Japan has been given the okay by UN to dump radioactive waste water into the ocean, but nearby countries are protesting that its unsafe. Is it unsafe? Is it safe?
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It’s safe. The radioactivity comes from trace amounts of tritium, which is an isotope (variant) of hydrogen (normally a proton and an electron) that has two additional neutrons attached, making it significantly heavier than normal hydrogen and more unstable. It has a half life of about 12 years, and when it breaks down it emits beta radiation, which can (in large amounts) be harmful to humans.
However, the amount that is produced by tritium under normal conditions is small. Even pure tritium in small amounts is safe to have around humans (you may have seen the little keychain lights that hunters use: those are powered by tritium, and use a phosphorous coating to turn the radiation into light).
And the amounts being discussed here are miniscule. The maximum exposure is on the order of a million times less radiation than the legal limit for radiation workers (which is in itself a very conservative limit, you can absorb the legal limit by flying frequently, since planes are exposed to more space radiation than ground vehicles).
The people who are really upset about this are either cynically trying to mislead the public to achieve some other goal, or are morons who have absolutely no grasp on what’s happening.
Some types of radiological release are extremely serious (see the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon development site for a dire non-Chernobyl example). But lots of them are almost comically benign, and this is one of those. If you consumed enough of the tritium-laced water to hurt yourself, you’d be dead uncountable times over from the salt content alone.
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