/Fish) and potentially anything from the pacific..

Japanese government is irresponsible

Best to ban products from the Atlantic as well. It touches the Pacific.

how would Japanese tea be affected by sea water?

Did you read how high the WHO limit is for drinking water? Just using that as a baseline, this doesn't seem all that irresponsible.

You'd be surprised what the WHO allows McDonald's to put in their food and in the whole supply chain

Do you own research of the risks, I listen to scientists, not politicians

> You’d be surprised what the WHO allows McDonald’s to put in their food and in the whole supply chain

Literally anything, but only because while there are many gorganizations in the world that regulate food, food service, and agricultural suppy chains, WHO isn’t one of them, being an intergovernmental coordination and information sharing entity, not a regulatory agency.

I'd recommend reading some of the other comments on here wrt how radioactive the water actually is. It seems to be well within safe levels for all but the most stringent agencies as-is, and they're going to put it in the ocean, where it will dilute to unnoticeable levels. This is a nothingburger story, plain and simple.

You should probably ban bananas as well, not to mention smoke alarms. And brazil nuts? Forget it. Do you consume potatoes, carrots, or avocados? Those are all radioactive as well

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