1.23 million tonnes of radioactive water has been "treated" (but still radioactive) from the Fukushima nuclear reactor incident in 2011. It currently sits on the Fukushima Daiichi site, waiting to be disposed of. A decision has been made to simply dump it into the ocean.
The radioactive water has had the most filtering possible applied to it. But there is still radioactive tritium in the water which they can't filter out.
Tritium or hydrogen-3 is a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
This decision to dump the water into the ocean wasn't the only option available. The other was to allow the water to evaporate. To me, letting the water evaporate would be better. Distilling water creates pure water. I don't know if as least some of the tritium would stay behind, or if it would all end up in the water vapor anyways. maybe it makes no difference.
So into the ocean it goes. Tokyo Electric Power had already dumped hundreds of tonnes of radioactive water into the Pacific in 2014. It wasn't filtered. At least this time some of the radioactivity will be removed.
But this will have impacts on the animal life of the oceans, and elsewhere. Concentrated radioactive material is not good for biological life. But whatever, let's keep proposing "clean" nuclear energy right? Yeah, it's so "clean", with all that radioactive waste as a byproduct, so clean. Bill Gates wants more nuclear power plants near major cities, what could go wrong!?
Between radioactive contamination of the planet, and carbon emissions, I gladly choose carbon emissions over the current radioactive waste and the existing and future disasters from radioactive accidents.
Why not just leave the millions of tonnes of water where they are? Or wait until technology has been developed to treat the tritium? Money. Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said:
We can't postpone a decision on the plan to deal with the... processed water, to prevent delays in the decommission work of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
They want to decomission the area, and don't want to leave the water there. Gotta move along with poisoning the planet's oceans...
Nuclear energy isn't the problem here. Lack of accountability is. There are nuclear reactors in submarines and military ships that work juat fine without contaminating the ocean. Cold fusion, once developed can side step the risk entirely.
Absolutely tepco deserves to be held accountable for these actions and This disaster.
I'm not sure why there isn't an international movement to force the Japanese into some kind of action to prevent further ecological catastrophe...
However the size and scale of This disaster is such that we are talking that the core has melted into the groundwater....
And it's not really looking like it's going to stop burning anytime soon and could potentially keep burning on through the mantle.
There is just no way for us to get a hold of it extract it and remove it off planet.
Too bad we couldn't just distill out all these particles and ship the entire mess and dump it on a planet that we don't use or don't need to use...
sure would be nice to have a place not on this planet to get rid of highly toxic nuclear waste
The Japanese government should dismantle TEPCO.
Absolutely not they need to be able to pay for the environmental damage as they cause to the world so....
However the head of tepco and the leading executives have a huge obligation that needs to be recognized.
Actually distilling would be the best way of managing the situation and multiple cycles of distillation would concentrate and leave the trinium however now all of that equipment is highly toxic.
Really there is absolutely no safe or sane way for this to be managed.
However if the best idea is for Japan to just dump all of this into the ocean and destroy the world's fisheries I would have to say that some major steps need to be taken to prevent that.
Thanks for covering this story.
This is such a disaster and with all the chaos of 2020, this issue is not garnering the attention it deserves.
We have no idea what this will do to our oceans, it's insane.
This is a crime against ecology.