Japan Says Seawater Radioactivity Below Limits Near Fukushima (reuters.com) 113
Reuters reports:
Tests of seawater near Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant have not detected any radioactivity, the environment ministry said on Sunday, days after authorities began discharging into the sea treated water used to cool damaged reactors.
Japan started releasing water from the wrecked Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, sparking protests in Japan and neighbouring countries, in particular China, which banned aquatic product imports from Japan.
Japan and scientific organisations say the water is safe after being filtered to remove most radioactive elements except for tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Because tritium is difficult to separate from water, the Fukushima water is diluted until tritium levels fall below regulatory limits.
The ministry's tests of samples from 11 points near the plant showed concentrations of tritium below the lower limit of detection — 7 to 8 becquerels of tritium per litre, the ministry said, adding that it "would have no adverse impact on human health and the environment". Monitoring would be carried out "with a high level of objectivity, transparency, and reliability" to prevent adverse impacts on Japan's reputation, Environment Minister Akihiro Nishimura said in a statement.
Japan started releasing water from the wrecked Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, sparking protests in Japan and neighbouring countries, in particular China, which banned aquatic product imports from Japan.
Japan and scientific organisations say the water is safe after being filtered to remove most radioactive elements except for tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Because tritium is difficult to separate from water, the Fukushima water is diluted until tritium levels fall below regulatory limits.
The ministry's tests of samples from 11 points near the plant showed concentrations of tritium below the lower limit of detection — 7 to 8 becquerels of tritium per litre, the ministry said, adding that it "would have no adverse impact on human health and the environment". Monitoring would be carried out "with a high level of objectivity, transparency, and reliability" to prevent adverse impacts on Japan's reputation, Environment Minister Akihiro Nishimura said in a statement.
Tritium (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily tritium has a really short half-life (about 12 years), so it's pretty much a non-issue at the concentrations they're maintaining.
Re:Tritium (Score:5, Funny)
that all it takes to make 1 godzilla
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A first gen 1956 Godzilla, a 1984, or a 2016?
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Even worse, a 1998 Godzilla.
https://collider.com/godzilla-... [collider.com]
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Even wikipedia says not to ingest it. (Score:2)
you might just happen to it the fish that ingested the tritium.
Re:Even wikipedia says not to ingest it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fish have been ingesting undetectable amounts of tritium for ever. Nothing has changed now.
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sushi.
fukushima sushi leaves you a warm glow all over
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I sold 110 bitcoins for $600 in 2011. I'm sensitive to such things lol.
Of course it is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Climate change is a real threat.
Covid is less of a threat. The reaction to it was overblown. Masks made sense. The lockdowns mostly didn't. Keeping kids out of school beyond the first few months was idiotic. We'll be paying the price for that for a long time. We've normalized truancy [economist.com].
Re:Of course it is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Of course it is (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sydney decided to go all pentecostal because of Scott Morrison and Berejiklian, and resisted going into lockdown or mandating masks. They spread the secon
Re: Of course it is (Score:3)
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What 'natural immunity'?
You need to establish that something exists BEFORE you rely on it.
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It prevented the population from developing natural immunity
It didn't, because it didn't prevent the population from contracting COVID. It only slowed down the spread, and thus slowed down the process of developing immunity through exposure. This was valid because the process of developing immunity through exposure has a body count much higher than the process of developing immunity through vaccination.
Just slowing things down seemed to work best.
Yes, that's what they did. It worked best. No doubt they are thankful for your validation.
Re: Of course it is (Score:2)
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There's nothing special about natural immunity.
No, there is! It's less effective at avoiding harm than being vaccinated, because in the former case you have to be exposed to the active virus before your immune system has been trained to defend against it. That's "special" in my book, as in you have to be "special" to think it's a good idea.
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Re: Of course it is (Score:2)
I'm wearing a mask right now because we had 3-4 cases in the office and that's our policy.
COVID is on the rise right now, so masking is a good idea right now.
Of course if the masking helps then this surge won't be big and then the anti maskers and anti vaxxers will both say it wasn't necessary, with no acknowledgement of the part it played in keeping the surge mild.
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My sister works as a taxi dispatch in a fairly large metropolitan area. They serve the airports and are probably about as strong a vector for COVID as anything else in America
We all (sister lives with mother, I visit them regularly as well as my three grown children) got very sick in February of 2020 and then masked up in March/April time frame, until the first two rounds of vaccine went out
My sister only got the first vaccine, while my mom (91 year old ex teacher with a ridiculously effective immune system
Re:Of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that it completely eliminated 2 entire flu seasons and may have driven one major flu strain to extinction indicates that lockdowns, masks, hand hygiene and distancing, even to the half-baked level that humanity managed, were highly effective.
But covid was so bad that it caused serious problems anyway.
Re:Of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of lockdowns wasn't to stop the pandemic, it was to slow it enough to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Remember "flatten the curve"? The *area under the curve* doesn't change -- the same total number of people would stillget it, but not so many at the same time people were dying because they couldn't get medical attention.
There's a spectrum of certainly that run from *clearly* justified because the lockdowns came too late to prevent near collapse of the health system (New York City), to places where you reasonably debate one way or the other, to places where it seems pretty clear there was overreaction (China, where you can find both too little/to late and too much/too late).
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Lockdowns, if done right, would have stopped COVID in its tracks, ensuring that it would run its course in individuals and fade out. However, what happened is that with lockdowns, businesses have to run. Other governments paid businesses and kept them going. Some governments paid individuals their salary, just so they wouldn't lose everything. However, without that financial pressure, lockdowns became a choice between COVID or being bankrupt and thrown in the streets. A lot of bigger businesses in the
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I work at a bio-tech company that has been involved in Covid response/research
By late April 2020 I was still going into the office, but wearing a mask whenever I was going to be around people
One afternoon, I was exiting the bathroom, when the CEO (a famous researcher), looked surprised at my mask and asked if I had been exposed.
I related that I had to go into a big-box store, and was confronted with multiple people coughing without covering their mouths, and that my expectation was that it was already out o
Re:Of course it is (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate change is a real threat.
This would be far more convincing if people treated global warming like an actual threat. People such as those that scream the loudest on the problem. If there's a solution proposed that isn't "green enough" then they get all upset and scream louder. We'd do a lot on lowering CO2 if we'd build some natural gas pipelines. That means less coal burned for heat and electricity, and less petroleum burned trying to ship LNG. That's not ideal but we don't always get to choose what is ideal, sometimes to move the ball to the goal some compromises need to happen along the way. That might even include taking one step back to make two steps forward later.
The bullshit fears over radiation from nuclear power is most frustrating. We need nuclear power or the lights go out. I'm sure there's people that would be happy with the lights going out, or they would be happy until they realize that by letting the lights go out then they won't have their internet, their food, their heat, or so many other necessities and conveniences.
I'm reading good news on nuclear power and the screams of horror from the anti-science eco-banshees is music to my ears. They will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world they at least claim they want. They protest nuclear power as if that is a greater threat than global warming. If these morons prefer global warming to nuclear power then they will be ignored. There's a third option, and that is the lights going out. Because even these eco-banshees will eventually realize that they don't want the lights going out the end result is more nuclear power. They will scream about how they don't like nuclear power but back them in a corner and they will choose nuclear power over the lights going out.
We solved the problem of global warming, and nuclear power is an essential part of that solution, and the largest obstacle to the solution are the very banshees that scream the loudest about global warming. Just shut up and get out of the way so the adults in the room can get some work done.
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Biggest problem with global warming response is that very large companies have become wealthy selling fossil fuels
These same companies would rather fight (via propaganda , buying politicians, etc...) than not make as much money anymore
They will lie about global warming, they will lie about nuclear power, they will lie about anything that they see as a risk to continuing to make money as they have been
We need to purge our political landscape from anybody who acts to support the fossil fuel industries of we a
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Biggest problem with global warming response is that very large companies have become wealthy selling fossil fuels
They'd stop selling fossil fuels if there was no profit in it.
We need to purge our political landscape from anybody who acts to support the fossil fuel industries of we are going to stave off global warming
Why does this have to involve politics? Create alternatives to fossil fuels that are lower in CO2 emissions and lower in cost and people will naturally gravitate to them. It might not even take being cheaper than fossil fuels to be successful since people appear quite willing to pay extra for alternatives to fossil fuels because they want to see their own CO2 emissions lowered. People are willing to give up on fossil fuels but not to the point
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Nah, lockdowns worked well in my province, in fact they worked so well we *almost* managed to keep Covid totally at bay for months...except that a there's too many rich assholes who had to fly all over the world and break protocols and kept bringing it back here. It did completely flatten the curve here, allowing us to get almost everyone vaccinated before they lifted restrictions (at which point it rolled right through the entire population, but the vaccine meant it was not as bad).
Better lockdowns would h
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I would argue that the initial reaction to it was just right, because we literally had no idea how bad it could be, and we needed to "flatten the curve" to keep our systems from being totally overwhelmed.
Where the "overblown" reaction came in I think has more to do with the relevant experts and agencies having to fight back against the stupider elements of society. In order to achieve a reasonable level of control on the spread to keep from running out of beds and supplies, those of us who understood the sc
Re: Of course it is (Score:5, Informative)
One of the best ideas Iâ(TM)ve seen on what to do with nuclear waste was published in Scientific American in the early 1980â(TM)s. They found an area of seabed that was geologically stable where nothing has happened there in hundreds of thousands of years. The area has hundreds of feet of silt as well. They proposed putting it in containers under a few hundred feet of silt where it will sit there undisturbed for another few hundred thousand years.
Re: Of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fine. Go build your new civilization. Follow the golden rule that those most qualified to do something can't be trusted because they are experts. And we'll check in 2 years from now and see how it's going.
I wonder if you would hold your oncologist to such scrutiny.
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Even air provides plenty of protection from tritium.
It decays to He3 by emitting an 18.6 KeV electron.
Many power stations run at higher voltages than that.
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Air is moderately good protection from such a low energy beta decay, and your clothing is even better protection from beta particles. But all this assumes you haven't ingested tritium.
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Throwing it in the silt in a deep ocean also ensures that some future civilization will have to have some tech savvy in digging it up. It won't just come out of a cave, be brought to the local village and kill everyone.
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With a 12.3 year half-life I assume you mean future civ as in 100 years? After 123 years the activity will be down by a factor of 1024. Far less than one atom decaying in a liter of water per second.
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The "bury it in the silt" proposal is for general nuclear waste, not specifically tritium.
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Yes. People forget or are too clueless to know that two of the best shields for radioactivity are salt and water.
Huh? Not really much better than anything else.
Pretty much any mass between you and the beta emitter is effective shielding. Water, dirt, aluminum foil, old copies of the New York Times, whatever.
The main point is that there is very little tritium, and millions of tons of water, so it's diluted into levels less than the natural radiation that's around us anyway..
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*pshaw*
Is water a good blocker of radiation? [calpoly.edu]
Currently, NASA and other space agencies plan on using water as a shield against radiation since it is already necessary for human missions. Water has been tested thoroughly and has been proven to be effective.
Does water block radiation? [quora.com]
Saying hydrogen is a good moderator means that the hydrogen nuclei in water scatter fast neutrons elastically and so reduce their energy very effectively. In fact, both ordinary hydrogen and oxygen can scatter fast neutrons elastic
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Different radiation.
We're talking here about blocking radiation from tritium, which is beta radiation: relatively low-energy electrons. The first article is about blocking space radiation, primarily protons (trapped particles) and high-energy heavy nuclei (cosmic rays)... but the actual tests were against blocking gammas. In any case, none of them were shielding against beta radiation. And water was not "one of the best," but was right in the middle of the materials he tested.
The second article you quote
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Re:Of course it is (Score:4, Interesting)
shitty people are shitty, damnation to the science. this week china banned japanese seafood [msn.com] and japanese establishments in china are facing harrasment & vandalism [nhk.or.jp]
Re:Of course it is (Score:5, Insightful)
shitty people are shitty, damnation to the science. this week china banned japanese seafood [msn.com] and japanese establishments in china are facing harrasment & vandalism [nhk.or.jp]
China is totally aware of the science. It's just using the tritium release to score political points against Japan.
Re: Of course it is (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Of course it is (Score:3)
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Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Common sense is as rare as genius.” So no, expecting the application of common sense to nuclear power is to hope for too much.
You've also ignored the little matter of the long term disposal of nuclear waste; the hard stuff is very very nasty.
Re: Of course it is (Score:5, Informative)
And you've just demonstrated Ralph Waldo Emerson's accuracy with your comment about disposal. The key thing to remember is that what makes radioactive waste dangerous is how much energy that waste is emitting. More energy = more danger. After you realize that, you need to understand what half-life means as regards energy output, and how long the stuff sticks around being dangerous due to radioactivity (heavy metals are still dangerous, but not due to radioactivity).
Short half-life = stuff decays rapidly, giving off a lot of energy. But, due to the short half-life, it doesn't stick around for long.
Long half-life = stuff decays slowly, releasing little energy. But, it will stick around for a long time.
Unfortunately, knee-jerk anti-nuke idiots conflate the two. They panic over the danger of short half-life substances while claiming the danger lasts for the duration of the long half-life substances. The old "OMG! This stuff is dangerous and will last for tens of thousands of years! Think of the children!"
Please search for and read the essay "Know Nukes" before you spew more ignorant ravings in the future.
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That is too simplistic.
If you have a very large amount of waste with a long half life, it can be dangerous due to the shear amount of it resulting in more energy being released.
It also depends how you are exposed. Inside or outside your body? For how long?
The tritium being discharged here is probably safe, but we still have to be very careful to make sure other waste from the plant isn't released too.
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OK. You seem to be missing the point. You're confusing quantity with intensity. So, I'll give an example.
Which is more dangerous to touch?
A red hot steel needle, or a bathtub full of hot water suitable for bathing?
Now, which of the above has the most absolute thermal energy?
As for me, I wouldn't want to touch that needle, although the total amount of energy is greater in the bathtub.
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Your analogy is flawed because the risk from tritium is to do with the length and type of exposure. This is my point, you can't over-simply it or make flawed analogies to understand the risk.
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You're an idiot, because there is no risk from tritium exposure. Zero, null, nada. You can drink water with tritium, you probably do on a regular basis. Super-heavy water (tritiated water), which is water that has extremely high levels of tritium is commonly used in the sciences to do things like tracing water flows both inside the human body and in large bodies of water, it leaves the body in about 7-14 days through urination. Fukushima waters are nowhere near completely tritiated.
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Tritium is a relatively weak source of beta radiation, which itself is too weak to penetrate the skin and the material not have any chemically toxic side effects. You would have to ingest massive amounts of it in order to have a slightly higher cancer risk. We're talking about a few picograms of tritium in the thousands of liters of stored water which will be dumped into the millions of liters that makes up the local waters which is just a small part of the 1.335 billion cubic kilometers estimated water tot
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What part of "The tritium being discharged here is probably safe" confused you?
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The ‘probably’ and all the statements before that.
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You've also ignored the little matter of the long term disposal of nuclear waste; the hard stuff is very very nasty.
You've ignored all the evidence of this being a solved problem. Disposing of nuclear waste safely and securely is far easier than trying to keep the world's human population healthy and happy without nuclear power.
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Protesting is an industry seeking income (Score:1)
By getting excited about this issue, the green campaigners will get money into their bank accounts. Some of them might even feel guilty at deceiving the scientifically illiterate public over the issue, but will probably argue that if their organisation didn't do this campaign, another one would and they'd get the money instead of my organisation. 'Of course my organisation will spend this money on projects that are fully justified by the science...' will also be offered as a means of self justification.
Re:Of course it is (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd take a gallon of that water, at IAEA level "negligible" levels over what pollution is in a lot of water, in other places. Mercury lasts a lot longer and has a lot more of a toxic effect than tritium at these low concentrations.
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Drinking a gallon of seawater rarely ends well for anyone, radiation or not.
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Would you drink a gallon of that water?
No, but I'd swim in a pool of it. Close enough? I would not drink from a swimming pool either but I'd drink water from it if processed like most any municipal water supply would be. Dump that water into the local municipal water processing plant and I'd drink it.
Re: Of course it is (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'd drink a gallon of that water after it has been distilled or processed through reverse osmosis to remove the salt and other substances.
Although, if you're afraid of radiation, I'd suggest you stop eating immediately. Virtually everything you eat is radioactive to some degree. In fact, anything that you eat that is derived directly or indirectly from plants is radioactive. That means plants, animals that eat plants, animals that eat animals that eat plants, etc. So, you're gonna have a real hard time finding anything to eat if you wish to avoid radiation. As for the reason everything you eat is radioactive? That's simple. It's called carbon-14 and it's produced continuously in our atmosphere via cosmic rays and taken up by plants. Hope that high energy electron produced via beta decay doesn't cause any damage to your DNA, causing cancer. In any case, have a good day and enjoy that recycled urine that you call water. Trust me, there's plenty of recycled piss in every glass.
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While I happen to believe the IAEA evaluation that this will pose no significant risk to people or ecosystems, no amount of general science background can allow you to make a reliable snap judgment about a thing like that. Details and specifics matter. A lot of the high school science reasoning people use to leap to conclusions one way or the other is actually faulty, although of course it always sounds "scientific".
For example you often hear that because tritium is a beta emitter, and beta particles are s
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It can, for example, bioaccumulate after being converted into organically bound tritium by plants and algae.
Tritium occurs naturally so if tritium bio-accumulation was a problem then we'd have likely detected that by now. Because this has not been seen yet it is far more likely that with time the tritium will dilute in the sea, and the sea is a large place for artificially produced tritium to hide among naturally occurring tritium.
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It can, for example, bioaccumulate after being converted into organically bound tritium by plants and algae.
Tritium occurs naturally
Not enough to matter.
A trivial amount of tritium can be produced by cosmic rays, but the amount is pretty much too small to measure.
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Tritiated water occurs naturally as a result of cosmic radiation, but in negligible quantities -- about 1 in 10^18 water molecules is naturally tritiated. If OBTs *did* bioaccumulate, you wouldn't expect to see significant effects *because there's not enough tritium in the system to produce those effects before the tritium leaves the food chain*, either by nuclear decay or biochemical processes.
We're talking about tritium levels 10,000x the natural baseline. That's still not very much, but you can't safel
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Again, this is exactly what I said.
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Tritium is almost chemically indistinguishable from hydrogen. A biological process that would be able to separate and accumulate tritium is very, very improbable.
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Slashdot commenters don't bother to check (Score:2)
their thoughts before quickly trying to get the first post.
Even checking wikipedia could be elevating for some commenters here.
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You only hear from the ones who didn't.
They wont listen to the ones who did. Ask me how I know.
Still No (Score:1)
How can you trust a country that still kills whales while saying it's for "research"? Call a donkey a donkey, don't slap another label on it to confuse people. That said, they might mean something else by saying "safe" in this context.
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You know the US still hunts whales right?
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Yes. To honor and carry on their tribal traditions.
Nice .50 caliber rifle you've got there, chief.
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American natives typically kill several hundred beluga, which are not tracked by the ITC, in addition to the 40-70 bowheads that are.
Japan claims the same reasons for their whaling: food, tradition and culture. Per capita, Japanese take far fewer whales than American natives.
If you're going to do ridiculous things like the OP and indict an entire nation for something like whaling, be intellectually honest about it.
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How can you trust a country
No one is trusting a country. The release of the waste water is done under the approval and supervision of the IAEA. No one country is involved here, and no one country is being trusted here.
I'll leave it to someone else to point out your entire post is a strawman fallacy, but even if it weren't, it's just silly.
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I can't tell if you're being silly or not. Besides the fact that these things have NOTHING to do with each other, directly, tangentially, or even emotionally, pointing out that "a country" does any one thing as a cohesive unit is inherently... dumb. There's no need to extend your logic any further to reach a conclusion that no country can be trusted on any topic, ever. How can you trust the Canadians on maple syrup production? Some of their Inuit population kills baby seals.
I think it's unlikely in the extr
Shame ... (Score:2)
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The price is like $30,000 per gram and it still wasn't profitable to extract? That is a really low concentration.
Re: Shame ... (Score:5, Funny)
$30,000 per gram? That's rather impressive. So if they managed to extract all the tritium from that contaminated water, they could sell it for an astounding $63,000. The issue is that the total amount of tritium there is only 2.1 grams, which can produce 14 mL of pure tritiated water, which in turn is mixed with 860,000 cubic meters of water. Yea, not economically viable to extract.
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Analog watches too.
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Below limits set by whom ? Oh yeah, the people releasing the waste water.
Nope. Maybe you shouldn't comment about something you know nothing about.
Doesn't matter. (Score:2)
The complaints about this action are not coming from scientific analysis, and because of that, they cannot be swayed by it. It's an emotional objection, and honestly from that perspective it's an understandable one. Lots of people find the idea of drinking recycled, purified sewage water upsetting, no matter how clean you prove that water to be.
So, pay "some" attention to providing enough details to assuage the fears of those who are on the fence... but write off the people who won't be convinced no matter
Did the math and... (Score:1)
Random tests by NRC (Score:2)
NRC tests are never random. Radioactivity tests always taken exact same location. More good news for you