this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.

Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.

The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.

i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.

totally sad.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Yet one litre of oil can contaminate over a million litres of water.

I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can't find it.

While I can't speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it's very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it's TREATED water that's being released. That means they have a treatment system (there's a fucking rabbit hole and half...) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone 'yolo pump the water into the ocean'.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should've been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.

I asked ppl there "is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?" And most of them were like "it's not a common occurrence but it's not inherently dangerous and it's not that big of a deal"

To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (21 children)

Its also classic anti-nuclear power FUD.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

China has released water with higher level of tritium on a regular basis before, from many of its reactors. Hypocrisy 100.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 11 months ago

they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 11 months ago (1 children)

china is causing a fuss for political gain. a huge chunk of their fishing practices are illegal and violates international law anyway. their concern is theatrics to drum up their anti-japanese nationalism.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not only that, but China's Fuqing power plant also releases 3 times more tritium into the Pacific than the Fukushima plant so they're also full of shit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not doubting you at all, but can you provide a link for emphasis?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/08/8388ba8002bb-tritium-at-13-china-monitoring-points-above-fukushima-water-level.html

It's a pressurized water plant like Fukishima was. Not quite 3x but still more than 2. Qinshan is a CANDU reactor, so that's why its 10 times more than what they're annually releasing from Fukishma. They release a lot of tritium because they use heavy water as a moderator. Any nuke plant that has a Lithium channel for producing tritium for nuclear weapons will also, of course, release a lot of it comparatively.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago

The old "trust but verify" position. Agreed 100%. If everything is perfectly safe there should be no reason not to have multiple independent, third-parties with no skin in the game to verify. This is good for everyone as it reassures the fishermen, those buying fish, and really the rest of the world.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Is somebody preventing them from catching and testing fish?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I live in South Korea and I get really frustrated how so many people(lefties) try to make a big deal out of this to shit on Japan.

Please fucking stop smoking first before you try to talk shit about this. You sound like a complete idiot when you drink and smoke and worry about how filtered water that is probably safer than the seawater now. You're literally paying to suck on carcinogens and radioactive shit.

You're just political about this. Not scientific.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Why do you specify lefties? Is there something unique about South Korean politics that make their left-wing reject science as much as everyone else's right-wing?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Anti-nuclear has been mostly a left thing in the US at least despite the clean energy movement including many of the same people.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If their reporting of the quantity of tritium is accurate, India's candu style plants release more incidentally than this will.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

Which is what the experts have been saying since the beginning, but the anti-nuclear propagandists explicitly ignore the experts.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

The power of the sun..... in the palm of my hand

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

Probably because the octopuses used it all for their science experiments. It's a scientific fact that octopuses hoard tritium. Source: Spider-man 2.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Dangit, now how am I gonna get my piscine superpowers/fish shaped tumors?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Fantastic news! so many people are so afraid of the word "nuclear", and don't understand how large of a volume the ocean is. the lethal dose of Fentanyl is like the size of a grain of rice. Put all of the known legal and illegal volume of fentanyl into the ocean and it would be undetectable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

The ocean is 1.335 × 10^21 litres. That number is stupid big. There are 7.5 × 10^18 grains of sand on Earth. If every person in Japan flushed a litre of the reactor water down their toilet, it would be diluted to nothing in no time at all.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Sample size: 64

Also, are there other things like Caesium-137 that pose a risk?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not really. This video by Kyle Hill does an amazing job at explaining it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

This video by Kyle Hill

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Cs-137 and other fission and activation products can be largely removed by treatment. H-3 is a bit trickier since it literally is part of the water. Luckily it's a fairly weak beta emitter with a relatively short half life so causes very, very little long term harm.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

People have been far more concerned about the efficacy of the ALPS system at extracting other contaminants than they are about tritium contamination. The ALPS system is unproven and the wastewater they're releasing would be pretty toxic as far as other radioactive isotopes is concerned if the ALPS system isn't doing it's job perfectly.

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