Anxious about Japan’s impending release of treated nuclear wastewater from the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant, hundreds of South Koreans marched in their capital Saturday.
Good, it's about time. Tritiated water just isn't dangerous. The ocean naturally contains billions of tons of URANIUM. A few kilograms of short lived tritium isn't going to matter at all.
Better yet, the water they're releasing has less tritium in it than average ocean water, so releasing it will actually be an improvement for the ocean (190 vs avg of 500 of some unit)
Yep. Best estimate I have seen is 4.5 billion tons of uranium. Course, most of the natural radioactivity of our ocean is from potassium, actually. But either way, natural levels of radioactivity will not change.
This is what I’ve heard too. It’s really no big deal. Concerned local fishermen are probably just not introduced to the physics of this. In general, humans tend to worry a bit more about radioactivity than necessary. This in particular will be diluted into basically nothing. The only real problem is the PR work that lies ahead for them. In practice, their people should probably be more concerned about constantly dying early from pollution and protest more about that.
Though with the Tomb, this passage from Wikipedia should be kept in mind:
However, the soil around the dome was found to be more contaminated than its contents, so a breach could not increase the radiation levels by any means. Because the cleaning operation in the 1970s only removed an estimated 0.8 percent of the total transuranic waste in the Enewetak atoll, the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.
This only makes the whole thing more fucked up, but at least the tomb itself isn't quite as bad as it sounded when I started reading up about it. By virtue of everything else being much worse. Fuck. I think that's enough internet for today. :'(
Sadly for your version but very good for the actual release, the radioactivity of this is so incredibly irrelevant compared to the freaking oceans, Godzilla would be completely unable to even realize someone had done this.
I'd still watch that movie. Start off by tuning in to the headlines from Exposition News Network to set up the plot, follow with ominous music while workers do industrial things in the rain. When the time is right, release valves open and alarm bells start ringing. Water floods out and mixes into the ocean where it (and the camera view) are swept away by powerful underwater currents.
Cut to an anonymous island in the Pacific where a dragonfly is zipping around doing dragonfly stuff. Give it a little more screentime and then a lizard explodes into the frame to snatch it out of the air. After its hard-earned meal, the lizard heads down to the waterline to swim/drink/scope out some hot single lizard babes in their area or whatever they do. Ominous music returns in time for the fed and hydrated lizard to sneak off for a nap.
The rest of the movie is just a wordless lizard documentary where we follow it around through a few days in its perfectly ordinary life.