Japan says no radioactivity found in Fukushima fish, Kyodo reports
Japan says no radioactivity found in Fukushima fish, Kyodo reports
www.reuters.com
Japan says no radioactivity found in Fukushima fish, Kyodo reports
Japan's fisheries agency said on Saturday fish tested in waters around the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant did not contain detectable levels of the radioactive isotope tritium, Kyodo news service reported.
I work with radiation. Radiation is hard for lay people to understand, and they are all afraid of it.
The technical language in this article is not helpful for lay people, but it is for me.
You get a much larger dose of a much worse kind of radiation exposure by eating a banana than drinking a liter of this seawater.
And things like Brazil nuts, your basement, living at altitude or near certain kinds of rocks, flying, smoke detectors, or dental X-rays are much, much worse.
Not to mention higher dose medical procedures (CT, PET, SPECT, and radiation therapy). Those, however, are borderline dangerous, but there's a trade-off. Your radiation therapy may lead to secondary cancer down the line, but your primary cancer is killing you right now.
These articles also need to mention that the actual experts -- the people who know what they're doing and understand this -- agree this is the best and safest course of action. I'm not that kind of person, but I know plenty of them. I assure you, they are very cautious.
Isn't the problem as much with the radiation itself as consuming radioactive elements that will stay in your body likely to the rest of your life and provide radiation from the inside?
Tritiated water mostly has a 12 day lifespan in your body, at max. Some of it may be used as tritium instead of normal hydrogen in putting things together, but it's not like other nasty radionuclides.
Thank you! I took ONE 100 level science class on radiation and every one almost always seem to be wrong in their understanding. Enough that I doubted everything I learned (for a while)
Thank you for this!
Ok but, people aren't talking about drinking the sea water, are they? It's about eating fish and sea vegetables that are living/growing in it. Do we know what the effect of eating these foods will be?
A fish will be consuming a lot more than a litre of water over its lifespan.
Edit: You could answer my question instead of downvoting me...
For tritiated water, it largely is. For other bioaccumulative radio-isotopes it's not. There's still potential for concerns. But I think this release is good.
All radioactive elements decay. Tritium has a half life of about 12½ years and it turns into ordinary hydrogen. If they keep releasing tritium at the same rate for a long time, it will reach a maximum concentration in about 25 years (or maybe less, depending on how accurate my fuzzy math is). Once it reaches that point, it will decay as fast as it's released.
It's also worth noting that if they want to release the tritium at a constant rate, they'll have to gradually increase the rate at which they release the contaminated water, because the tritium is already decaying in storage.