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 as safe as anything in life, for a couple of key reasons:
* Compared to the volume of water they’ll be discharging, the ocean is *absolutely freaking massive*. Like, the difference in scale is utterly absurd. It’s like putting a drop of food dye into the volume of several olympic swimming pools.
* The water has been heavily processed to remove almost all of the radioactive isotopes from it. About the only thing they can’t readily remove is tritium – basically hydrogen atoms with a couple extra neutrons.
* Because extra neutrons don’t change the charge of an atom, they’ don’t really affect its *chemical* properties, so those ^(3)H atoms have bonded with oxygen to become part of water molecules – can’t *really* separate them without, idk, electrolysis and a bunch of gas centrifuging or something.
* Tritium does eventually release its extra neutrons, and those free neutrons bouncing around *are* ionizing radiation. But the amount and energy of the radiation is pretty low. It’s *beta* radiation –
* outside you, it can’t even penetrate your skin (although large amounts of exposure in a short time could give you the equivalent of a sunburn).
* if it gets inside you *in large amounts* it can increase your overall cancer risk, but it would take quite a lot of concentrated tritiated water to actually cause harm.
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