this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Japan will start releasing treated and diluted radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean as early as Thursday — a controversial step that the government says is essential for the decades of work needed to shut down the facility that had reactor meltdowns 12 years ago.

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[–] Enigma@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. Holy shit, it’s been 12 years already? 2010-2020 was like a fever dream.

  2. What are the alternatives?

[–] ZapBeebz_@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly, not much in the way of alternatives. Tritium is very, very difficult to remove from water. Basically the only option, aside from discharge, is to store it in tanks and wait for enough half lives to elapse that the tritium effectively just decays away on its own. The half life of tritium is just over 12 years, so that'll still be a while longer, and that gets expensive (in terms of both storage costs and space costs). However, tritium is not particularly dangerous, especially at low concentrations.

As usual with radioactive liquids, dilution is the solution. And Japan has diluted this liquid to 1500Bq/liter, far short of their internal legal limit of 60,000Bq/liter, and even far below the WHO limit of 10,000Bq/liter.

[–] mrbubblesort@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The half life of tritium is just over 12 years, so that’ll still be a while longer

It's been 12 years, 5 months, how much longer are we talking about?

[–] Ryumast3r@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Usually to consider radioactive sources "gone" you have to wait at least 5 half lives (which makes it 99.875% gone), which would be 60 years in this case.

[–] ZapBeebz_@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Honestly, that's probably why they're getting ready to discharge the tritiated liquid now.

[–] steltek@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago

12 years? Holy shit that's insanely fast. Can you even go near that stuff, nevermind release it into the ocean?

[–] joe@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

As the saying goes: The solution to pollution is dilution.

[–] Cleverdawny@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Good! About damn time. Tritium isn't dangerous when diluted in the ocean, which contains 4.5 BILLION TONS of uranium naturally.

[–] MossBear@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have they considered the kaiju implications of this?

[–] Eonandahalf@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think… maybe Japan wants one ?

[–] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

They'd have a national crisis to justify country-wide emergency production of giant robots...

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

In WWII the US processed Ocean water to get the same radioactive components, and now Japan wants to put them back.

[–] Nunya@lemdro.id 2 points 1 year ago

This seems like Godzilla's origin story. Should be fun.