Shouldn’t the world have a choice on this?
 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-water/japan-will-have-to-dump-radioactive-fukushima-water-into-pacific-minister-says-idUSKCN1VV0CC

Companies are required to have plans for chemical spills and other environmental disasters and cleanup, but shouldn’t this be left to world bodies to decide?

Unreal. Go figure !

While I question some of the details of why they need to do this, the reality is that "dilution is the solution". There is a lot of water in the oceans. While it sounds like a bad idea, adding this water will have no measurable adverse consequences. It's more of a political problem than a technical problem.

I am dubious that it will have no measurable consequences, as it is already measurable.

Tritium is not a big deal (12.3 years half life) but who knows what else is in the water.

Dumping it in the ocean should not be an option.

So how do you long term store vast amount of radioactive water?

...and Godzilla arose from the depths.....

NY dumped 80% of it's trash offshore, I believe through the mid 1990's. They didn't consult NJ (where it would wash up on the beaches), let alone the world.

I'm waiting for someone to remember, and figure out how to clean that mess up.

Beat me to it...

Mothra is King ;)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1568218514.jpg

I have a friend who was a nuclear physicist, wrote a book on radiation poisoning, and he keeps saying this fukushima is way overblown and there are enough naturally present radioactive material just in the san francisco bay sea water to make several nuclear bombs - if you could gather it easily. I'm not saying dumping that water is good, it instinctively sounds terrible (mostly because it may not dilute quickly and first affect specific regions and fish population via currents and land on our door step), but it may not make an iota of difference to natural ocean radiation levels once diluted overall. Guess it depends how they go about it, all at once, one place, etc... This topic could use input from an independent scientist that's neither working for Japanese power nor greenpeace. Maybe we got one here ?

Doing the math...there is about 2.97x10^21 lbs of water in the oceans. Fukushima claims to have about 1.1 million tons of water stored (2.2x10^9 lbs). That amount of water - while it sounds like a big number - is only .000000000000007407% of the amount of water in the oceans...

Even if it was highly contaminated, that percentage is so astoundingly low that you'd never see it. We can talk discharge rates, mixing ratios, etc. all day long but the reality is this idea isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.

I wouldn't worry about it.

You're not dubious - you're just bad at math. ;)

I did not do any math at all.

It is already measurable on the west coast of the USA. They have been discharging radioactive water since the day it happened.

The Cesium and Strontium are more of an issue than Tritium.

Ohhh good then you can eat the seafood and drink the desalinated water that comes from where they dump the stuff..CA would make you put a label on it saying "Known to cause cancer."

Clearly Japan needs to build rockets and blast it in to space.

Seriously, just what alternative exists?

I'm with Mike on this one.

When the concentration achieves equilibrium, the dilution factor described applies. It will be more concentrated in the Pacific until that happens.

What could possibly go wrong in the meantime

No, all of the contaminated sea food is being shipped to LV for all of the free loaders to eat at the various buffets.

Duh! You just need a long hose and one of these

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9bizykuQjfg/maxresdefault.jpg

The article doesn't say, but I expect that the water that they intend to dump has had as much radioactive materials removed as humanly possible.


Here's an interesting read.

https://phys.org/news/2016-07-pacific-ocean-fukushima.html

http://pool.theinfosphere.org/images/7/7a/Blinky.png

http://www.clker.com/cliparts/f/G/Y/...octopus-hi.png

https://www.dictionary.com/e/wp-cont...acle-porn3.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DK55NkSVAAAFcVT.jpg

I'm in the nucular-weapons industrial complex. The lore is that the best cure for a tritium uptake is beer - you flush it out as water. Supposedly at Rocky Flats, back in the cold war, they gave you a coupon for a case of Coors if you got a facefull.

There's lots of stuff in the oceans that's already radioactive. I'm not worried about a little bit more.

Mike, it will have no measurable adverse consequences if it is sufficiently diluted, as in your example of it spreading out thru the entire Pacific.

OTOH, currents may or may not disperse it adequately - e.g. the Japanese Current flows from there to the PNW and Alaska. So, we will need to hear from the sub-section of oceanographers who study these currents. (If I had to bet, I'd bet you are right.)

OTOOH...
Measuring radioactivity is not the same as adverse consequences - we can measure far below health effects.

A few decades ago I lived in SF and went to a public meeting about a new power plant proposed there.
Really no personal opinion but I wanted to hear the sides speak.
It almost turned into a riot with groups of big men demanding construction jobs.

Hunter's Point (public housing but could be prime real estate with a bay view..where OJ Simpson grew up in the projects) supposedly had the highest breast cancer rate in the world due to left over from the 1950's US naval ownership, and many unaccounted dump sites.
At least that was the story.

But there are natural sources of radiation and plants that condense it everywhere.

Here in Michigan, radon testing which sometimes require air pumps below the basement slab, is a requirement in Title transfer I believe.

Copy paste from the guy I meantioned earlier:

LaHague reprocessing plant : *casually releases 12PBq tritium per year*
The media : who cares?
Fukushima : *Tries to release 1~2PBq of tritium as IAEA recommended since 2014*
The media : ECOLOGICAL DISASTER OF UNPRECEDENTED SCALE

Oh for fks sake, let them dump it and bring on all the great Godzilla memes.

xtra points if they tow it to Cape Cod.

Funny, this is a geopolitical topic...

I thought OT peeps couldn't stand to see such things. :cool: