Japan seeks support for Fukushima nuclear water release

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s government adopted an interim plan Tuesday that it hopes will win support from fishermen and other concerned groups for a planned release into the sea of treated but still radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.

The government decided in April to start discharging the water into the Pacific Ocean in the spring of 2023 after building a facility and compiling release plans under safety requirements set by regulators. The idea has been fiercely opposed by fishermen, residents and Japan’s neighbors including China and South Korea.

Under the plan adopted Tuesday, the government will set up a fund to buy fisheries products and freeze them for temporary storage to cushion the impact from negative rumors about the discharge. The government will also help promote Fukushima products to restaurants and other food industries.

The government also plans to start raising fish in the water treated to levels allowable for discharge as part of a safety awareness campaign. Further details have yet to be decided.



FILE - In this April 13, 2021, file photo, environmental activists wearing a mask of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and protective suits perform to denounce the Japanese government's decision to release treated radioactive Fukushima water, near the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Japan’s government adopted an interim plan Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021 that it hopes will win support from fishermen and other concerned groups for a planned release into the sea of treated but still radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, FIle)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business-japan-environment-and-nature-united-nations-2ae9b3fbe05a592fa71bbe64d9a8762f

[nocoincidences]

1. NO! Just plain no! n/t

[Jetheels]

2. Horror movie imitates life,

life imitates horror movie.

[Bayard]

3. Godzilla!

This crap will stay off the coast of Japan. It will eventually end up in Hawaii, Calif.

[Submariner]

4. The decision has been made by Japan: dilution is the solution

Or at least, the appearance of a safe dilution level. This is new territory in wide scale pollution of an ocean that will change everything forever in the waters of that part of the world, plus wherever the currents flow in the Pacific Rim.

All the spare site space has been taken up by tanks storing this hot waste, and now there is no other place to put it. The radioactive slug will be tracked and measured to death as it gets into the food chain. Stock up on you tuna now before the mercury toxin picks up rads making it worse.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I don't want to bring a Geiger Counter to the fish department.

[Snackshack]

6. Unfortunately.

They really don't have a choice. If you go to Google Earth and look at the plant the place is covered with water containment vessels. They could continue to add more vessels but still eventually they are back at the same place.

This is why nuclear power is not the answer. Yes - it is much cleaner then fossil fuels but 1 unplanned event is all it takes to make huge swaths of Earth uninhabitable for centuries. This disasters will still be going on 100 yrs from now or longer.

[elleng]

7. RIGHT This is why nuclear power is not the answer.

[NNadir]

11. Let's be clear on something OK?

No part of Japan is uninhabitable for centuries.

Dangerous fossil fuel waste and the mining waste associated with so called "renewable energy" are making large portions of the Earth uninhabitable.

There are no forms of energy, none, that are as safe and as reliable as nuclear energy. This does not mean that nuclear energy is risk free, only that it is the last best hope of the planet.

To my mind, anti-nukes are the moral and intellectual equivalents of anti-mask, anti-vax types. Vaccines are not risk free, but they still save lives, as does nuclear energy.

[Snackshack]

15. So everything.

About radiation is a lie? People are living next to Chernobyl? As far as I know Pripyat is still a ghost town.

What so called “renewable energy” are you referring to that associated processes are leaving large portions of Earth uninhabitable and for what reason is it uninhabitable? You provide zero evidence for that claim.

“Last best hope”. That’s your prerogative I disagree. Even if a nuclear plant could be guaranteed to be operated safety 100% of time over its life span the waste is a huge issue. Waste that has to be stored for centuries and also makes a place uninhabitable. No one lives next door to Yucca Mtn. Waste that we still do not know what its going to present as a problem when we get into the the 200-300-500-1000 yr mark (presuming we are still around).

You’ve caught at opportunity with your last point but it’s is still a false equivalency. However again that’s your prerogative.

[NNadir]

19. Your body contains about 4000 Beq of radioactive potassium-40 if you weigh 70 kg.

Last edited Wed Aug 25, 2021, 06:23 AM - Edit history (1)

All of the potassium on Earth is radioactive, and has been since the Earth formed.

The oceans contain over 500 billion curies of the stuff: I walked through a calculation of this many years ago, with reference to the scientific literature: How Radioactive Is the Ocean?

If we removed the potassium from a human body, we would kill the person from whom it was removed.

The ocean also contains just shy of 5 billion tons of uranium as part of the geological uranium cycle, which I explored, again with significant reference to the scientific literature here: Sustaining the Wind, Part 3: Is Uranium Exhastible.

The proportion of what is written about radiation that is a lie, or a misrepresentation depends on where and what you read. Lots of idiocy about radiation is circulated by people who don't read the scientific literature and who have never taken or passed a college level science course in which radiation is discussed.

I have been reading scientific publications related to radiation for more than 30 years, pretty much every damned day, since I know that nuclear energy saves lives.

Very little of what I read in the scientific literature consists of lies. However a significant proportion of what other people, lacking education, write about radiation is either extremely misleading, paranoid, or is, in fact, a lie.

The tritium in the Fukushima tanks is trivial when compared to the NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) in the ocean.

Oil and gas mining, fracking, brings vast amounts of radium to the surface, this while we all wait, like Godot, for the grand renewable nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.

The thorium by products dumped daily by lanthanide mines opened to make magnets for wind turbines dwarfs the tritium in the Fukushima tanks.

Sorry, but I am uninterested in your selective attention.

[betsuni]

17. To be fair, that was an old reactor right next to a coast with a history of huge tsunamis

and earthquakes. Asking for trouble. Put corrupt conservative geezer-morons in charge and this is what you get. I'm assuming actual high tech 21st century nuclear power is a hell of a lot safer, but still scary.

[madville]

8. The ocean naturally has a huge amount of radioactive uranium suspended in the water

There is a gigantic amount of radioactive uranium suspended in all the world's oceans, it occurs naturally. China is actually building a facility to extract uranium from seawater to fuel new reactors. It's estimated that there is up to 500 times more uranium in the ocean than in all the land-based mines combined. The amount Japan will release is minuscule relative to what's already in the ocean.

[Kid Berwyn]

9. Quadruple Meltdown includes one plutonium reactor.

Not that that ever gets mentioned.

News Coverage of Fukushima Disaster Found Lacking

American University sociologist’s new research finds few reports identified health risks to public

By Rebecca Basu
American University, March 10, 2015

Four years after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the disaster no longer dominates U.S. news headlines, though the disabled plant continues to pour three tons of radioactive water into the ocean each day. Homes, schools and businesses in the Japanese prefecture are uninhabitable, and will likely be so forever. Yet the U.S. media has dropped the story while public risks remain.

A new analysis by American University sociology professor Celine Marie Pascale finds that U.S. news media coverage of the disaster largely minimized health risks to the general population. Pascale analyzed more than 2,000 news articles from four major U.S. outlets following the disaster's occurrence March 11, 2011 through the second anniversary on March 11, 2013. [font color="green"]Only 6 percent of the coverage—129 articles—focused on health risks to the public in Japan or elsewhere. Human risks were framed, instead, in terms of workers in the disabled nuclear plant.[/font color]

Disproportionate access

"It's shocking to see how few articles discussed risk to the general population, and when they did, they typically characterized risk as low," said Pascale, who studies the social construction of risk and meanings of risk in the 21st century. "We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant."

Pascale studied news articles, editorials, and letters from two newspapers, The Washington Postand The New York Times, and two nationally prominent online news sites, Politico and The Huffington Post. These four media outlets are not only among the most prominent in the United States, they are also among the most cited by television news and talk shows, by other newspapers and blogs and are often taken up in social media, Pascale said. In this sense, she added, understanding how risk is constructed in media gives insight into how national concerns and conversations get framed.

Pascale's analysis identified three primary ways in which the news outlets minimized the risk posed by radioactive contamination to the general population. Articles made comparisons to mundane, low-level forms of radiation;defined the risks as unknowable, given the lack of long-term studies; and largely excluded concerns expressed by experts and residents who challenged the dominant narrative.

[font color="green"]The research shows that corporations and government agencies had disproportionate access to framing the event in the media, Pascale says. Even years after the disaster, government and corporate spokespersons constituted the majority of voices published. News accounts about local impact—for example, parents organizing to protect their children from radiation in school lunches—were also scarce. [/font color]

Globalization of risk

Pascale says her findings show the need for the public to be critical consumers of news; expert knowledge can be used to create misinformation and uncertainty—especially in the information vacuums that arise during disasters.

"The mainstream media—in print and online—did little to report on health risks to the general population or to challenge the narratives of public officials and their experts," Pascale said. "Discourses of the risks surrounding disasters are political struggles to control the presence and meaning of events and their consequences. How knowledge about disasters is reported can have more to do with relations of power than it does with the material consequences to people's lives."

While it is clear that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown was a consequence of an earthquake and tsunami, like all disasters, it was also the result of political, economic and social choices that created or exacerbated broad-scale risks. In the 21st century, there's an increasing "globalization of risk," Pascale argues. Major disasters have potentially large-scale and long-term consequences for people, environments, and economies.

"People's understanding of disasters will continue to be constructed by media. How media members frame the presence of risk and the nature of disaster matters," she said.

SOURCE with Links: http://www.american.edu/media/news/20150310-Fukushima.cfm

[NNadir]

13. That's OK. Very few anti-nukes mention the 19,000 people who die every damned day from air...

...pollution.

The latest Global Burden of Disease Survey, that of 2019, was published in 2020. It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long.

Here is the text from this comprehensive scientific document touching on the air pollution deaths that anti-nukes ignore every damned day while whining about plutonium, an element about which they know nothing at all:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

Give a shit?

No?

Why am I not surprised?

You are invited to show that 19,000 died from commercial plutonium in the last 50 years. I look forward to your response.

Nuclear energy saves lives. It follows that fear and ignorance about "plutonium" costs lives. Every nuclear reactor operating on this planet, saving lives from air pollution, contains plutonium. Every damned one.

Ignorance kills people. The equivalence between anti-nukes and anti-vaxxers is absolute to my mind.

[Kid Berwyn]

16. Great condescension!

Wonderful logical fallacy, too. Why imply that I don’t care about the murderous impact of air pollution?

Oh, yeah. It draws attention away from my post. Worse, answering you wastes my time.

Do you work in the nuclear industry?

[NNadir]

18. Do you work for the fossil fuel industry?

Last edited Wed Aug 25, 2021, 06:31 AM - Edit history (1)

My post contains reference to a scientific publication giving the daily death toll connected with the use of dangerous fossil fuels, to which you haver no comment other to claim that the only reason that anyone can take an ethical position is for money.

It's a pretty typical response I've heard over the last 30 years from anti-nukes. Almost all of them have a very low ethical reasoning ability, thinking in a rather bourgeois fashion that the entire world is about money.

I work in the pharmaceutical industry, if you must know. I really have no need to tell anti-nukes what I do for a living, but given their obvious hatred of science, I'll make an exception here, and let you know that the evil life saving industry in which I work is the pharmaceutical industry. I'm a scientist.

Since you already clearly are unfamiliar with epidemiological science, and hate it, and can't identify 19,000 people who died from plutonium equivalent to the death toll from air pollution in the last 50 years that will take place today from air pollution, I'll take this as further indication that anti-nukes are equivalent to anti-vaxxers.

In general both sets of people kill other people by trumpeting their ignorance.

Nuclear energy doesn't need to be risk free to save lives, any more than vaccines or antibiotics or cancer drugs need to be risk free to save lives:

Nevertheless, the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen and a colleague have published a very famous and widely read scientific publication statically showing the mechanism by which nuclear energy saves lives.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Of course, antinukes don't have "time" to read scientific publications, don't care about their contents.

I am spectacularly disinterested in the use of time by anti-nuke anti-vax types like say the famous fool Robert F. Kennedy, but when an idiotic statement he makes becomes makes its way around the internet, ethical people are appalled.

Most of the time people of this unethical and ignorant ilk spend is directed toward pernicious indifference to human life, and thus is worthless.

I'd suggest opening a science book, but people who hate science, present company included, experience teaches, won't do so.

[Kid Berwyn]

20. Great ad hominem.

So, here’s why I am concerned:

Plutonium from Fukushima is a global catastrophe.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10024382019

Some of the links may no longer work, but the Internet Archive Waybac has copies.

[NNadir]

10. Isn't it amusing how we can't release low level tritiated water without protests, and yet...

...dump 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year on the planet along with other dangerous fossil fuel waste, thus killing seven million people per year.

The people protesting in this picture are not "environmental activists" any more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his anti-vax squad are "health activists."

They are, to put it mildly, uneducated fools.

[Jedi Guy]

12. The saddest thing is...

Even if you explained it to them, complete with pictures, they'd still rabidly oppose nuclear energy because they think it's scary. Someone told them "nuclear bad" and that's all they're interested in knowing.

[NNadir]

14. Right. Deliberate ignorance is the worst form of ignorance. We're seeing exactly that...

...with Covid.

[hunter]

21. Japan dumps worse shit in the ocean and atmosphere every fucking minute. So does the U.S.A.

Quite a lot of that shit, toxins like mercury and lead, have a "half life" of FOREVER.

Personally, I don't have any sympathy for commercial fisherman. That's a profession that ought to be extinct, just as commercial bird hunting is extinct.

https://www.audubon.org/news/the-migratory-bird-treaty-act-explained

Humans are a clear threat to many fish and marine mammal species.

Buy these fishermen out and welcome them to the twenty first century.

You know what's going to end this civilization?

It isn't "nuclear waste."

I figure it will be hybrid natural gas / renewable energy systems.

There's enough cheap natural gas in the ground to destroy the world as we know it.

Most renewable energy schemes are simply not viable without natural gas backup power, and this so-called backup power becomes the dominant energy source in most renewable energy schemes.

[oasis]

22. K an R for a most important topic.