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

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

#71

Post by adhesive_wombat »

pvaldes wrote: post #47
ramchip wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 15 grams of tritium in total, so it won't generate much helium. Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... [Q6]

Very interesting, thanks. Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?

Tritiated water isn't particularly bioaccumulative: chemically, it's water and acts like it. The body doesn't preferentially retain tritium compared to normally hydrogen, so it doesn't concentrate in tissues like, say, dioxins or mercury. It can be incorporated into tissue, but not preferentially to normal hydrogen.

Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.

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

#72

Post by vixen99 »

janmalec wrote: post #10
jay_kyburz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matt…

At least shades of https://youtu.be/sXJ8tKRlW3E perhaps.

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

#73

Post by Aeolun »

Stevvo wrote: post #36

The quantity of Tritium in the water of concern is 760 TBq. This is not a huge amount; if the accident had not occurred the plant would have discharged more than that amount into the ocean over the years since during its normal operation.

15 grammes of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water

Sounds a lot better than

760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.

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

#74

Post by perihelions »

ben_w wrote: post #43
pvaldes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not use it as a valuable source of the very expensive and non renewable Helium? It seems that they are trowing money to the sea after paying yet for storing it for the last 11 years.

> Then why not use it as a valuable source of the very expensive and non renewable Helium? Same reason we don’t use nuclear reactors to turn lead into gold, even though we can: it’s far more expensive than it’s worth.

That's actually what we do, in this case: nuclear reactor-derived tritium is the *sole* source of helium-3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production

It's *ten* times more expensive than gold!

(If I remember correctly, medical ³He MRI's are done on a closed rebreather -- they literally want to recycle your lung air, it's that valuable).

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

#75

Post by littlestymaar »

Reason077 wrote: post #27
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 naturally" Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!

And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).

This is a complete non-issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fission

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

#76

Post by LightG »

junon wrote: post #31
top_sigrid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear waterwaste != nuclear waste. Water cannot be radioactive, and in fact water is a fantastic insulator for radiation. The water had contaminates in it and the argument is whether or not the current level of contaminates is safe. The article's title makes it sound like they're just going to dump the Elephant Foot directly into the pacific. It's clearly a sensationalistic anti-nuclear title edit.

I invite you to take a swim in it.

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

#77

Post by littlestymaar »

From the article

> Japan’s plans to dump just over 1 million tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean

But it omits to say that this is actually extraordinarily diluted: we're talking about around 20 grams of pure tritiated water.

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

#79

Post by credit_guy »

Aeolun wrote: post #70
ceejayoz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tritium vial on my keychain. 5 mm of air is sufficient to block it. It’s pretty harmless stuff in the level of dilution being proposed.

I mean, yes. But there’s no 5mm of air between tritium you drink and your stomach.

You're probably thinking of getting a speck of a radioactive metal (like Uranium or Plutonium) in your lungs. That gets stuck there, the body has no mechanisms to eliminate it, and it will keep emitting gamma rays all your life.

Tritium is very different. It is an isotope of Hydrogen, and a water molecule containing one atom of Tritium is fairly indistinguishable from any other water molecule. The most important thing is that it has no reason to stick to any other Tritium from that glass that you drank. It will spread throughout your body. Like all other water molecules, it will probably be out of your body in a mater of days. Tritium's half life is 12 years, so the vast, super vast majority of all the Tritium you'd drink with that glass of water will be long gone before it has a chance to decay.

But even if some of these atoms decay, their decay is a beta particle (an electron, and if you really care one antineutrino as well, although that antineutrino will probably travel through a few galaxies before it interacts with anything). The beta particle is not very damaging (compare that with the gamma rays emitted by Plutonium). For sure a single one is not damaging at all. Now, in contrast with the speck of the radioactive metal above, this beta particle will not be followed by others like it, because the Tritium that emitted it doesn't have any other Tritiums next to it.

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

#80

Post by Someone »

dikei wrote: post #15

The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues: it's one of the cleanest country I've ever seen, so I'm willing to trust them if they say the waste water dumping plan is safe.

All over half a century ago, but there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of..., cases where the Japanese government didn’t come out well (e.g. Itai-Itai disease was known in 1912, but according to Wikipedia, “Medical tests started in the 1940s and 1950s”, and for Minamata disease “The Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectural governments conducted a joint survey in late 1960 and early 1961 into the level of mercury in the hair of people living around the Shiranui Sea. The results confirmed that organic mercury had spread all around the inland sea and that people were still being poisoned by contaminated fish. Hundreds of people were discovered to have levels greater than 50 ppm of mercury in their hair, the level at which people are likely to experience nerve damage. The highest result recorded was that of a woman from Goshonoura island who had 920 ppm in her sample.

The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”

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