Protesters gathered in the capital of South Korea on Saturday to demand that the government take steps to avoid what they fear is a looming disaster from Japan's release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Dumping is illegal where I live, you’ll get a fine ;)
Jokes aside, does anyone with a chemistry/physics background know of a technical solution/alternative to dumping? I suspect Japan would not dump nuclear waste in their domestic waters if they could avoid it.
Idk why the downvotes, I’m actually curious about this. Do you know how the waste is treated? I have a some education in radioactive materials and it doesn’t seem like an easy problem to solve.
If you have some “education about radioactive materials” you’d know that the half-life of tritium is 12.5years and that it is a beta emitter. This type of radiation isn’t harmful unless ingested. You would also know that the water has been diluted to safe levels before being released in the ocean, and even after that dilution, it will also not be released all at once, further reducing the chance of re-concentration and making radiation poisoning impossible. Finally since this is tritium we are talking about it, it isn’t a bio-accumlator and if you did drink too much tritated water, the treatment would be to drink an increased amount of tap water.
Since you are still just “asking questions,” about how Tritrated water is “treated” it kind of sounds like you don’t actually know about radioactive materials at all otherwise you would know about H3, i.e. tritium and wouldn’t be concerned about “treatment” only the concentration of the released water.
The radioactive component is mostly tritium. As long as they get almost all of the heavy radioactive elements, the hydrogen isotopes are basically harmless in the quantities we’re talking about here. The ocean is a very, very big place.
Dumping is illegal where I live, you’ll get a fine ;)
Jokes aside, does anyone with a chemistry/physics background know of a technical solution/alternative to dumping? I suspect Japan would not dump nuclear waste in their domestic waters if they could avoid it.
They have treated the waste water, so it isn’t dumping. The water is well below the recommended parameters for releasing water.
There is nothing wrong with this. People are just freaking out because its “nuclear waste”, which causes people to be irrational.
Decades and decades of fossil fuel company propaganda against nuclear is a helluva drug
Idk why the downvotes, I’m actually curious about this. Do you know how the waste is treated? I have a some education in radioactive materials and it doesn’t seem like an easy problem to solve.
If you have some “education about radioactive materials” you’d know that the half-life of tritium is 12.5years and that it is a beta emitter. This type of radiation isn’t harmful unless ingested. You would also know that the water has been diluted to safe levels before being released in the ocean, and even after that dilution, it will also not be released all at once, further reducing the chance of re-concentration and making radiation poisoning impossible. Finally since this is tritium we are talking about it, it isn’t a bio-accumlator and if you did drink too much tritated water, the treatment would be to drink an increased amount of tap water.
Since you are still just “asking questions,” about how Tritrated water is “treated” it kind of sounds like you don’t actually know about radioactive materials at all otherwise you would know about H3, i.e. tritium and wouldn’t be concerned about “treatment” only the concentration of the released water.
So nasty!
The radioactive component is mostly tritium. As long as they get almost all of the heavy radioactive elements, the hydrogen isotopes are basically harmless in the quantities we’re talking about here. The ocean is a very, very big place.