Japan will start releasing treated and diluted radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean as early as Thursday — a controversial step that the government says is essential for the decades of work needed to shut down the facility that had reactor meltdowns 12 years ago.
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Holy shit, it’s been 12 years already? 2010-2020 was like a fever dream.
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What are the alternatives?
Honestly, not much in the way of alternatives. Tritium is very, very difficult to remove from water. Basically the only option, aside from discharge, is to store it in tanks and wait for enough half lives to elapse that the tritium effectively just decays away on its own. The half life of tritium is just over 12 years, so that’ll still be a while longer, and that gets expensive (in terms of both storage costs and space costs). However, tritium is not particularly dangerous, especially at low concentrations.
As usual with radioactive liquids, dilution is the solution. And Japan has diluted this liquid to 1500Bq/liter, far short of their internal legal limit of 60,000Bq/liter, and even far below the WHO limit of 10,000Bq/liter.
The half life of tritium is just over 12 years, so that’ll still be a while longer
It’s been 12 years, 5 months, how much longer are we talking about?
Honestly, that’s probably why they’re getting ready to discharge the tritiated liquid now.
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Have they considered the kaiju implications of this?
I think… maybe Japan wants one ?
They’d have a national crisis to justify country-wide emergency production of giant robots…
As the saying goes: The solution to pollution is dilution.
In WWII the US processed Ocean water to get the same radioactive components, and now Japan wants to put them back.
