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.
Unsurprising.
in other news water is wet
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.
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’.
Tritium isn’t toxic, it’s mildly radioactive.
Tritated water is toxic just like heavy water. You’d just have to drink a truly ridiculous amount for it to be toxic, to the point that the radiation is a much bigger problem than the toxicity.
Edit: fully tritated water is actually worse, now that I think about it. The radioactive decay will periodically knock off a hydrogen atom, which makes it very reactive. That’s not what this is though.
Water is toxic, if you drink an only mildly ridiculous amount and don’t get some salt too. I say this having been hospitalized for hyponatremia several years back, due to unwisely drinking plain water instead of anything with salts in it when sick.
Oh for sure, I’m a nurse. Heavy water/tritated water is cytotoxic like a chemotherapy drug however, vs just messing up your osmotic balance. Your proteins conformiational structure from hydrogen bonds can’t function correctly with it and you can’t replicate your DNA/RNA because of the difference in size of the hydrogen and your cells die. Starts with diarrhea, ends with death. You need like a 20% proportion of it to see those effects though, so like I said, truly ridiculous amounts of tritated water. More than the entirety that they’re releasing.
Yeah they talk about nuclear waste and how it needs to be stored for so long, without recognizing that fossil fuels spew their waste, including radiation, directly into the atmosphere, where it is causing apocalyptic global warming. Having it in barrels is actually a big plus.
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.
I don’t understand why people think concentrating it and keeping large quantities on-site is preferable to heavily diluting and releasing it. A giant vat of radioactive water sounds like another disaster waiting to happen.
Because they don’t believe that they’ve removed the heavy metals that end up in the food web and sitting in the littoral area seabed until it’s picked up by lifeforms again. Tritium dilutes, but fission products do not.
Water eats beta- and even alpha particles in a small radius. Ionized water even more so.
The sea is vast. A pond is but a drop to the sea.
It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly, but it was a good gamble.
Nobody’s particularly concerned about the actual radiation of the tritium. It’s just that it is actively picked up by your body and used like any other water with the same biological half life of water at 7 days. It can cause some problems in that time. It’s not really a problem of it getting integrated into anything, since all it’ll do is knock itself off of and destroy whatever it gets incorporated into when it decays.
Probably because the octopuses used it all for their science experiments. It’s a scientific fact that octopuses hoard tritium. Source: Spider-man 2.
A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.
Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.
The banana’s potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it’s not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who’s amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.
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Wtf you’re just stating facts and giving a different opinion, and you’re being downvoted for that. Truly i don’t understand
They’re claiming that some “exteaction” [sic] was done improperly during World War II when getting bomb material, and made a mess, and that that should be factored into the environmental effects of modern nuclear power.
That’s a dumb argument.
Also telling people to go look it up, is not stating facts.
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I like this but would rather see a multi country coordinated oceanic study. We’re all in this together.
Sample size is critical to get a realistic result of the tritium toxicity. In this case, they sampled only 64 fish! That would not yield a statistically significant result!
they only sampled two fish!
Source?
Read the article again, moron
From the ORIGINAL article, before the 9/26 edit: “Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website.” Here is a link to the pre-edit article saying 2 fish: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/09/c798a431682e-no-tritium-found-in-fish-1-month-after-fukushima-water-release.html
Samples of local fish have been collected at two points within a 5-km radius of the discharge outlet, except during rough weather conditions, with the agency announcing its analysis results on an almost daily basis since Aug. 26.
No tritium was detected in 64 fish, which included flounder and six other species, collected since Aug. 8.
I mean… you could have read the article.
I mean, you are correct, it was not two fish. But is 64 fish some sort of good sample size?
Follow up question: does this type of thing accumulate in small fish and then concentrate in larger and larger fish?I don’t know the answers to those questions, as I am not a nuclear scientist. But the nuclear scientists seem to think so.
In any case, I think those are good questions. Those are the kind of good questions we get when people read the articles.
What number, in specific, would be a sample size you would accept?
I love when people tell on themselves for not knowing a thing about statistics.
Yes, it’s more than enough.
I mean, you are correct, it was not two fish. But is 64 fish some sort of good sample size?
Given the results, it is significant.
Follow up question: does this type of thing accumulate in small fish and then concentrate in larger and larger fish?
No, tritium is treated by organisms just like normal H2O, bioaccumulation is no problem.
But then they wouldn’t be able to bitch!
That’s right.
When I was on nuclear submarines I got less radiation than a single flight on an aircraft. And you gotta know there were less-than-secret competitions on who could rack up the most mrem. Could never get close to significant.
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now do extraction, refinement, transportation, etc. for diesel
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Ooh, and do lifetime emissions, and compare it with actual energy output of the source!
I think that if the environmental movement emphasized how much radioactive material is released by coal and other fossil fuels, we’d have a lot less public resistance to phasing them out.
Woah, it’s almost like the universe didn’t give us easily accessible energy for doing nothing.
Wow. Let me know when oil doesn’t need to be extracted, refined, and doesn’t produce waste.
Hell, coal literally contains trace uranium, and its waste products aren’t accounted as “radioactive waste” even though they are.
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You were downvoted because you told the truth about nuclear power, not because people thought you were responding to a question that wasn’t asked.
They were downvoted for telling a half truth. Technically true, but ignoring the context that makes it a good thing. Sure, it needs to be extracted, refined, and (to be clean) contained. All energy sources need the same, except dirty energy at least doesn’t contain their waste.
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Now do solar and wind. What materials are used, what wastes are produced, how much energy is consumed.
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If you think it’s whataboutism to ask for information that lets you fairly compare things on an equal basis, I’m not sure there’s anything I can say really.
I appreciate the discourse, my only intent with my comment was to give a perspective as to how operationally safe it is. That is not to say I would be alright with being in the Reactor Compartment while it was operational, that would lead to certain and painful death.
I haven’t really considered the relative environmental impact of the extraction, refinement, removal, and waste management of nuclear fuel and how that compares to other alternatives like coal or gas. I would suspect that carbon emissions from that process are significantly more.
I would however expect that the environmental impact is significantly less for the other items on your list like transportation and more specifically operation.
You do seem to be pretty aware of the state of energy research, do you happen to have any recommended papers to take a look at that might shed some light on the overall environmental impacts of nuclear and how they compare to the current alternatives?
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If you have 100x emissions, but 1000x the efficiency of the fuel (numbers may be overblown), then it’s still better for the environment.
Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.
However, we could always either repurpose it or yeet it into space, away from any other close planet collision course.
While yeeting things into space sounds cool, I am sceptical of the viability of that strategy.
Putting things into space is very expensive and putting them in a solar orbit is even more expensive.
Isn’t nuclear waste also really heavy? And guess what that means, it’s getting more expensive.
It also isn’t very environmentally friendly to send shit into space and of course even less friendly considering how heavy nuclear waste is.
In my opinion, they should find a nice, stable continental plate and in the middle of that, drill some relatively small diameter boreholes. Drill them ten or twenty kilometres apart to a depth that exercises our current technology, drop sealed waste into the bottom of said holes, top them off to 200m below the surface with concrete, and then backfill the rest with dirt.
After that, remove all evidence of anything ever being there on the surface.
If you have the technology to drill a hole 3-4km deep then you have also the tech to detect radioactive material.
Small diameter boreholes that kind of distance apart are basically undetectable by geophysical survey with our current technology so nothing in particular would ever be seen.
The quantity of worldwide high level radioactive waste that can’t be reprocessed could easy be disposed of in this manner.
The high tech equivalent of a cat burying their shit. While I like the idea of yeeting stuff into space, this is also beautifully simple.
I remember talks of building places with the use of symbols or other non-linguistic messaging to keep future populations at bay, I think that was in Finland or something.
Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.
Newer reactor designs are able to consume nuclear waste and use it as fuel. Look up breeder reactors. If we want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build more reactors ironically.
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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.
Welcome back to Fact or Cap
they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.
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.
I for one would like to try this “nuclear fish”…preferably crumbed, deep fried and doused in lemon juice. With a serve of fries.
Cool! So let’s ramp up disposing of radioactive material into the ocean because this one fish is ok!
