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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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla)
From the wiki…***.”Godzilla is a prehistoric reptilian monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation.”***
Obviously unsafe! lol
The top answer nails it but I wanted to add something.
If Japan’s radioactive emissions is all there is then there is absolutely no danger.
But, if we made the limit of what was allowed based on what was ok health wise, everyone would immediately scoot up their emission levels to the new (higher) minimum and then we really would start facing dangerous situations.
So, from a policy standpoint, it makes sense to be concerned, but it is currently a policy issue more than an immediate health issue.
Well, this is more political than environmental/scientific. WTO allowed it to do so because we allowed it. If it were Russia or China with the exactly same contaminated water, can you imagine the reactions from the WTO and its members?
Can we please make a distinction between “radioactive waste” and “nuclear process water”?
Not sure which they are dumping but I’m guessing it’s process water and that’s vastly different
Are they TRYING to create RL Godzilla?!
It ain’t safe. Nuclear energy ain’t safe. There will always be mistakes. And with private companies involved in PowerGen then the profit motive will always cause corners to be cut.
Fukushima was supposed to be safe. It was designed to withstand earthquake and tsunami but human beings designed it. You can’t anticipate everything. Nobody considered placement of the auxiliary power units.
Next designs will handle the problems Fukushima encountered and the next incident will be caused by something else. But there WILL be the next incident. And the one after that.
They have asked for permission to release some radioactive waste into the sea. Because their shareholders are squeaking about the on-going cost.
They’ve been collecting the water in tanks ever since the disaster and it must be very expensive. They may even have run out of room for more tanks by now but financial pressure doesn’t make the waste less toxic.
Gravity will settle the radioactive particles out of the water being released and it will eventually concentrate on the sea floor. Right there where the fish live. In hundreds of years everyone will have forgotten Fukushima and wonder why you get cancer from eating sea life caught offshore.
Fanboys brigade threads like this one and do their tiresome whatabout fossil fuels bs. It is true that fossil fuels contribute negatively to the planet, but when a coal-powered power station has an issue you don’t need to evacuate a thirty-mile area for ever.
The truth is that nuclear is not safe. When it goes wrong it produces problems that will linger for a thousand generations.
Change it to China instead of Japan and the world goes batshit crazy, I’ve always said it, the UN is a joke.
It is safe
Although the water is radioactive it is mainly hydrogen isotopes that does not gamma radiate and in so low concentrations that it fade into the natural background radiation.
But as always people tend to loose their shit when somebody say radiation.
It’s not ‘unsafe’, per se — such a release is not permitted until the water is assessed and declared safe, and the water is filtered and diluted to meet safety standards. Even then, the release is done in small volumes, through costal pipelines.
However, the precise effects of a *large-volume* release, such as the million gallons of water being used to cool the Fukishima plant’s disabled-but-still-hot reactors, are harder to determine.
Some studies have shown that a number of marine species could suffer some form of DNA damage from the radionucleotides in the released cooling water, but most of those studies are entirely lab-based; because of concerns about human safety, there’s relatively little data on the external environmental effects of large-volume wastewater releases.
That makes fisheries nervous, particularly in a time when 10% of the planet’s population depend on fisheries for their livelihood — an environmental contamination has the potential to affect the food-chain, causing cancers, fertility problems, and serious damage to the marine species we rely on for food security.
So, the release of wastewater itself isn’t necessarily a problem; it’s the *volume* of the release, and the unpredictable consequences, that are causing concern.
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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