Japan’s plan to dump nuclear waste into the pacific ocean may not be safe (opens in new tab)

> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"

Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!

> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution.

You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.

Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.

Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.

Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.

Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).

People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.

Also, for another bit of comparison, there's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296

Thank you for saying that, I still don't get how so many people who claim to take decision based on science are so against nuclear tech.

I maintain that "being utter horseshit" should be added to the reasons to flag a submission.

Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.

> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...

And in order to come to any of those conclusions you have to get independent experts to perform a review. Your comment is an emotional defence of your own heuristics. Science requires verification.

Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.

> Tritium is already present in the ocean

Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?

>I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start...

The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.

> nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity

Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.

> If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.

This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.

> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.

Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...

Right, it’s all safe and fine as long as we don’t release the water into your own backyard and swimming pool.

Well, it's a mixture of water and radioactive isotopes. The million tons of water isn't a danger to the Pacific Ocean, but the stuff it's mixed with may or may not be.

If the title had said "a million tons of tritium" it would be wrong, but it didn't.

Water which ... is nuclear waste as it is from a nuclear power plant that had a core meltdown? Of course wastewater would have been more specific, but in the end they ARE dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.

To note, one of groups like Greenpeace’s argument is that gov. and TEPCO are straight bullshitting the waste water composition [0]

It usually would fall in conspiracy theory territory, expect TEPCO did bullshit their facts and numbers at several critical occasions already, and the gov stays in lockstep with TEPCO.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/sustainable/story/2019/07/2...

15 grammes of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water

Sounds a lot better than

760 trillion berequel of tritium in 1,000,000 tons of water.

Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual.

Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.

https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...

>The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues

I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…

All over half a century ago, but there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of..., cases where the Japanese government didn’t come out well (e.g. Itai-Itai disease was known in 1912, but according to Wikipedia, “Medical tests started in the 1940s and 1950s”, and for Minamata disease “The Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectural governments conducted a joint survey in late 1960 and early 1961 into the level of mercury in the hair of people living around the Shiranui Sea. The results confirmed that organic mercury had spread all around the inland sea and that people were still being poisoned by contaminated fish. Hundreds of people were discovered to have levels greater than 50 ppm of mercury in their hair, the level at which people are likely to experience nerve damage. The highest result recorded was that of a woman from Goshonoura island who had 920 ppm in her sample.

The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”

It's a tough issue, because it's also the Japanese gov and TEPCO who brought this all mess, their trade-offs on how much to secure that plant didn't pay off, to say the least.

We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.

Minamata Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease

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Credit on environmental issues? Greenpeace has a very different opinion about it. Japanese are very sketchy about their whale hunting practices.

4 years ago (2018/8/20’s public hearing)[0], one of the subject was how that “Tritium water” also contained strontium and cobalt, and what to do about that before releasing the water. To this day, the answer is “nothing”

[0] https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/chiji/kaiken20180820.h...

To answer your question. The risk is minimal to nonexistent.

Tritium, the thing ONE of the scientists is concerned about, is an isotope of hydrogen. It's barely radioactive, and it has half life of about 12 years. You may know it as the stuff that illuminates watch faces and sights. It's used in many other industrial applications and as far as radioactive elements goes

If you read the actual article you may see it's classic fear mongering:

The panel of multi-disciplinary scientists, hired by the intergovernmental Pacific Islands Forum, has not found conclusive evidence that the discharge would be entirely safe, and one marine biologist fears contamination could affect the food system.

TL;DR: They couldn't say something could happen, so they said that they can't conclude nothing will happen. Which is exactly what everybody knew before. One of them said that something COULD happen, but he doesn't know how.

Yes this comment.

Though it might be nice to see Godzilla IRL... at least until he/she squishes you with gigantic irradiated feet.

I don't know how other countries work but that actually is a legal requirement in the US. The NRC requires reactor operators to set aside funds for decommissioning[1], and the government charges a fee to nuclear plants to cover long-term waste storage[2]. Or at least, they did, until 2014. The waste fund has accumulated to $43 billion (as of 2018), but the government hasn't managed to actually store any waste; since the utilities were also incurring the cost to store the waste themselves, they successfully sued and got the fee lifted, until such time as the government starts taking the waste off their hands.

If only fossil plants were required to pay for burying their waste deep underground. Then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html

[2] https://www.ocregister.com/2019/02/01/billions-pile-up-in-nu...

They are dumping 1 Million metric tons of water over a period of 30 years.

Even if China allow them to dump the water into the Gobi desert, it'd still cost billions of dollar to build and operate the pipeline. It'd never happen.

Logistics... Where is Japan and where is Sahara

Well because some people actually do live in Sahara

From a PR perspective, they would do better constructing a precast concrete plant nearby the site, and use the water to make concrete.