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Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

civilbeat.org

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Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#141

Post by photochemsyn »

janmalec wrote: post #4

Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible c…

Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.

> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#142

Post by unethical_ban »

top_sigrid wrote: post #30
junon wrote: post #3

WasteWATER*. I hate when titles leave important things out to make them sound worse than they are. This is about WATER waste.

Water which ... is nuclear waste as it is from a nuclear power plant that had a core meltdown? Of course wastewater would have been more specific, but in the end they ARE dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.

It's fair to say most people, the casual reader glancing a headline, would "commonly" define nuclear waste as barrels of used Uranium.

http://thedailychrenk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/simptox...

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#143

Post by SECProto »

Pyramus wrote: post #98
SECProto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments. First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind…

That's the issue with "safe" - it's difficult to capture in a single factor like number of accidents and for this factor, the distribution of the metric is very different. Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency? It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: I…

> Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?

Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#144

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Pyramus wrote: post #98
SECProto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments. First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind…

That's the issue with "safe" - it's difficult to capture in a single factor like number of accidents and for this factor, the distribution of the metric is very different. Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency? It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: I…

no it's not. coal gives millions of people cancer, but it does so in ways that are hard to prove in court on an individual level.

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#145

Post by WithinReason »

teawrecks wrote: post #136
WithinReason wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, for another bit of comparison, there's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296

That number doesn't mean anything on its own. How about a ppb ratio?

The article specified the amount in absolute quantities as well instead of a ppb ratio.

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#146

Post by DennisP »

teawrecks wrote: post #135
janmalec wrote: post #4

Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible c…

> Tritium is already present in the ocean Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?

We've increased the atmosphere's CO2 concentration by 50%. A few grams of tritium won't significantly change its concentration in the ocean.

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#147

Post by cwp »

Reason077 wrote: post #104
kyrra wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution. You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives. Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massiv…

> "Wood and animal waste" Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas. Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the de…

What does renewability have to do with climate change?

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#148

Post by ceejayoz »

pvaldes wrote: post #140
ceejayoz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/62/4/557/6256015 > 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.

"A factory worker ingested tritium over 7.4 years. His exposure dose was estimated at 3–6 Sv. He developed isochromic anemia, and subsequently died of pancytopenia"

Eating tritium straight from the factory for years at a time seems like a special case, yes?

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.

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#149

Post by tablespoon »

pera wrote: post #105
Reason077 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe

#150

Post by hypertele-Xii »

cwp wrote: post #147
Reason077 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Wood and animal waste" Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas. Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the de…

What does renewability have to do with climate change?

When you burn a tree, everything that's released into the atmosphere is something the tree absorbed from the atmosphere as it grew. So it's plus minus zero in terms of pollution.

When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.

Pollution that changes the climate.

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