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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

#151

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> 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.

And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."

The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.

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

#152

Post by causi »

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…

I maintain that "being utter horseshit" should be added to the reasons to flag a submission.

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

#153

Post by twojacobtwo »

martinald wrote: post #128
titzer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch. Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking... methane , which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

But keep in mind methane's halflife is 'only' ~8 years.

Keep in mind that this is really just a nicer-sounding way of saying that we get xxx-xxxx (can't be arsed to do the half-life based math at the moment) years worth of equivalent C02 warming in just 8 years. Given how global warming is accelerating toward/through various points-of-no-return, stopping to point out that it's 'only' 8 years is doing a disservice to the efforts of communicating the danger of our current situation.

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

#154

Post by bsagdiyev »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #131
yandrypozo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying that, I still don't get how so many people who claim to take decision based on science are so against nuclear tech.

Science is irrelevant. There still hasn't been a political decision in my country on where to store nuclear waste.

Sure but other countries can figure it out. So that's a you problem, not an us problem.

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

#155

Post by janmalec »

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"?

It would be if we added way more tritium. We are adding a very small amount compared to what is already there naturally and even that will decay away.

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

#156

Post by boomboomsubban »

belter wrote: post #68
boomboomsubban wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poster you asked is not that Japanese official. They just said dumping it was not a concern. Posting someone else's claim and asking them if they're ready to "back their claim" is disingenuous.

I realize that, and I would imagine everybody else in this thread. That was why, to try to avoid sounding disingenuous, I tried to apologize upfront for the question, and recognized and appreciated the poster qualifications. I was trying to qualify what safe means in this context. A bit like when talking for example to an aircraft manufacturer CEO, for example as in: 1) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to f…

Your method of asking was very confrontational, even if you did start it politely. You challenged them to "back your claim" which wasn't their claim.

You could have asked something like "do you agree with the Japanese claim that the water is safe to drink? Would you be willing to drink it?"

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

#157

Post by brnaftr361 »

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…

I've never actually sat down and worked it out, but it seems to me that this is more of a political buoy than legitimately optimized.

Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".

And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.

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

#158

Post by Pyramus »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #144
Pyramus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is correct - if we were to price in "cancer" for coal maybe indeed coal may not be economic anymore.

But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?

I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.

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

#159

Post by xyzzy21 »

It's far safer than keeping it on dry land or burying it.

Just look up the amount of water in the Pacific and then divide into the amount of waste water being discussed - the ratio is insanely tiny and nearly unmeasurable. The biological effects are far smaller because of this ratio than if you kept it concentrated on land.

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

#160

Post by xyzzy21 »

Reason077 wrote: post #102
pera wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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