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Power Earth Japan

Greenpeace Claims Fukushima Water Release Could Change Human DNA (cnn.com) 200

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Contaminated water that could soon be released into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains radioactive carbon with the potential to damage human DNA, environmental rights organization Greenpeace has warned.

The environmental group claims that the 1.23 million metric tons of water stored at the plant — scene of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster — contains "dangerous" levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 and other "hazardous" radionuclides, which it says will have "serious long-term consequences for communities and the environment" if the water is released into the Pacific Ocean.

To cool fuel cores at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has pumped in tens of thousands of tons of water over the years. Once used, the water is put into storage. But nine years on from Japan's worst nuclear disaster, storage space is running out, and the government is still deciding what to do with the water. Authorities, including the country's environment minister, have indicated the only solution is to release it into the ocean — a plan facing opposition from environmental campaigners and fishing industry representatives. On Friday, the Japanese government postponed a decision on what to do with the water.

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Greenpeace Claims Fukushima Water Release Could Change Human DNA

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  • Idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:37PM (#60644354) Journal
    I am so sick and tired of ppl that refuse to use facts, science, and logic.
    • "I am so sick and tired of ppl that refuse to use facts, science, and logic."

      Didn't you watch the documentary?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:28PM (#60644602)

      I am so sick and tired of ppl that refuse to use facts, science, and logic.

      This has been Greenpeace's specialty from the day they decided to diversify away from saving whales. But this new claim is so fatuous that Commie News Network may be the only channel that would even bother carrying it.

    • Never mind that. The real question is, will it turn the frogs gay?
      • Never mind that. The real question is, will it turn the frogs gay?

        Not quite, the real question is...
          will it turn the frickin' frogs gay?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Greenpeace is using science. Shame you didn't bother reading it before you made this anti-scientific screed.

      TECPO are claiming that the concentration of carbon-14 in the water would only result in an annual exposure of 0.11 millisieverts if you drank 2l per day. That statement should be setting off alarm bells in your head.

      It makes some ridiculous assumptions, such as that the carbon-14 will be evenly distributed so that average exposure over the whole year will be 0.11 millisieverts. That's clearly nonsens

      • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@noSPAm.earthlink.net> on Sunday October 25, 2020 @08:24AM (#60646014)

        TECPO are claiming that the concentration of carbon-14 in the water would only result in an annual exposure of 0.11 millisieverts if you drank 2l per day. That statement should be setting off alarm bells in your head.

        It makes some ridiculous assumptions, such as that the carbon-14 will be evenly distributed so that average exposure over the whole year will be 0.11 millisieverts. That's clearly nonsense.

        How is this average some "ridiculous assumption"? I don't know what form this carbon-14 is taking in the water but I'm assuming it's as dissolved CO2. Given that this is a liquid that will experience mixing from Brownian motion, or perhaps someone giving the water a stir before they ladle out some water to drink, it's pretty safe to assume it's fairly evenly distributed. Why would it not be evenly distributed? Can you explain that?

        A person drinking 2 liters per day of this water would be taking in a lot over the year. Maybe they do get far more in one gulp than another, the carbon-14 will likely at some point reach some kind of steady state in the body.

        According to XKCD 0.11 millisieverts over a year is similar to how much additional radiation someone would get living in a stone, brick, or concrete home.
        https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]

        A mammogram gives four times more radiation than that, and that's over the course of a matter of hours or minutes, not a year. I don't know how a mammogram works exactly, I never had one and I don't plan to.

        Nobody has tried this before so at best the results will be difficult to predict.

        There's been plenty of people exposed to this much radiation, go find them and follow up on how they turned out.

        0.11 millisieverts is also about 10x the normal exposure for a human being and again nobody has done any experiments to see what the long term effects of that are.

        You have that backwards, it's not 10 times the normal exposure, it's more like 1/10th the exposure. In the fine article there's a subject matter expert that points out this additional exposure is insignificant.

        I recall having a conversation in a web forum much like this one with a physician from Ukraine. This was shortly after a documentary on the containment dome over the Chernobyl site was aired on PBS, at least I recall it was PBS. Anyway in the documentary someone made a comment on how the community was seeing so many of the people that worked in the initial cleanup die off every year. Well, no shit Sherlock these people were dying off, that was over 30 years ago and Ukraine was not a healthy place to live even before the Soviets blew the top off a nuclear reactor. According to this physician I was conversing with the working class males in Ukraine, the kind of people that would be called upon to do this cleanup, were already likely to reach an early demise.

        The reason for their short lifespans could not be blamed on the radiation they were exposed to. Unfortunately common among these men were high rates of tobacco use, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse (such as krokodil). Their diet was often poor. If they got enough to eat then it would be high in fat and salt, and low in fresh fruits and vegetables. Many of these people were in the military, and after their discharge they'd often find work as manual labor. This meant a lot of these now middle aged men would die in car accidents, industrial accidents, as victims or perpetrators of crime, in barroom fights, run ins with animals while hunting/farming/ranching/hiking/whatever. Rarely did they die of cancer, and if they did it would be difficult to rule out smoking or exposure to pollution as a cause. Common medical reasons for death would be heart attacks, stroke, liver and kidney damage (from drug and alcohol abuse), suicide, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia, and so on that is, again, typical of all working class Ukrainian men.

        We have seen people with far more exposu

  • Treated Water (Score:4, Interesting)

    by h4x0t ( 1245872 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:38PM (#60644360) Homepage
    This is ridiculous.

    "Ryounosuke Takanori, a spokesperson for TEPCO told CNN in a statement that the concentration of carbon-14 contained in the treated water is about 2 to 220 becquerels per liter, as measured in the water tanks. Takanori said "even if the water is continuously drunk by 2 liters every day, the annual exposure is about 0.001 to 0.11 millisieverts, which is not a level that affects health.""
    • by will_die ( 586523 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:40PM (#60644366) Homepage
      Stop that, I want the powers of a sea spider.
    • "even if the water is continuously drunk by 2 liters every day, the annual exposure is about 0.001 to 0.11 millisieverts, which is not a level that affects health."

      You already get a couple of mSv/year from background radiation, so I wouldn't worry about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Remember that Greenpeace is the same group that wants to ban golden rice.

      • Re:Treated Water (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rossz ( 67331 ) <ogreNO@SPAMgeekbiker.net> on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:37PM (#60644480) Journal

        I used to support Greenpeace. Then it was taken over by the wack jobs who do shit like denounce a crop that will save the eyesight of tens of thousands.

        Their hard-line stance against anything genetically engineered makes them fools.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by WindBourne ( 631190 )
          exactly. I used to support Sierra Club and ACLU. NOT anymore. Both have be come radicalized and really are NOT about what they are supposed to be.
          • I don't know, the ACLU is still kind of great, even if I don't agree with them on everything. They are ardently pro-free-speech.
            • I don't know, the ACLU is still kind of great, even if I don't agree with them on everything. They are ardently pro-free-speech.

              Not quite. They would not defend the peaceful assembly of people speaking out in favor of the right to keep and bear arms.

              The ACLU used to hold that the Second Amendment protected a "collective right", that it protected the right of the states to arm police, state defense forces, and the national guard. This meant they supported the speaking out for states' rights of self defense. After DC v. Heller upheld that the Second Amendment protected the right of the individual to keep and bear arms the ACLU got

    • the concentration of carbon-14 contained in the treated water is about 2 to 220 becquerels per liter

      Okay... except it's Tritium, not Carbon-14, that Greenpeace is protesting. Tritium is the only thing specifically mentioned in the Greenpeace press release [greenpeace.org], though they do also say "all radionuclides."

      The Greenpeace press release is full of hyperventillating, it's not written in a calm manner which inspires confidence in the rational behind their protest. It would be nice to see some third-party opinions on this.

    • Re:Treated Water (Score:4, Informative)

      by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:17PM (#60644576)

      There is no safe dose of radiation.
      All radiation in any quantity has the ability to damage DNA.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by h4x0t ( 1245872 )
        That is stupid. All matter you consume or touch in your life will have some concentration of radioactive isotopes. There is no such thing as a ZERO dose of radiation. You have to give it a number.
        • I'd like that number to be low and not increased by Fukushima overflow

          • Unless you live right next to there, it won't be. This isn't even a blip in terms of background radiation.

            Also, DNA has self-repair, so there is some safe level, because DNA damage happens all the time. Given that this is not going to do anything meaningful to the background radiation, it is not a real cause for concern.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The GP is right, there is no safe level that definitely will never damage your DNA. All you can do is reduce your risk as much as possible and hope you don't get cancer one day.

          So the real question is are you willing to accept that risk on behalf of TEPCO, uncompensated and on the hook for any resulting expenses should it harm you?

      • you started receiving radiation the moment you were conceived and every second since then you have received a continous dose. So while your statement is not wrong, it is also complete FUD.
      • Sea water is slightly radioactive [waterencyclopedia.com]. The question boils down (see what I did there?) to concentrations.

        Good luck with your quest to avoid all radiation. While you're at it, try to avoid all aging.

      • Which basically is an assertion which claims nothing, since we are continually exposed to many forms of radiation from many sources ( and mutagenic effects from other sources like chemicals ). There are areas of the world ( including your basement if you are in coal country ) that have very high natural background radiation (VHNBR) , some of these with indigenous populations whose gene lines have been continually exposed for tens of thousands of years. And, oddly enough, from http://ijrr.com/article-1-1004. [ijrr.com]
      • by Goonie ( 8651 )
        Nobody really knows whether there is a safe dose of radiation or not, and the question is virtually impossible to answer robustly.

        The available data is insufficient to distinguish beyond reasonable doubt whether low levels of radiation have a very small effect on your risk of getting cancer, or zero effect. Distinguishing reliably between "very small effect" and "zero" requires ridiculously large amounts of data. Furthermore, there are a squillion other things that affect your risk of getting cancer.

        By

      • That is not clear at all. Small doses of radiation might even improve your health [discovermagazine.com]. There is some data which supports this hypothesis, and the proposed mechanism is that when the body detects radiation it activates its DNA repair and anti-cancer mechanisms. These mechanisms then repair damage due to other causes, not only the radiation which just arrived.

      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] TL;DR : low level radiation could potentially activate repair mechanism in situation where the repair mechanism would not in absence of radiation.
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        You should really focus on the real problem. Radioactive potassium in you. It should be extracted at all costs, since it's damaging you from inside with radiation.

        Now, you'd obviously die if you did that. Horribly. Potassium is critical for your survival, like many other similar things in life, that include both a necessary and harmful component. Which is why every living cell on the planet has self-repair mechanisms specifically adapted by evolutionary process over billions of years to counter all threats

    • by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Greenpeace said nothing about carbon-14. Greenpeace was complaining about tritium... a much more potent isotope. I can see why TEPCO wants to shift the discussion to carbon-14 but that is irrelevant.

      • Tritium occurs naturally in sea water. If you want to raise an alarm then you must frame it in term of concentrations.

    • The danger of radioactive carbon-14 is that it gets absorbed into the food chain pretty easily and doesn't just go away. Plankton or seabed vegetation can absorb it, which can then get into animals, which can then get into humans. You eat fish with radioactive carbon-14 in its body then your body absorbs that. So now you have radioactive isotopes right next to healthy cells in your body which then exponentially increases your chances of gene mutations and cancer.

      • The danger of radioactive carbon-14 is that it gets absorbed into the food chain pretty easily and doesn't just go away.

        All life forms contain carbon 14. Every 5,730 years, half of it goes away.

        • All life forms contain carbon 14. Every 5,730 years, half of it goes away.

          And everyday more carbon-14 is produced in the upper atmosphere as cosmic and solar radiation bombards the nitrogen in the air.

          Another tidbit, we measure the levels of CO2 in the air that is from fossil fuels by the LACK of carbon-14. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas deep in the earth is not exposed to near the same levels of radiation that produces carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere. By being deep underground for so long the carbon-14 in fossil fuels have all decayed away. If carbon-14 in the environment

      • It's carbon, not one many of the other elements ( like Iodine ) which because of their preferential chemical reactivity have isotopes that bind to certain organs or body tissues, where they can accumulate for an individual, or chemicals like DDT which exhibit similar mechanism. The C-14 in our bodies ( unless you're licking reactor control rods daily) is identical to the atmosphere, and because of global atmospheric circulation (see http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/p... [harvard.edu] from http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/p... [harvard.edu] )
  • by curtis3389 ( 5534388 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:46PM (#60644388)

    This comes from the same idiots that damaged the Nazca Lines for some stunt.

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      This. Greenpeace could claim that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and I'd still get independent confirmation.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:54PM (#60644402)
    seriously, how? Is the other side promoting them to discredit the whole environmentalist movement? Because if so, it's working.
    • exactly.

      THere was a time when environmentalist were about the environment and being sane.
      Now, groups are getting more and more radical, but are screaming for more money because fewer ppl will donate to them.
      • it's just dumb. It's like when we kill the smart terrorist leaders and leave the dumb ones to swim. In hindsight that's probably what's happening here. More effective environmentalist groups are attacked and shut down while idiots like Greenpeace get press releases from AP.
    • There is no other side. Everyone wants to save the environment, it all comes down to cost and who foots the bill.

      No, this is what happens when you send too many people to college. You educate people with books but they never learn to think. As a result, they think they're very smart, and value spectacles and non sequiter arguments and think they're doing good. On top of that, their worldview is so misinformed that they 1) cannot be argued off their platform with real data, because they don't know wh

      • can you?

        There is literally trillions of dollars worth of oil assets that would become near worthless if we switched to renewables. Yeah, not every drop of oil will be junk, but a *lot* of it will because nobody'll bother with anything that isn't cheap and easy to pump and refine.

        Those people who own that couldn't care less about the environment. They're rich enough that the damage won't effect them in their lifetime, and they not good enough people to care. Many of them are super rich mid-east oliga
        • There is literally trillions of dollars worth of oil assets that would become near worthless if we switched to renewables.

          That's why the switch will not happen anytime soon. The best we can hope for is a slow and steady transition over decades.

          Energy is pretty much energy, and fuel is fuel. Whenever we see some claim of X renewable energy source being cheaper than Y fossil fuel there will be a shift in the market to make this difference largely disappear.

          If natural gas gets cheaper then so does electricity that is produced from it. This means more people will buy electric cars instead of a gasoline burner. Lower demand for

  • Why do they bother anymore. Why not just stay in their little compound and isolate themselves... The contaminated water, if released over time and a sufficiently large area will not cause any major issues.
  • by llamahunter ( 830343 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @05:57PM (#60644414)
    The Kuroshio Current flows by the east coast of Japan (and Fukushima) at a rate of approximately 25 million metric tons PER SECOND. Most of the water at fukushima is only mildly radioactive, and if released over the course of a few months would be further diluted by more than another 7-8 orders of magnitude to inconsequential levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:04PM (#60644430)
    Doesn't sunlight also contain radiation that could alter our DNA?

    I'm all for protecting the environment but Greenpeace has been publicly crapping on the environmentalism view point for decades. It's the same as politics these days, everyone goes directly to the most extreme case even though we know for a fact that people will always reject extreme change.
    • Yeah but melanoma is no joke.
    • So does sitting inside of a burning house.
      And that's just as relevant as your sunlight statement.

      "It's still a house! What are they going to do?
      Ban sitting in houses? Ban fire? Ban houses? Ban sitting?"

    • Doesn't sunlight also contain radiation that could alter our DNA?

      Can and does. Fortunately, our DNA is designed to repair itself.

      • by comm2k ( 961394 )

        ... our DNA is designed to repair itself.

        Our DNA, or DNA in general does not repair itself. There are specialized enzymes that detect damaged/broken parts and specifically repair those parts. DNA on its own would just continue getting damaged without them.

    • by bidule ( 173941 )

      Bananas is the new killer weapon.

      https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]

  • Greenpeace. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:10PM (#60644440)
    Is just another way of saying "Hi I'm stupid and don't really understand how anything really works."
  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:47PM (#60644500) Homepage

    Bananas can alter human DNA. (High potassium = high radioactivity)

    Silly statement unrelated to truth.

    This water was always going to end up in the ocean. Can't put the genie back in the bottle.

    Horrible disaster can not be solved by wishful thinking.

  • by maiden_taiwan ( 516943 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:17PM (#60644578)

    Top 3 benefits of releasing the radioactive water:

    3. Gives conspiracy theorists something new to talk about post-Trump.

    2. Produces a new source of "miracle water" cures to be hawked by sketchy websites.

    1. In a word: Godzilla.

  • by presearch ( 214913 ) on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:36PM (#60644624)

    Regardless of the water's nucleotide content or Greenpeace's statement, how is Tepco running out of storage space?
    The prefecture is all but abandoned. There should be room to store 1000s times more water.
    Build a road, lay a concrete slab, store the casks, repeat as needed.

    Seems like they just don't want to spend the money any more.
    That is historically not the best motivating factor in regards to public health.

    • If you boil the water, send the steam (optionally via a a long settling tank) to a condenser, you get clean H2O out the other end, which you can then pour down the drain.

      The remaining crud-filled water in the boiler can go to an existing storage tank, to be kept for a gazillion half-lives or so. Along with a couple of radioactive boilers.

  • The sun, radon gas, all sorts of things from the natural environment are ionizing radiation that damages molecular bonds. Without proper context this is just scare propaganda. Shame on greenpeace for going there.

    • by robbak ( 775424 )

      Don't forget naturally created C14, which is created by UV light acting on Carbon in CO2 molecules in the air. You just ate, breathed in, and out, a portion of C14.

  • Where have I heard that before... oh yeah the wacka doddle Rick Wiles claimed meatless burgers would change human DNA and make a race of soulless creatures unable of being born again?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Here is a chance for normally opposed organizations; Greenpeace and Fundi Chrisitans could find some common ground... Radiation and Meatless Burger are creating a race of soulless creatures.

  • Or are we just supposed to believe it because Greenpeace says so?
  • This is the sort of garbage that discredits organizations like greenpeace. you would think that they would have a few people with a couple of brain cells to rub together to say "hang on, do we really want to publically say this?"
  • Flying exposes you to a ton of radiation, relatively speaking. They should ban flying if they care so much about radiation exposure.

  • Did you know that bananas are radio active? So are rocks, Greenpeace forgot that these also change your DNA. In fact your body generates positrons from potassium decay and these generate gamma rays which destroy DNA. So why aren't we all dying from cancer or turning into mutants?

  • by mridoni ( 228377 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @02:54AM (#60645494)

    There's only one way to know: get TEPCO executives and their families to drink and use this water for their daily needs for the next 12-18 months, then ask them again.

  • To Greenpeace if you're not dead you're the problem
  • What will it do to cat DNA? Probably nothing. Suspicious if you ask me.

  • This how every good Godzilla monster movie starts.

  • Wow! Once an organization actually succeeds, they go senile.

    We now have a common understanding the need for clean environment, and humane treatment of animals. So "normal" people no longer spend time in these organizations.

    What we are left with are some crazies that attack every random thing, and cruel people that operate "kill shelters" that put down most of the animals rescued.

    Maybe it is time we shut these down.

  • Considering the frequency of natural disasters, it definitely sounds dangerous to maintain a huge amount of radioactive water on site forever. If it was all released at once it would be a huge contamination of the coast.

    Personally though I would rather NOT having it dumped at all, not in the ocean or a mine. It would be better if it could be solidified and stored somewhere that it can be monitored.

    Is there an alternative such as dissociating away the oxygen and hydrogen so we are only left with solid carbon

  • by drwho ( 4190 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @03:42PM (#60647544) Homepage Journal

    These people have long abandoned logic, science, and reason. Please don't give them any more money.

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