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 fine. The ocean is really big, water is an excellent insulator for radiation, and it’s not *that* radioactive.
This doesn’t even weigh on the scales of things we’re doing that are destroying the ocean. Rising temperature and increasing amounts of acidity are infinitely worse.
The plan is for TEPCO to treat, filter, and dilute the wastewater from the Fukushima reactor in small amounts over the next 30 years, so that the actual amount of radiation released at a time is minimal and well below accepted safety standards. The *plan* is safe.
The problem is that TEPCO doesn’t have the best record of transparency, and some people are concerned that the water that actually gets released may not meet the standards set in the plan. There’s also China and NK being alarmist just for the sake of being provocative/difficult/causing trouble with a western-aligned nation.
Your bones are more radioactive than the water that is being released into the ocean by Japan. Ripping out the skeletons of thousands of people and dumping those into the ocean might be something that some people would find concerning, but that concern wouldn’t be over a radioactive hazard.
The reason that other countries are “concerned” is because that “concern” is a valid reason for restricting Japanese exports under the treaties that establish the World Trade Organization.
Any country that is a member of the WTO (which is basically every country that matters) has to agree not to arbitrarily impose tariffs or other import restrictions on goods from other countries. There are exceptions to that, one of which is because goods from another country pose a health or safety risk.
The *vast* majority of environmental or health complaints that countries make against one another in the modern world have no basis in reality, but are an attempt to justify an otherwise arbitrary tariff or import restriction that is being placed on the goods of the complained about country.
The current complaints about Japan fall into this category – the countries complaining about Japan are using those complaints as a justification to ban Japanese fish – not fish from “contaminated” waters, but all fish that originate from Japanese owned fishing vessels, or which were processed in a Japanese owned plant.
Japan is a major exporter of fish to other East Asian countries, and the purpose of these complaints is to benefit the fishing industries in the countries imposing the bans at the expense of the Japanese fishing industry.
It’s fine – water cooled reactors routinely discharge tritium in effluent produced in their everyday operation. Tepco has set a limit of 22 trillion becquerels per year from this scheme which is about a quarter of discharges from individual power plants in South Korea and China – and not even a rounding error for discharges from the reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague in France:
[https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/06-03-09.html](https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/06-03-09.html)
It’s a lot of water with a little radiation in the grand scheme of things. It is also mostly tritium (literally activated hydrogen as a part of water), a low level beta emitter with a half life of 12 years roughly. Furthermore it has a biological half life much less, because you expel and replace water. Any ingested or absorbed tritium is gone after like 12-60 days. The levels are below what we consider to cause a measurable impact, although we recognize the impact is not zero. I would say any number of plants or factories along that coast have done more environmental harm in the past year than this will do. Like a toilet paper factories allowable monthly emissions are probably projected to cause more harm overall to the environment. Radioactive releases due to man made commercial radiation are kept at like 1/1000000 of what is considered needed to cause measurable harm. This release would be above that, but below what a sewage plant or coal plant is allowed to release yearly (as they are not considered making the radiation, just concentrating it…).
Terrible idea, this is how godzilla starts. But in seriousness, unless it’s raw waste material, and stored properly, it should be fine. I was all for shooting it to space as well.
The waste water has been treated enough that it is considered safe as the content of radioactive material is very low. However a lot of the opposition comes from fishermen who rightfully believe this will impact their livelihoods because your average lay person isn’t adequately informed by proper scientific sources. Already there’s been a media frenzy about “radioactive fish” and it probably won’t go away.
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It is inherently a human-based concept as to whether something should be considered safe or not safe. Complete safeness does not exist. In this case you’re trying to compare Japan dumping radioactive waste water, with implied alternatives. What happens if Japan doesn’t dump the water? It’s not like there’s some alternative where the water simply becomes non-radioactive on its own.
So in the end the question is about who should have to deal with the effects from these decisions, and some of these decisions were made a long time ago (i.e. the decision that caused Japan to have nuclear / radioactive waste in the first place). It’s not so much a safety question as it is a morals/ethics/values question at that point – I think most people can agree that individual people should have to deal with the consequences of their actions, but this is somewhat about the consequences of *other people’s* actions.
Just as a little fun fact, burning coal for power releases more radiation into the environment than using a nuclear plant for power.
Coal fly ash is actually pretty radioactive. It’s a hazardous material for many reasons.
To answer your question specifically, the radiation levels are very low, *and* water is an incredible radiation shield. There’s practically no danger.
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