Japan OKs plan to release Fukushima nuclear plant wastewater

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s nuclear regulator on Wednesday approved plans by the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant to release its treated radioactive wastewater into the sea next year, saying the outlined methods are safe and risks to the environment minimal.

The plan was submitted by the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings in December based on the government’s decision last year to release the wastewater as a necessary step for the ongoing plant cleanup and decommission.

A massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 destroyed the Fukushima plant’s cooling systems, causing the meltdown of three reactors and the release of large amounts of radiation. Water that has been used to cool the three damaged reactor cores, which remain highly radioactive, has since leaked but was collected and stored in tanks.

There is still concern in the community and neighboring countries about the potential health hazards of the release of the wastewater that includes tritium — a byproduct of nuclear power production and a possible carcinogen at high levels.



FILE - Tanks storing treated radioactive water after it was used to cool the melted fuel are seen at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), in Okuma town, northeastern Japan, on March 3, 2022. Japan’s nuclear regulator on Wednesday, May 18, 2022, approved plans by the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant to release its treated radioactive wastewater into the sea next year, saying the outlined methods are safe and risks to the environment minimal. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/science-government-and-politics-japan-environment-dfb0b0c1eee51fbfa7d9a3b2e75eab92

[Evolve Dammit]

1. Once again earthlings, there is no safe disposal of this waste. We will all suffer for any releases.

Atmospheric, oceanic, or buried and entering groundwater. The detonations from combined nuclear nations testing alone have raised levels enough to be measured.

[NNadir]

7. Bullshit.

[Magoo48]

14. Not Bullshit.

[NNadir]

15. Anyone who makes a statement that highly diluted tritium is...

...dangerous is completely unfamiliar with the contents of science books, including risk analysis physiology, biophysics and a host of other topics.

Since 2011, over 77 million people have died from the unrestricted release of dangerous fossil fuel waste, without a whimper of protest from the people who whine and cry about Fukushima.

This type of ignorance is as toxic as antivax rhetoric, as I frequently point out.

To my mind, the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is a direct consequence of people whining about subjects they are incompetent to understand.

[NickB79]

21. Given that we can measure incredibly small increases of radioactive material

Saying the levels are measurable isn't saying much.

We've detonated something like 2,000 nuclear warheads over the past 75 years, over 500 above ground, yet here we still are.

[Evolve Dammit]

23. so what is a "safe level" of radiation? Has it been defined?

[lapfog_1]

2. that is a lot of big water tanks

but I always knew they would run out of room / money.

Problem is... once they empty these tanks... the new waste water (radioactive) will need to equal the water needed to cool the destroyed reactors.

I think Godzilla started this way, right?

[NullTuples]

9. The plan they've been pushing for years is just to give up containing the water

The molten cores aren't going anywhere and they're not cooling down for a long, long time. The plan is to just keep flushing them with cooling water and letting it run out to sea.

Luckily, they built the plant right in the path of an underground river.

[Owl]

16. Why can't the same water be reused for cooling?

[Lasher]

3. The tsunami destroyed the plant's cooling systems, causing the meltdown of three reactors.

Has any thought been given to the relocation of nuclear power plants to places where another tsunami could not do the same thing?

[NullTuples]

10. It wasn't the force of the tsumani; it was putting the emergency generators in the basement

As soon as the tsunami hit, the basements were flooded. No generators meant no pumps to keep the reactors cool.

In retrospect, a very poorly considered decision.

Putting the plant at the coast made sense from TEPCO's point of view. Ample cooling water, somewhere to dump it. And if there was a meltdown, most of the fallout would travel out over the ocean.

[Lasher]

17. No meaningful difference.

We should have learned that it's a bad idea to build nuclear power plants where they might be struck by tsunamis. We didn't.

[NullTuples]

18. My point is the location wasn't the problem; minimizing cost was the problem

The site right on the coast was originally a 35 meter tall hill that was tsunami safe. They chose to eliminate the hill, ostensibly at the time for earthquake safety. But it seems much of the decision making was actually to lower costs.

Katsumi Naganuma, 70, a former worker at Tokyo Electric Power Co., feels particular guilt because he knows that a 35-meter-high bluff overlooking the Pacific was shaved down to build the plant closer to sea level more than 40 years ago.

During a recent interview with The Japan Times, Masatoshi Toyota, 88, former senior vice president of Tepco, said one of the reasons the utility lowered the bluff was to build the base of the reactors directly on solid bedrock to mitigate any earthquake threat. Toyota was a key executive who was involved in the Fukushima No. 1 plant construction. It is actually common practice to build primary nuclear plant facilities directly on bedrock because of the temblor factor.

Toyota also cited two other reasons for Tepco clearing away the bluff — seawater pumps used to provide coolant water needed to be set up on the ground up to 10 meters from the sea, and extremely heavy equipment, including the 500-ton reator pressure vessels, were expected to be brought in by boat.

In fact, Tepco decided to build the plant on low ground based on a cost-benefit calculation of the operating costs of the seawater pumps, according to two research papers separately written by senior Tepco engineers in the 1960s.

If the seawater pumps were placed on high ground, their operating costs would be accordingly higher.

“We decided to build the plant at ground level after comparing the ground construction costs and operating costs of the circulation water pumps,” wrote Hiroshi Kaburaki, then deputy head of the Tepco’s construction office at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, in the January 1969 edition of Hatsuden Suiryoku, a technical magazine on power plants.

(source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/07/13/national/fukushima-plant-site-originally-was-a-hill-safe-from-tsunami/ )

[Lasher]

22. So the location wasn't a problem until they made it so by eliminating the hill.

I don't see how you can separate the location from their cost reduction schemes as a root cause of the Fukushima disaster. A thoughtful analysis should conclude they are one and the same. I think we are trying to agree, but sometimes that's hard to do.

Over time, when the probability of human error is greater than zero, a negative event will eventually occur.

[keithbvadu2]

4. Approved! What other choice do they have?

Approved! What other choice do they have?

Store it somewhere else but still in its concentrated strength?

[NullTuples]

19. Tritium removal systems are in use elsewhere; TEPCO/Japan is taking the cheaper route

There are a number of companies that produce industrial scale systems to extract tritium from water or reduce the volume of tritium water by 10,000. Often they're used at plants that make or use tritium, to recover it from the water that's also part of the process.

TEPCO & the Japanese government simply want to take the lower cost route since there will be no end to the contaminated water being created for perhaps thousands of years.

[Blue Owl]

5. Send it on down to Mar a Lardo

[NNadir]

6. Good. It's long been a wasteful paean to ignorance to spend the money to store it.

[Kid Berwyn]

24. What's a little plutonium among friends?

Don’t forget the strontium, americium and all the rest of the waste that will pollute the planet for a million years, too.

[NNadir]

25. One of the interesting things about anti-nukes is how willing they are to display ignorance.

Not much else about them is particularly interesting.

People who actually know something know, for instance, the half-life of strontium isotopes, americium isotopes and the solubility of plutonium.

It's not like the people who reference these elements in extreme ignorance give enough of a shit about the world to look these things up.

They just don't give a fuck. It shows.

I do know these things because I do give a fuck:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

Of course, I'm a scientist, not a bourgeois dumb shit who couldn't bother to open a book.

Informed people know what's in the tanks at Fukushima. Toxic dumb chanting shits just make stuff up.

The results of extreme ignorance, ignorance unafraid to parade itself, are in:

Here they are:

May 19: 420.29 ppm
May 18: 420.16 ppm
May 17: 421.64 ppm
May 16: 421.72 ppm
May 15: 421.84 ppm
Last Updated: May 20, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Stronium...a million years...you don't say...

Jesus Christ! One sees and hears these kinds of things, but one really can't believe it.

Perhaps anti-nukes think I should congratulate them on the wonderful results of climate change and of course, on the roughly 70 to 80 million people killed by air pollution while they forced their eyebrows through their anal sphincters whining insipidly about Fukushima. These 70 to 80 people died unnecessarily because we don't use nuclear power, this sick result coming from paeans to the abysmally ignorant, but I happen to give a shit about the world.

I don't congratulate stupidity though. No apology for that position will be offered.

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)

That's a fact. Facts matter. It follows from that fact that anti-nuke ignorance kills people.

Have a wonderful weekend.

[Kid Berwyn]

26. Reactor 3 ran plutonium enriched fuel.

Japan’s Misguided Plutonium Policy

As for what’s getting dumped into the sea that Japan has admitted to:

New paper addresses the mix of contaminants in Fukushima wastewater

August 6, 2020

Nearly 10 years after the Tohoku-oki earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant and triggered an unprecedented release radioactivity into the ocean, radiation levels have fallen to safe levels in all but the waters closest to the shuttered power plant. Today, fish and other seafood caught in waters beyond all but a limited region have been found to be well within Japan’s strict limits for radioactive contamination, but a new hazard exists and is growing every day in the number of storage tanks on land surrounding the power plant that hold contaminated wastewater. An article published August 7 in the journal Science takes a look at some of the many radioactive elements contained in the tanks and suggests that more needs to be done to understand the potential risks of releasing wastewater from the tanks into the ocean.

We’ve watched over the past nine-plus years as the levels of radioactive cesium have declined in seawater and in marine life in the Pacific,” said Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and author of the new paper. “But there are quite a few radioactive contaminants still in those tanks that we need to think about, some of which that were not seen in large amounts in 2011, but most importantly, they don’t all act the same in the ocean.”

Since 2011, Buesseler has been studying the spread of radiation from Fukushima into and across the Pacific. In June of that year, he mobilized a team of scientists to conduct the first international research cruise to study the early pathways that cesium-134 and -137, two radioactive isotopes of cesium produced in reactors, were taking as they entered the powerful Kuroshio Current off the coast of Japan. He has also built a network of citizen scientists in the U.S. and Canada who have helped monitor the arrival and movement of radioactive material on the Pacific coast of North America.

Now, he is more concerned about the more than 1,000 tanks on the grounds of the power plant filling with ground water and cooling water that have become contaminated through contact with the reactors and their containment buildings. Sophisticated cleaning processes have been able to remove many radioactive isotopes and efforts to divert groundwater flows around the reactors have greatly reduced the amount of contaminated water being collected to less than 200 metric tons per day, but some estimates see the tanks being filled in the near future, leading some Japanese officials to suggest treated water should be released into the ocean to free up space for more wastewater.

One of the radioactive isotopes that remains at the highest levels in the treated water and would be released is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen is almost impossible to remove, as it becomes part of the water molecule itself. However, tritium has a relatively short half-life, which measures the rate of decay of an isotope; is not absorbed as easily by marine life or seafloor sediments, and produces beta particles, which is not as damaging to living tissue as other forms of radiation. Isotopes that remain in the treated wastewater include carbon-14, cobalt-60, and strontium-90. These and the other isotopes that remain, which were only revealed in 2018, all take much longer to decay and have much greater affinities for seafloor sediments and marine organisms like fish, which means they could be potentially hazardous to humans and the environment for much longer and in more complex ways than tritium.

Continues…

https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/fukushima-tank-contaminants/

Those are the facts.

[NNadir]

27. Yeah, and what?

Last edited Sat May 21, 2022, 07:17 AM - Edit history (1)

Perhaps the dumb shit who wrote this precious bit of stupidity isn't aware that the ocean contains over 500 billion curies of potassium 40, and has generally contained more than that for the 4 billion years oceans have existed.

If you would like to produce a credible scientific paper from a reputable journal showing that in the 11 years since Fukushima that as many people as will die in the next hour from air pollution, have died from radiation releases at Fukushima you are invited to do so.

There are many thousands of papers on the subject of radiation releases at Fukushima and their health effects.

Here's one: Michael R Reich, Aya Goto, Towards long-term responses in Fukushima, The Lancet, Volume 386, Issue 9992, 2015, Pages 498-500,

4 years have passed since the nuclear power plant accident at Fukushima, Japan, moving the problems there from an acute nuclear disaster to a chronic environmental disaster, with multiple social, psychological, economic, and political consequences. As described by Ohtsuru and colleagues,1 many people continue to experience multiple losses, both tangible and intangible, at the individual, family, and community levels.

Putting Hiroshima and Nagasaki side by side with Fukushima, as done in this issue of The Lancet, seems inappropriate in major respects. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were intentional governmental acts of war, whereas Fukushima was accidental and negligent industrial behaviour in time of peace. They share exposure to radiation—but at vastly different levels and in different forms.2 In Fukushima, no one has died from radiation exposure, and the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation report3 in 2013 stated that substantial changes in future cancer statistics attributed to radiation exposure are not expected to be observed, although the committee also noted “a theoretical increased risk of thyroid cancer among most exposed children” and recommended they be “closely followed”.4

However, putting these disasters together does reveal some shared characteristics. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people were “exposed to explosion” (hibaku in Japanese); while those in Fukushima are “exposed to radiation” (also hibaku in Japanese).5, 6 These words share the same pronunciation, but use different Japanese characters. Both groups are living with the social and psychological uncertainties and implications of possible radiation exposure. Both groups also became higaisha or victims. The apocalyptic disruptions of their lives did not arise from their own choices, but from social and political decisions taken by others. This reaction is common in radiation disasters worldwide.7

The survivors of a chronic environmental disaster typically seek redress around questions of care, compensation, and clean-up.8 Although chronic environmental disasters have important medical dimensions, the human losses go far beyond the medical sphere. Below we briefly explore these three questions for Fukushima, examine the role of community engagement, and highlight changes needed to prevent another nuclear power plant disaster.

I added the bold, the italics and the underlining.

The most serious effects are psychological and stupid people whipping up hysteria are not helping.

The fact is that more people have likely died from the dangerous fossil fuel waste generated by assholes to run their computers to whine about Fukushima and so called "nuclear waste" than have died from the 75 years of commercial nuclear power operations.

What part of the bolded, italicized, and underlined statement in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals escapes the mind of a person who clearly doesn't give a shit about the roughly 70 to 80 million people who died from air pollution since the Fukushima reactors were breached in a natural disaster where 20,000 people died from seawater?

How come dumb shit anti-nukes aren't calling for the banning of coastal cities?

The death toll from air pollution is around 19,000 people per day, about 800 people per hour:

This information can be found here, also in the prestigious medical journal Lancet:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet 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. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

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).

Let me know if there are any dumb shits around the world who can find reference to Fukushima in this document.

Let me understand this. Am I supposed to credit the stupid selective attention of a person who clearly has never opened a science book and who clearly knows zero about radiobiology over the fact that people are dying from extreme heat in Asia today? Over the fact that while I've been embracing this dubious conversation with the moral and intellectual equivalent of anti-vax type 800 people or more have died from not using nuclear power?

I've been studying plutonium chemistry in the primary scientific literature for over 30 years; I'm not some paranoid asshole who screams and pulls his brains out through his hair follicles whenever the word "plutonium" is mentioned.

Stick to telling me about how radiostrontium sticks around for a million years. It's pretty fucking typical of people who just don't give a shit about reality.

It is thought that 70,000 people died from heat waves in Europe in the 2003 heatwave there; the death toll from recent extreme heat are sure to exceed that.

Jean-Marie Robine, Siu Lan K. Cheung, Sophie Le Roy, Herman Van Oyen, Clare Griffiths, Jean-Pierre Michel, François Richard Herrmann, Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003, Comptes Rendus Biologies, Volume 331, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 171-178.

The paper begins with these words:

Everyone remembers the 15,000 additional deaths caused by the heat wave of August 2003 in France [1]. However, four years later, no one knows precisely the cumulative number of European victims, although more than 70 scientific reports related to this event have already been published [2]

Everyone remembers? Really? Would this include the assholes whining endlessly about Fukushima while pushing the bridges of their noses past their hemorrhoids?

I'd suggest that dumb shit anti-nukes shouldn't pretend to give a shit. They don't care how many millions of people die, how many tens of millions of people die, how many hundreds of millions of people die from dangerous fossil fuel waste or any other form of pollution. They only credit their imagination that someone somewhere might die from radiation and it fills their whithered intellects with terror that this might happen.

Their selective attention borders on criminally insane.

Their ethical level is clearly disgusting.

It is no more valuable to discuss the issue of risk with an anti-nuke than it is to discuss the existence of Covid with a Trumper. No amount of information or truth can effect the withered intellects of either of this type.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[Kid Berwyn]

28. Not with TEPCO dumping nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.

The insolvable problem of safely managing, let alone disposing, of all that contaminated water should bother all people.

Unfortunately, when faced with making a choice between environmental safety and nuclear power, they chose the latter.

[NNadir]

29. I made myself clear. It is a waste of time to discuss facts with anti-nukes...

...to engage their inability to think; their idiotic and toxic dogma that kills people, and their mindless hatred of this planet and of, clearly, humanity, and their love of ignorance.

I did add my previous post to my journal. One should never miss an opportunity to call out stupidity and hatred of scientific facts that kills people, whether it's anti-vax or anti-nukes or any other shit handed out by uneducated, unthinking illiterates.

Some people hate the thought of being educated. It shows.

This conversation, the equivalent of speaking to a Trumper about vaccines, is concluded. I have better things to do.

[Kid Berwyn]

30. You didn't educate anyone.

In fact, you ignore the plutonium. Everyone should know about the incredible amounts of plutonium -- one of the most deadly elements known -- that have been introduced into the environment from Fukushima. Specifically:

DOE-STD-1128-98

Guide of Good Practices for Occupational Radiological Protection in Plutonium Facilities

EXCERPT...

4.2.3 Characteristics of Plutonium Contamination

There are few characteristics of plutonium contamination that are unique. Plutonium
contamination may be in many physical and chemical forms. (See Section 2.0 for the many
potential sources of plutonium contamination from combustion products of a plutonium fire
to radiolytic products from long-term storage.) The one characteristic that many believe is unique to plutonium is its ability to migrate with no apparent motive force. Whether from alpha recoil or some other mechanism, plutonium contamination, if not contained or
removed, will spread relatively rapidly throughout an area.

SOURCE (PDF file format): http://energy.gov/hss/downloads/doe-std-1128-98

Available via Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160511003711/http://energy.gov/ehss/downloads/doe-std-1128-98-0

Why I bring this is up: This is information about Fukushima and plutonium that people have a right to know, yet is what the press and governments of the United States and Japan apparently want people to forget. Thank goodness news and information aren't censored on DU.

[Bayard]

8. Japan may have approved those plans,

But what about the rest of us earthlings?

[rockfordfile]

11. wow messed up

"-to release its treated radioactive wastewater into the sea next year, saying the outlined methods are safe and risks to the environment minimal." Do you trust them?

[hunter]

13. Worse shit comes out of any coal power plant in normal operation.

Mostly we deal with the horrors of fossil fuels by ignoring them.

[2naSalit]

12. Yikes.

[NickB79]

20. Good. That will go a long way to protect ocean life

The amount of radiation in the water is trivial, and won't harm any sea creatures in the slightest.

It will, however, discourage the most destructive species on Earth (humans) from fishing the surrounding areas of the ocean. This will help create an oceanic wildlife sanctuary like the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site, much as the land around Chernobyl and Fukushima have already become havens for rare species in Europe and Asia.

Nothing is more destructive to the natural world than humans going about our regular daily activities. Not even nuclear reactors melting down, apparently.