Japan announced it will start releasing radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean starting Thursday. The move has been condemned by a number of Pacific nations, including China. Wang Wenbin: “This is extremely selfish and irresponsible. … China strongly urges the Japanese side to rectify its wrongful decision and withdraw its plan to discharge nuclear-contaminated water into the sea.” Hong Kong and Macau said they will impose a ban on seafood imports from 10 Japanese prefectures. Opponents in South Korea and Japan have ramped up protests since the plan was approved last month by the international nuclear agency. This is a protester in Tokyo. Fumitaka Tsuzumi: “The nuclear disaster happened in Japan, and Japan should send a solid message to the world. But the government told the world that it’s safe without showing any scientific evidence. That’s really outrageous. In the future, the children will bear the burden and have health issues.”

Japan announced it will start releasing radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean starting Thursday. The move has been condemned by a number of Pacific nations, including China.

japan-cool

Also, I saw reddit libs downplaying it, coming up with excuses about low radioactivity, and why it’s not a bad thing, so they can go back to brunch. All because it’s Japan doing it, which can do no wrong. If it were China, they’d be frothing at the mouth. frothingfash Fucking clowns. They couldn’t care about what long-term accumulation would do to the environment, the safety of food, and public health. At this stage, anyone who supports these sort of crimes against public health deserve the absolute worst. stalin-gun-1

  • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately I have to side with (or at least humor) the reddit libs on this one. People are so propagandized against anything to do with nuclear power that it’s hard to judge whether their concerns are reasonable or fictional. Like, the way tritium is disposed of everywhere else is IIRC to more or less just dump it into the ocean (though obviously in a more controlled setting). Obviously state-level actors like China raising concerns adds credence but as far as I know, the IAEA are trustworthy as well. At any rate, I’m still not convinced without seeing actual numbers on eg how much tritiated water there is.

    All that said eh they could just build more storage tanks shrug-outta-hecks

    • cynesthesia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      All that said eh they could just build more storage tanks

      This is a bad option. Infinite containment for waste is worse than doing effective treatment and release.

      • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I mostly agree. In the hypothetical that there’s so much tritium that it’s unsafe to release, even diluted so much, though, I’m thinking about what could be done. Apparently there are ways to distill tritium out from water, and because there’s so little tritium relative to water, you could presumably store whatever was less in some tanks. Tritium’s half-life is 12-ish years and 8 half-lives is enough for it to be almost nothing, so whatever storage they make would be fine if it only lasted for a century.