Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sept. 24, the Fisheries Agency said.
No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.
Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.
The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.
ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.
i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.
I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can't find it.
While I can't speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it's very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it's TREATED water that's being released. That means they have a treatment system (there's a fucking rabbit hole and half...) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone 'yolo pump the water into the ocean'.
I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should've been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.
I don’t understand why people think concentrating it and keeping large quantities on-site is preferable to heavily diluting and releasing it. A giant vat of radioactive water sounds like another disaster waiting to happen.
Yeah they talk about nuclear waste and how it needs to be stored for so long, without recognizing that fossil fuels spew their waste, including radiation, directly into the atmosphere, where it is causing apocalyptic global warming. Having it in barrels is actually a big plus.
I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.
I asked ppl there "is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?" And most of them were like "it's not a common occurrence but it's not inherently dangerous and it's not that big of a deal"
To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.
Cs-137 and other fission and activation products can be largely removed by treatment. H-3 is a bit trickier since it literally is part of the water. Luckily it's a fairly weak beta emitter with a relatively short half life so causes very, very little long term harm.
All that other stuff was filtered out, but the tritium is near impossible to separate, because it is chemically identical to the hydrogen in normal water.
As for caesium, there are still detectable amounts of Cs-137 in most of the word from the thousands of atomic bomb tests. It's half life is just 30 years, but it will still be detectable for a hundred years or so because of the huge amount we released.
The ocean is 1.335 × 10^21 litres. That number is stupid big. There are 7.5 × 10^18 grains of sand on Earth. If every person in Japan flushed a litre of the reactor water down their toilet, it would be diluted to nothing in no time at all.
People have been far more concerned about the efficacy of the ALPS system at extracting other contaminants than they are about tritium contamination. The ALPS system is unproven and the wastewater they're releasing would be pretty toxic as far as other radioactive isotopes is concerned if the ALPS system isn't doing it's job perfectly.
Sample size is critical to get a realistic result of the tritium toxicity. In this case, they sampled only 64 fish! That would not yield a statistically significant result!
Samples of local fish have been collected at two points within a 5-km radius of the discharge outlet, except during rough weather conditions, with the agency announcing its analysis results on an almost daily basis since Aug. 26.
No tritium was detected in 64 fish, which included flounder and six other species, collected since Aug. 8.
I mean, you are correct, it was not two fish. But is 64 fish some sort of good sample size?
Follow up question: does this type of thing accumulate in small fish and then concentrate in larger and larger fish?
For people genuinely interested in the nuclear industry, only listening to the cheerleaders and Dunning-Kruger advocates is a bad idea.
Go look at nuclear from extraction of materials, to refining of materials, plant risks and histories of disasters, waste and waste management issues,extraction. (ie There are superfunds sites in Washington state still being cleaned up from WWII bombing materials exteaction.)
Pro nuke shills normally like to just cherry pick a slice of the nuclear energy life cycle to fit confirmation bias and or intentionally do it in bad faith.
Yes Nuclear has a LOT of positive potential, but it's also got significantly higher risks (many magnitudes larger) as the history of disasters, exteaction, and waste management will show you.
This article like a lot of the comments are just pro nuke propaganda. None of these guys have empirical studies on the propagation rate of contamination through the food web for constant regular radioactive dumping. They don't have exhaustive studies on all the vectors by which the contaminates enter the food chain. There has not been nearly enough time since they started dumping to make the assertions being made here, and NO--64 fish is not a large enough sample size.... and on and on.
What you're reading here is wishful thinking and either inentional lies, or people who think they know more than they do demonstrating Dunning-Kruger.
They're claiming that some "exteaction" [sic] was done improperly during World War II when getting bomb material, and made a mess, and that that should be factored into the environmental effects of modern nuclear power.
That's a dumb argument.
Also telling people to go look it up, is not stating facts.
A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.
Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.
The banana's potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it's not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who's amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.