Fukushima Disposal Plans Put Tokyo in Hot Water

[milestogo]

Japan’s plan to release more than 1 million tons of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean has set off a firestorm among neighboring countries and raised concern among international nuclear safety experts.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report last week that said the plan met international standards, though the atomic agency did not endorse or recommend the Japanese disposal idea. IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said Japan must make the final decision on whether to proceed with the water disposal plan, which is expected to start as early as August. The report assessed that the discharge would have “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.” “We do not take sides,” Grossi told Reuters. “I’m not on the side of Japan or on the side of China or on the side of Korea. The standards apply to all the same way.”

A spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on July 7 that the IAEA’s report failed to address international concerns on the impact of treated wastewater on people and the environment, urging Japan to “give up using the IAEA report as the ‘greenlight’” and handle the contaminated water in a responsible way. The same day, China’s General Administration of Customs announced that it would continue its previous ban on imported food from Fukushima and nine other regions, as well as increase regulation of imported food from other parts of Japan.

Similar sentiments have festered in South Korea despite the current Korean administration’s support of the plan. Hundreds gathered in Seoul last weekend to protest against the Fukushima water disposal plan while opposition lawmakers spoke with Grossi in a tense meeting to voice their concerns. South Korea also plans to stick with its ban on all seafood imports from eight Japanese regions around Fukushima, which has been in place since 2013. Fish markets in South Korea have increased testing of seafood for radiation, and shoppers are hoarding salt as fears have grown over the Fukushima water release.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/12/japan-fukushima-radioactive-disposal-nuclear-tensions-oceans/

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. The amount in play is approximately 1 TRILLIONTH of the volume of the ocean

And given they're treating the water first I imagine the 'radioactive' component will likely also be in the extremely low 'parts per million' to begin with.

Then there's also the fact that there are natural radioactive deposits all over the world, it's not like the ocean is free of radioactivity. We sure didn't care about this kinda thing when we nuked the Bikini Atoll (the ocean around which has recovered remarkably well, I might add).

I have no problem with this release, and frankly think it's ridiculous to worry about it.

[hunter]

2. But they'll continue to ignore all the fossil fuel wastes that are actually killing people.

It's just

[NNadir]

3. Um...um...um...

Foreign Policy, which has a history of publishing scientific illiteracy - after all it was the first journal to publish the scientifically (and socially) illiterate fool Amory Lovins whose rhetoric helped drive climate change - is obviously jumping on this nonsense scare mongering based on public stupidity.

In another post, on the subject of rubidium, a naturally occurring element found in seawater, that like its congener potassium, is also radioactive, I pointed to the scale of this public stupidity, this appeal to fear and ignorance concerning Fukushima, this while the world burns from fossil fuel waste, waste that actually kills people: 19,000 people will die today from air pollution, fossil fuel waste, some of those deaths contributed by servers powered by fossil fuels and dedicated to disseminating fear and ignorance.

The post:

Low Impact Leaching of Rubidium from Mica Sources Preserving the Lamellar Structure of the Mica.

The relevant text:

I highlighted seawater in the text above for a reason, which motivated me in a sense to have this paper catch my eye. Fossil fuel apologists/salespeople/salesbots, some of whom at a huge environmental expense, greenwash the fossil fuels by converting them to hydrogen and then claiming they're "green," - although hydrogen is an extremely dirty fuel - are carrying on insipidly about the release of slightly radioactive water at Fukushima, where the number of people killed by radioactivity releases from the big boogeyman there is essentially zero or close to zero.

Whenever I think of radioactivity in seawater, rubidium crops up in my mind just after uranium - which I believe should be recovered from seawater - and potassium.

The concentration of rubidium in seawater is about 125 micrograms per liter. There are 1000 liters in a cubic meter. The volume of the ocean is thought to be around 1.51 X 10^18 cubic meters. (cf. Korenaga, J. (2008), Plate tectonics, flood basalts and the evolution of Earth’s oceans. Terra Nova, 20: 419-439. The specific activity of rubidium 87 is 3090 Bq/gram, or at 27.8%, for rubidium overall, 859 Bq/gram. It follows @3.7 X 10^10 Bq/curie that the radioactivity in the ocean from the trace element rubidium alone is 1.2 billion curies, never mind the much larger concentrations of potassium and the members of the uranium decay chain along with uranium itself.

All of the radioactivity released by the boogeyman at Fukushima, and not just the slightly radioactive water foolishly stored in tanks and wisely to be released but including that water, is trivial. The tanks contain 0.15 Terrabecquerel of radioactivity or about 4 curies.

This release will injure no one, but is definitely being hyped by appeal to fear and ignorance, clearly relished by fossil fuel salespeople/salesbots participating in the hydrogen bait and switch marketing game.

Of course the fossil fuel snake oil salespeople/salesbots playing bait and switch with hydrogen - requiring the wasting of the energy content of fossil fuels for marketing purposes - want to demonize nuclear energy. It is the only source of primary energy that exhibits the technical feasibility of driving their environmentally odious scheme out of business.

The fossil fuel industry has always opposed nuclear energy, very successfully indeed, this with slick bait and switch marketing, sequestration, wind, solar and like a rising and falling hydra cropping up uselessly decade after decade, hydrogen.

Over 80 million people died from air pollution since Fukushima, where the number of people killed by exposure to radiation is either zero or vanishingly close to it.

19,000 people, of course, died from seawater in the Earthquake, but neither Foreign Affairs or any of the morons who have been carrying on about Fukushima for the last 12 years have called for banning coastal cities.

Illiteracy about the effects of radiation kills people.

[Think. Again.]

4. This is obviously NOT.....

...any kind of sustainable solution to the problem of radioactive waste, either from accidents or from day-to-day operation of nuclear power plants.

My fear is that this will be setting a precedent that should NOT become the standard operating procedure for radioactive disposal needs.