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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“Radioactivity” is one of those fun words in society.
Few fully understand and can appreciate what it does, what is hazardous, etc. Flip side, there is a nearly unlimited pool of “experts” who will tell you how “dangerous” it is.
The Dunning–Kruger effect here is very real (people who are not experts in radiation are also very vocal about the dangers it poses??).
Nearly everything is radioactive, the question is “HOW” radioactive.
You have a group of people who have no issues with granite countertops but will rant and rant about “radioactivity” and the dangers “radiation” presents?
[https://www.epa.gov/radiation/granite-countertops-and-radiation#:~:text=Radon%20released%20from%20granite%20building,of%20beta%20and%20gamma%20radiation](https://www.epa.gov/radiation/granite-countertops-and-radiation#:~:text=Radon%20released%20from%20granite%20building,of%20beta%20and%20gamma%20radiation).
Take a look at any discussions around opening a new nuclear power plant and see for yourself.
But to address your questions, yes the water being dumped is radioactive, but many things are. Does dumping a “known quantity” of radioactive water into an ocean which also contains radioactive components “damage” things
An interesting article discussing this very topic and presenting details on how radioactive the ocean already is:
[https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/the-ocean-is-radioactive/](https://schmidtocean.org/cruise-log-post/the-ocean-is-radioactive/)
““The ocean is quite radioactive, much more so than rivers,””
It’s so safe you could drink it (assuming you sterilised it, filtered it, deslinated it etc). The concentration of tritium in the water is 190 Bq/m^3. The committed effective dose of tritium is something like 2 x 10^-10 Sv/Bq. So if you drank a pint of it you’d get a dose of 2 nanosieverts, which is about 30 seconds of background radiation.
It’s a political tool to discredit Japan while China plans to invade Taiwan even though they did the same but worse in the past.
It’s perfectly safe. This probably doesn’t even move the needle given how big the ocean is and that stuff are already naturally radioactive
It seems other countries don’t even treat their radiated water as good as the water in Fukushima and it also gets dumped.
Firstly, the amount of water being drained into the ocean per year has the same amount of Tritium (22TBq) as the amount of Tritium that was being added when the plant was operating. (Of note, the two countries complaining about this (China and South Korea) add 52TBq (Fuqing plant in China) and 50TBq (Kori plant in South Korea) annually), which is well within the limits deemed safe. For comparison, the UK Heysham nuclear power plant releases 1,300TBq of Tritium annually, and has been doing so for the last 40 years.
Secondly, for 12.7 years (incidentally, the half-life of Tritium is 12.3 years, which also reduced the amount of Tritium by half), the water has been ‘cleaned’ of actual dangerous isotopes, such as Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, and what will be released is only Tritium. You might ask why they cannot strain the Tritium out as well using the ALPS system, and that is because Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, and is too small to be filtered by that system. In truth, there may be some isotopes of helium there as well, but anything larger is large enough to be caught by the filtering.
Another interesting fact is that our own atmosphere generates Tritium to the amount of 50,000 to 70,000 TBq annually, which dwarfs the 22TBq being released into the ocean.
Thirdly, the Pacific Ocean is already radioactive, and not just due to the atomic tests in the 1950s. The Pacific contains ~3,000,000TBq of Tritium on its own, and that’s not even the highest amount of isotopes in there, with a potassium isotope reaching 7,400,000,000TBq (the potassium is a result of the seaweed).
You might be wondering what I mean by TBq. That stands for tera becquerel. A becquerel is a unit of measurement for radioactivity, and I used tera because it made more sense to use tera than anything else based of the amount released at Fukushima. If you want to know what the actual amount is, the amount to be released annually is 22,000,000,000,000 Becquerel, which seems like a lot, but which ends up being around 0.06g. This is in comparison to the naturally occurring Tritium being generated annually, which is around 150 to 200g.
As for, ‘is it safe?’, yes. I would have no concerns about swimming in that area.
The amount of radioactivity being sent into the Pacific Ocean in total after they’re done (in 30 years) is literally less than a drop in a bucket, and the amount they’re sending into the ocean annually isn’t even registerable compared to what is already there, added elsewhere and created naturally. It’s kinda like that saying, “the difference between a million and a billion is around a billion.” The radioactivity of the ocean before releasing the water and after is basically no different.
Note: I am NOT suggesting that we have a free for all and dump radioactive stuff in the ocean willy-nilly. I’m simply pointing out that this instance is kind of difficult to even register as anything but a political opportunity for some countries to register complaints.
I know this isn’t exactly explaining like you’re five, but I hope it is still very understandable and interesting.
Given that I read somewhere else today that China is releasing 5x the concentration off their coast then I think that Japan doing it is a drop in the ocean.
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.
I have only anecdotal experience about this but it may be helpful to share.
Growing up my family lived in a medium sized suburban area right around a lake and not far from a very large city center in the US. The lake is about 50 square miles and we were only 2 minutes away from the waterfront. The entire lake is man made and is used as a heatsink for a local nuclear plant. Thus this water is referred to as “nuclear waste”.
We swam in that water for a great many summer days and the lake is overall very popular, with waterfront property being several million USD depending on which part of the lake. We always joked that we’d eventually find a two-headed catfish but in all reality, that “waste” water has negligible if any radiation left in it. I think the only ‘significant’ byproduct of using it to cool the reactors was that the lake is just a small percentage of a degree warmer than it would be otherwise.
Source: I was a nuclear reactor operator on a U.S. Navy fast attack submarine.
Yes, it is very safe. Water doesn’t really retain radiation/contamination the way solid material does, and the ocean is **very** big. Based on my training, this water will be essentially “clean” about 24 hours after discharge.
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