Tests of seawater near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant have not detected any radioactivity, the environment ministry said on Sunday (Aug 27), days after authorities began discharging into the sea treated water used to cool damaged reactors.
Japan started releasing water from the wrecked Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, sparking protests within Japan and neighbouring countries, in particular China, which banned aquatic product imports from Japan.
Japan and scientific organisations say the water is safe after being filtered to remove most radioactive elements except for tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
As totally expected.
I’m no scientist, but even I know the basics of how it works. And then there’s the actual scientists…
I talk about it here briefly
It is safe, but ‘radio active water release’ sells headlines
Fuck off with your Japanese cocksucking behavior.
Wat
I’m just as confused as you are. That’s not what I wrote.
Frick. I’m a moron. I am so sorry, I replied to the wrong comment.
Haha all good
Dude read too much Chinese propaganda
Removed by mod
Do you have any evidence to go against the tests in the article or are you just rambling?
Read my update. Evidence? Yes, it is radioactive waste they don’t want anywhere on their own soil. That should tell you enough.
…so you don’t have evidence.
They actually looked into other methods, such as evaporation and it’s simply not as safe as this method.
Uh huh. You are aware that pretty much everything has radioactivity in it? And that there are serious regulations on the limits of those due to it generally being a bad thing. Those regulations determining safe limits for it. As in, it is safe. As in, no harm is done. When you stay within those limits, you’re fine. Just like with every single thing regarding chemicals and waste, and pretty much anything. That is why the regulations exist in the first place.
Well it’s been filtered for all radioactive material except tritium and is well below the level of concentration the UN allows for drinking water. They are not detecting any radiation currently and and releasing the water very slowly over 30 years. Did you just not read the article or what?
You do realize that the ocean has been full of radioactive material for billions of years, right? Uranium oxide is water-soluble. You can literally pull uranium out of ocean water if you know the right chemistry.
Hell, you’re currently being exposed to ionizing radiation right this second. So am I, so is every one. Go outside, pick up a handful of dirt and there will be trace amounts of uranium, and likely some thorium. Have a radon detector in your basement? That’s radioactive, and comes from the natural decay of uranium.
Do you drink well water? Water-soluble oxides of uranium. Which is why damp basements accumulate radon.
The detected levels of radiation in this discharge water are actually lower than standard background radiation from all the uranium that’s literally everywhere.
Then why dont I have superpowers yet
Little doses of radiation don’t lead to superpowers, you need a really big dose. And by superpowers I mean cancer.
All water gives off some levels of radiation. Every water drop you’ve ever drank has.
The levels are very low.
This is no exception.
Please stop posting anti-nuclear nonsense.
Did it occur to you that most things in nature have radioactive isotopes and that for nuclear reactors we look for the most radioactive bunch, refine them to remove the least radioactive bits and then use them in reactors?
If you reverse that process (well, not really a reversal as you now have different atoms) and re-dillute stuff in nature in a sensible way, you’re not going to get anything that is substantially above ambient levels. The oceans are tremendously big and the waste water is already quite treated. One is not going to notice a change in relative terms anywhere on earth unless high-precision equipment is used.
This is not a very-scientifically-accurate comment, but if it was you would not understand so lets keep it like this.
I don’t say this lightly: you are an insufferable moron.
Lmfao.
There is naturally radioactive elements dissolved in water and it doesn’t really hurt us. We’re bathed in radioactivity all day every day and it doesn’t really hurt us. Releasing this water will effectively change nothing. There’s a lot of water in the ocean and it’s already naturally dissolved radioactive elements, like uranium and other things. How is a tiny bit more going to cause harm?
Lol. K.
Wanna bet most people making a scene out of it don’t even use sunscreen?
The sun pumps out some amazing stuff. It happens to be the OG nuclear reactor.
Sunscreen doesn’t protect from gamma rays, does it? It’s not really fair to compare radioactivity with sunshine.
UV radiation is quite damaging (although part of the popular “summer tan” culture) on its own. However, we also receive higher energy photons (above UV: xray, gamma) as well as some energetic muons from the sun. You get a 4x of a daily dose of radiation if you grab a flight. Around that of an xray. All of which is mostly ignored by people.
You are correct that gamma ray radiation is by far the most damaging radiation. Beta and alpha radiation can be stopped by pieces of paper (or your skin), gamma radiation will go through your house, your car, your wife, hit a dna molecule in your hair follicle, and make that hair follicle permanently gray.
More interestingly, putting the “radioactive” seawater in perspective: tritium fizzles into some beta radiation, of 18kev energy. Assuming, magically, all this (beta radiation) energy was deposited perfectly into your DNA (nearly impossible because it is beta radiation), resulting in maximal damage, in somewhere important and not the dead layer of your skin, doing a tiny calculation we can compute this damage to be that of a photon of 0.07nm wavelength (18 kev), of similar energy used in simple xray imaging (CT imaging uses 5x higher energy). With 10 becquerels / liter, 100 liters of water surrounding you, could inflict a horrible dose of 24 (hours) * 3600 (sec / hour) * 10 x 100 x 18 kev * 1.60218e-16 (Joule / kev) / 70 (kilograms per human) = 3.55958619e-9 Sv in a day
That is a terrifying amount of 3.6 nSv. Almost close to 1/20 that of a banana you eat (I am not joking, just smiling heavily).
Fun facts: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
The fact that people talk about radioactivity in this news, and chinese being angry and the world going apeshit is… unfathomable.
The elites dont want you to know this but the Godzillas in the ocean are free you can take them home I have 458 Godzillas
On one hand it’s weird how people are so upset about this, on the other these morons were talking about radioactive fallout hitting the US right after the tsunami hit. They aren’t the brightest bulbs.
Yeah it mostly seems reactionary nonsense.
Like you ca. swim at the top of a pool in a tractor coolant tank. Water is very cool at diffusing radioactivity (if that’s the right term, it’s probably not).
Heck we have legit crashed nuclear subs at the bottom of the ocean, and places we have just straight dumped waste much more potent than this water.
It’s only at 4.3 rads. It’s not ideal, but it’s okay.
Take some Rad-Way from time to time.
The solution to pollution is dilution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because no human activity could ever have effects that accumulate at the macro scale. All that plastic has been successfully diluted and SO2, CO, CFCs and CO2 are all harmless once released.
(I mean, we’re talking about radioactive water from one nuclear power plant. I’m pretty sure the adage applies in this case.)
Did they test the sea floor? Some of it sinks. The concern isn’t radioactive seawater, it’s seabed accumulation working its way into the food chain
The sea floor will have a lot of thorium and uranium, because every inch of the ocean floor does. This is because uranium oxide is water-soluble, and billions of years of erosion have led to the oceans being full of the stuff.
Thorium does not have a natural water-soluble oxide, but can end up in suspension, to participate out to the ocean floor.
Now, we’re not actually talking about uranium or thorium in this water discharge, instead we’re talking about deuterium and tritium, both of with can naturally be found in seawater, but natural tritium is vanishingly rare. It’s usually created via cosmic ray, and has a half life of 12 years.
Anyway, the point is, all this radioactive material, both natural, and discharge, will be so diluted that it’s not an issue.
