...and damage some preserved ecosystem in the process. Great idea!
The same release from a vessel in open water is less likely to damage an ecosystem than release from the shoreline. That said, if it's diluted enough and released over a long enough period of time, it's unlikely to make much difference.
Not!. Is just the opposite. Coastal ecosystems are much more resilient than deep water ecosystems! They evolved to stand changes.
We must stop thinking in the ocean as just a lot of water. This way of thinking is suicidal.
...and damage some preserved ecosystem in the process. Great idea!
That brings up a good point. There are a few nuclear zones that no one lives in right (Chernobyl came to mind after watching that hbo show)? Why don’t we at-least get some value out of of these sad situations and convert one to a nuclear disposal site?
Life beings migrate. What situation would you prefer: radioactive water waiting safely in a tank in fukushima for 24 years to save your family from cancer, or Chernobyl's birds soaked in Fukushima's water, pooping and molting in your backyard to save TEPCO some money and allow them to circumvent their responsabilities?
My old Physics teacher always said to put it on cornflakes. The surface area of all cornflakes in existence (back of the envelope) would result in totally harmless concentrations, undetectable above background. Of course getting the waste evenly distributed over all the cornflakes is another matter, one for the engineers...
James Lovelock (formulator of the Gaia hypothesis) suggested sprinkling radioactive waste through out wilderness areas. This would, in a way, also help preserve these areas because humans would be wary of entering them or building in them.
Lovelock was very naive in this sense, as the radioactive Ucrainian wildboars moving to Deustchland and Poland showed us.
It has been low enough the whole time. Radioactivity is super easy to detect even at harmless levels. Sunburn is a far (probably a million times? More?) bigger concern with similar effects (radiation burns possibly leading to cancer), yet people still go outside.
Because sun is also healthy in the right dose. Its all about the right balance..
Or lack of sun is also unhealthy by the you can't win for nothing principal.
The whole Fukushima aftermath is a good example of the Mike Tyson Principal: Everyones got a plan till they get punched in the face. There were plans how to prevent this kind of mess until it actually happened.
I don't fully understand the comment - but I think it's my lack of knowledge here. If I stand next to a sign made with a small amount of tritium I get a small dose of radiation. If I live near a river or ocean that has 0.76 PBq dumped into it, isn't that high concentration going to be a lot worse for me even if I drive past every exit sign in Tokyo? What if I end up growing a Tritium vegetable garden?
> isn't that high concentration going to be a lot worse for me even if I drive past every exit sign in Tokyo No, absolutely not. Both are extremely harmless. Zero is zero; neither is more harmful than the other. Let me put it this way: In both cases, a much bigger threat to you would be walking past the display of bananas at the local supermarket. (And no, you shouldn't be worried about the radiation from THAT either…
Er, all it takes is one ingested radioactive particle to damage DNA and spawn cancer. Radioactive particles from Fukushima are showing up in automobile AC filters on the West Coast, and the media hasn't said much about the MOX fuel in Reactor 3 that many experts now theorize could go critical based on the volatile (and largely untested) combination of plutonium and uranium that MOX consists of. And Japanese culture is about the worst possible mindset to deal with this cleanup effort, they are more concerned about saving face and avoiding embarrassment in front of the international community for having made the genius decision to build a bunch of nuclear reactors, some of which are using experimental MOX fuel, on top of the Shionihara Fault. They haven't even located the melted fuel in these reactors yet, and one misstep could easily result in another meltdown or worse yet a critical MOX mushroom cloud that kills millions if not hundreds of millions of humans as the result. Never mind the 850,000 tons of contaminated water they are now simply going to discharge into the ocean.
Which is a good point, but "half life" doesn't mean "all gone". It'll take some x cycles to get it down to some safe level y. So the water needs stored until then, if it's not being released somewhere. Meanwhile, it keeps accumulating, because the problem is caused by groundwater leaching into the contaminated reactor area. So at some point, accumulated volume p will probably exceed available storage area q, which se…
> at some point, accumulated volume p will probably exceed available storage area q Maybe they should stack a second row of containers in the second floor then? (hey, we doubled the available space with only steel beams, some concrete and a welder! we can build upwards!, is like magic!)
Gosh, why didn't they think of that?
Every difficult engineering or social problem can be solved by the clever one-line idea of some dude on the internet.