As Fukushima Releases Treated Radioactive Water, Inspections Started by Atomic Energy Agency (apnews.com) 68
In August the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant started releasing treated radioactive wastewater into the sea — a process they plan to continue for decades.
Now the International Atomic Energy Agency has sent a team to sample the water near the plant. And the Associated Press reports that a team member "said Thursday he does not expect any rise in radiation levels in the fish caught in the regional seas." The IAEA team watched flounder and other popular kinds of fish being caught off the coast earlier Thursday and brought on boats to the Hisanohama port in southern Fukushima for an auction. "I can say that we don't expect to see any change starting in the fish," said Paul McGinnity, an IAEA marine radiology scientist.
A small rise in the levels of tritium, which cannot be removed from the Fukushima Daiichi wastewater by the plant's treatment system called ALPS, is possible in locations close to the discharge points, but the levels of radioactivity are expected to be similar to those measured before the discharge last year, he said... The IAEA has reviewed the safety of the wastewater release and concluded in July that if carried out as planned, it would have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health. During the Oct. 16-23 visit, the IAEA team also inspected the collection and processing of seawater and marine sediment near the plant...
The sampling work will be followed by a separate IAEA task force that will review the safety of the treated radioactive water...
Tokyo Electric Power Company and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks will reach their 1.37 million-ton capacity next year and space at the plant will be needed for its decommissioning, which is expected to take decades, if it is achievable at all. They say the water is treated to reduce radioactive materials to safe levels, and then is diluted with seawater by hundreds of times to make it much safer than international standards. Some experts say such long-term release of low-dose radioactivity is unprecedented and requires close monitoring.
Now the International Atomic Energy Agency has sent a team to sample the water near the plant. And the Associated Press reports that a team member "said Thursday he does not expect any rise in radiation levels in the fish caught in the regional seas." The IAEA team watched flounder and other popular kinds of fish being caught off the coast earlier Thursday and brought on boats to the Hisanohama port in southern Fukushima for an auction. "I can say that we don't expect to see any change starting in the fish," said Paul McGinnity, an IAEA marine radiology scientist.
A small rise in the levels of tritium, which cannot be removed from the Fukushima Daiichi wastewater by the plant's treatment system called ALPS, is possible in locations close to the discharge points, but the levels of radioactivity are expected to be similar to those measured before the discharge last year, he said... The IAEA has reviewed the safety of the wastewater release and concluded in July that if carried out as planned, it would have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health. During the Oct. 16-23 visit, the IAEA team also inspected the collection and processing of seawater and marine sediment near the plant...
The sampling work will be followed by a separate IAEA task force that will review the safety of the treated radioactive water...
Tokyo Electric Power Company and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks will reach their 1.37 million-ton capacity next year and space at the plant will be needed for its decommissioning, which is expected to take decades, if it is achievable at all. They say the water is treated to reduce radioactive materials to safe levels, and then is diluted with seawater by hundreds of times to make it much safer than international standards. Some experts say such long-term release of low-dose radioactivity is unprecedented and requires close monitoring.
Are they testing the fish? (Score:1, Troll)
Are they testing the fish, cause if they're not then their statements are entirely specious.
Re:Are they testing the fish? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they're testing the fish. From TFA:
"IAEA selected six species of fish — olive flounder, crimson sea bream, redwing searobin, Japanese jack mackerel, silver croaker and vermiculated puffer fish — because they are known to have higher levels of radioactivity than other species due to the areas they tend to move around in, McGinnity said.
The Japanese government asked the IAEA to conduct the environmental and fish sampling to build confidence about the data that Japan provides amid skepticism in some IAEA member states, McGinnity said without identifying which countries."
we just test for godzilla and if not found it pass (Score:2)
we just test for godzilla and if not found it's an pass
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we just test for godzilla and if not found it's an pass
That sounds like an excellent idea.
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Are they testing the fish
Are you reading the article, cause if you're not you posts will appear quite ignorant and silly.
And they do.
Why not T into the atmosphere ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Why not T into the atmosphere ? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a matter of scale. At Fukushima they have over 1.25 MILLION METRIC TONS of water that's contaminated by less than 20 grams of tritium. The amount of energy required to electrolyze that amount of water is huge. Call it about 4.6 million megawatt hours. Not exactly practical. Remember, it takes about 13.2 mega joules of power to electrolyze just one liter of water and I suspect the releases you mentioned were for far smaller quantities.
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It would be more practical to filter it out of the water, but also much more expensive. The Fukushima disaster is already a huge drag on public finances (TEPCO taking advantage of the free government insurance they got as a subsidy) and they decided it would be cheaper to simply compensate the businesses affected by the release than to avoid damaging them in the first place.
It's not an unreasonable position. The issue is that the people affected have to apply for compensation, and in Japan that's typically
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Since water contains hydrogen atoms (as opposed to gas molecules), and the tritium (we can ignore the deuterium - it's stability is similar to hydrogen) got into it as individual atoms (not molecules), then the tritium will be moving around as trit-oxide (tritium-equivalent of hydroxide OH-) and tritium-hydronium (tritiated hydronium, H3O+) in the water, interacting an moving every few femtoseconds. Good luck filtering t
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28675844/ (2017) ... Abstract : "The recent use of the reverse osmosis (RO) process at the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant generated a growing interest in the application of this process for decontamination purposes." ... "The scale up to a 2.6 m2 spiral wound membrane led to equivalent retentions (around 96% for Cs and 99% for Sr) " ...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264728934_Radioactive_Liquid_Waste_Treatment_at_Fukushi
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Might have something to do with the fact they're dealing with 1.37 million tons of wastewater...
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"As of 2000, commercial demand for tritium is 400 grams (0.88 lb) per year[11] and the cost is $30,000 per gram "
And you are throwing it out?
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Yeah, I don't know why. It might not be in a usable form, but we release it into the atmosphere on dry hot windless days.
It's because it's mixed in with a million+ tons of water.
If there was an easy way to separate it out they would have done that.
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"As of 2000, commercial demand for tritium is 400 grams (0.88 lb) per year[11] and the cost is $30,000 per gram "
And you are throwing it out?
Because it's mixed in with a million+ tons of water.
You're free to buy it all from them and try to get it out if you like.
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Well, if the cost to isolate trace amounts of tritium from megatons of waste water is more than $30k per gram, then it would make little sense to try, wouldn't it? Furthermore, one could expect that the commercial market for tritium is fairly stable: there is a certain amount of demand, and there are supplies to meet it. If we dump the Fukushima tritium into that market, the price will drop, and then the extraction process would make even less sense.
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Because electrolysing 1.25 million fucktons of water will take an equivalent fuckton of energy. Your little toy lab does not scale well.
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Hydrogen gas released into the atmosphere does not immediately waft into space. It circulates in the atmosphere for a time (several years), and is quite happy to react with whatever it encounters along the way. The higher in the atmosphere it goes, the more likely the diatomic H2 molecule is to get broken by a UV
Unprecedented? (Score:5, Funny)
Haven’t they heard of homeopathy?
Re: Unprecedented? (Score:2)
So Japanese seawater will be great for treating sunburn, how much for a bottle?
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Wait a few months, and get some seawater from the South Atlantic. It will be even more powerful at treating sunburn.
Super clean water (Score:2)
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You could, and your exposure increase would be negligible... but people have been trained for a long time now to hear the word 'radiation' and panic.
Which, honestly, isn't the worst thing given that you can't expect everyone to know everything and make informed decisions based on statistical analysis. I'd rather have people fear radiation than treat it as benign.
On the other hand, I'm going to guess that since they're diluting the output with seawater, you'd eventually die because drinking salt water is re
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Tritium is highly radioactive. Harmless on your skin, but just one milligram ingested is enough to kill you.
Fukushima has 20g in a million tons of water, so you'd need to drink something like 50 tons of water to get a lethal dose, based on my back-of-envelope maths.
Drinking 50 litres would give a non-zero risk of cancer. So I would not want it piped to my house, but drinking a few glasses, or eating a few fish farmed in the tanks, would be harmless.
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but drinking a few glasses, or eating a few fish farmed in the tanks, would be harmless.
That is neither how radioactivity nor cancer works.
A single - what ever particle - can go so far that it affects millions of cells.
It is a question of statistics / likelihoods. That is why all radiation limits are so low.
You are at a point where it gets statistically irrelevant for the population, but that does not mean it is harmless.
If it only hits 25 from 100million, but you hospitals can not figure that this was the
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The problem is that water is full with fission products and their decay products and fuel, aka Uranium and Plutonium.
Uh, no! Where on earth did you get that idea?? The water has been filtered. It is pure water, but some of that water is a bit heavy. ,over many years. The phrase "a drop in the ocean" comes to mind.
Uranium, BTW is barely radioactive at all. While the Pacific contains only 8kg of tritium, it contains literally billions of tons of uranium.
And Japan is releasing 20 grams of tritium
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The water was not filtered.
It flooded the remains of the reactos and got gathered in open pools.
Uranium, BTW is barely radioactive at all.
You mean this Element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ???
Just wondering if we are talking about the same problem.
Main problem with Uranium is: if it gets into your body it is highly chemically active.
And if you have a few micro grams of any radioactive element in your body: it does not really matter what you think "is not very radioactive" means. Hint: it most certainl
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The water was not filtered.
It is. I know English is not your first language Angelo, but try reading. Even the most critical people complain about the quality of the filtering, not the lack.
Long half life means low radio-activity. Tritium is years, uranium billions of years, linear relationship, so billions of times less active.
But if you spent half as much time reading as you do posting, you'd know that.
> problem with Uranium is: if it gets into your body it is highly chemically active.
Yes, it is a heavy metal. Angelo is starti
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Long half life means low radio-activity.
It means relatively low and in relation to stuff that is not radioactive at all: it is highly radioactive.
Yes, it is a heavy metal. Angelo is starting to get this.
So is everything aboved Lithium, if you ask an Astronomer.
Or everything above Aluminium if you ask a Chemistriest.
The rest of your rant is simply completely swrong.
The deadly does after 5 years for dogs is about 40mg Plutonium per kg body mass.
Does not matter if something is radioactive or high radioactive
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Sigh, the Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with this one!
Does not know the difference between uranium and radium. Only six orders of magnitude difference in radiation level!
Keeps asserting nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Since the water is so clean, why donâ(TM)t they use it for drinking water?
An excellent question. I thought I might look for what is an allowable concentration of tritium in drinking water in the USA and found this from the US NRC: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML102... [nrc.gov]
It turns out the document is out of Canada but... whatever, close enough. If it's on the US NRC website then I guess it is something the US government uses as a standard.
I tried looking for a useful number in the document and then quickly realized I might have to spend an hour calculating out the conversions from what
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Since the water is so clean, why donâ(TM)t they use it for drinking water?
An excellent question. I thought I might look for what is an allowable concentration of tritium in drinking water in the USA and found this from the US NRC: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML102... [nrc.gov]
I tried looking for a useful number in the document and then quickly realized I might have to spend an hour calculating out the conversions from what is in the document to what is known about the water from Fukushima. If someone wants to do that math and post their results then I'd appreciate it.
Not much calculation required.
From the document you linked to (thanks!): the guideline dose is 7610 Bq/L (pg. 4)
From here [nature.com]: the level of radiation in the treated water is ~1500 Bq/L
Ergo, it's (relatively) safe to drink...
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You're do it wrong. You're not supposed to react with thought and analysis, backed up by independent data. You're meant to run in circles, scream and shout. Didn't you get the memo?
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OTOH, putting it into something that would consume the water and fix it into something that would stay put for ... 1300 years (10 half-lives of tritium).
So ... build an artificial peat bog. Or grow a small forest? Or even, use it to turn cement powder and aggregate into concrete for long-term infrastructure. Self-shielding too.
Radiation is pretty much everywhere (Score:3)
I don't trust corporations to respect the environment or public safety more than their balance sheet, but in under close watch there's nothing particularly dangerous about a fractional increase in local radioactivity. You can get greater exposures just by moving somewhere with a natural higher radioactivity level.
Where I live, natural exposure is about 1.8mSv per year (which I believe is less than Japan, so maybe they should move here as a precaution!). You can do nothing about that, that's the world we live on.
If you go for a single CT scan, you're looking at north of 7mSv just from that. If you drank nothing but the water they're dumping from the plant... you'd expect to get about 0.025 mSv/year of additional exposure.
This is truly nothing, so long as the output is monitored to ensure nobody has the bright idea to dump more and lie about it.
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natural exposure is about 1.8mSv per year. You can do nothing about that, that's the world we live on.
So a few things: 1) the environment in which we evolved is that ideal one for humans, 2) the environment in which we evolved has slightly more radiation than our current environment due to natural radioactive decay, 3) if you somehow got less than this background amount of radiation, its likely you would suffer negative health effects including an increase in rates of cancer, 4) this is because of several complex interacting reactions (for instance without some radiation exposure, you can't make vitamin D)
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>Your basic understanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation is fundamentally wrong and you should stop spreading misinformation.
Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote; we have a normal amount of radiation we're exposed to, we're not all dead from it, and drinking water from this plant release would make a negligible difference. But please, can I offer you a ladder so you can get down from that high horse?
Your basic understanding of English is insufficient to overcome your desire to look sm
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People live in environments with 30x the radiation level you mentioned, they have lived in such environments for 1000s of years, and their cancer rates are either the same or less than populations at lower altitudes which get less radiation. That's how we know there is a floor on the "healthy" amount of ionizing radiation.
What?? Even if I don't pick apart all the BS in this statement (what are you referring to as "radiation", are the people you mention representative of humanity), your conclusion doesn't follow. There is no indication of a floor on the "healthy" range of ionizing radiation. That is not implied by your argument--it sounds like a fabrication.
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I'm not gonna dig, but your post is about ionizing radiation, and I can only find that La Paz has increased UV rays. Besides, I didn't even challenge you on that. There ARE places with more background radiation. It's the rest of your post that does not compute (at least not without additional evidence and/or arguments that were not cited).
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https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
I think we are done with this conversation.
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Within my country (which is smaller to considerably smaller than many American states) the natural background radiation varies by about a factor of 10 from place to place. The regional variation of cancer rates OTOH, is far lower. From which you can conclude that the main causes of cancer are not natural background radiation levels, but environmental factors (an excessively fatty
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Don't confuse ambient levels of exposure to exposure from ingested materials though. Your skin effectively blocks a lot of radiation from reaching your internal organs, but if the source is inside those organs...
Of course the released tritium here is completely safe, even if ingested. It's just that you have to trust the people taking the measurements, which is why independent checks are important, and that no matter what you do it's going to affect some businesses. People stopped buying Corona beer when th
What I expect as questions... (Score:5, Informative)
I expect many of the same questions coming up again, just like the last time there was mention of Fukushima dumping radioactive water, so I thought I might create something of a FAQ.
Why didn't they filter out the radioactive bits?
Because what is radioactive is the water itself, you'd be trying to separate water from water. Technically this is possible, it's how heavy water is produced today, but it is very energy intensive and the facilities for separating out heavy water from "regular" water aren't exactly portable.
Won't this contaminate the water for millions of years?
No, because the radioactive isotope in question is tritium, or hydrogen-3, a heavy unstable isotope of hydrogen. It has a half-life of about 12 years and the "rule of thumb" on anything radioactive is that it is effectively gone after ten half-lives, which in this case is 120 years. But that rule of thumb only applies for something that is staying in place, not mixed in with the sea that contains naturally occurring tritium. Tritium isn't like artificial isotopes like plutonium or americium in that they are only seen in nuclear reactors, tritium is being constantly produced on Earth from cosmic radiation hitting water in the air and from decay of heavier elements. Maybe I should just direct people to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is a nonevent, it is something like 20 grams of tritium that is already diluted into one million tons of water. Tritium is a beta emitter, a kind of radiation that doesn't penetrate the dead layers of skin and is certainly contained by the water is it mixed with. To do damage to living tissue it must be consumed and decay inside the body where the usual defense mechanisms against radiation are weak. Even if there is damage to cells there are repair mechanisms, mechanisms in place because without them naturally occurring tritium would have wiped out all life on the planet a long time ago.
They do not need to dilute this water and release it slowly over decades. They could, and I believe should, just dump it all as quickly as possible just to be done with the nonsense than have this drag on for decades.
Oh, another question I expect...
If it is so safe then would you be willing to drink it?
No, I would not drink it. It sounds like this water has been sitting in steel tanks that have been open to the air for a very long time and so is potentially contaminated with bacteria, bird poop, bits of rust, and all matter of nasty things that even if safe to drink would likely taste bad. It is for the same reasons that I would not be willing to drink pond water or seawater, it could make me sick from something growing in it. I might be willing to take a swim in the water though, that's almost certainly safe if still a bit gross.
Russia and China cutting off fish imports out of Japan over this is a bit rich, they aren't exactly known for their best practices in disposing of radioactive waste. Russia, and the former Soviet Union, especially has a history of dumping all manner of radioactive materials into the sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The hype is particularly strange in singling out Fukushima, given that many (all?) nuclear reactors will produce some amount of tritium as a byproduct of operation.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/o... [nrc.gov]
"Tritium is a mildly radioactive type of hydrogen that occurs both naturally and during the operation of nuclear power plants. Water containing tritium and other radioactive substances is normally released from nuclear plants under controlled, monitored conditions the NRC mandates to protect public health and safe
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Fuqing power plant
Really? Seriously? That's the name of the power plant? How would I pronounce that in English on TV or radio and not get fined by the FCC for profanity? Something like "few king"? That might sill get some phone calls complaining to the station and FCC.
Beijing has been accused of hypocrisy and of using the incident to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment.
This anti-Japan sentiment is apparently resulting in vandalism on Japanese businesses and violence against Japanese visitors. I doubt it would take much to get people upset about Japan in China since they likely have been primed for this all their lives f
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The Chinese sounds that are romanized as "q" are pronounced "ch", for example the Qing in "Qing dynasty" being pronounced "ching".
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What asshole romanized Chinese, anyway? And why wasn't it done by the same person who romanized Japanese, who did a great job?
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To be honest Japanese got romanized 15 or 20 times.
Only one stuck, and that is the version which actually difficult for english speakers: but great for the rest of the world.
Look at Thai. Basically every teaching literature uses the British (I exaggerate, modern Apps have several options), but how to pronounce a word that is transliterated like this:
Sun - is that U a U like in look? Or is it an A as in Sun?
Goong - what is that? A long O or an U as in look?
And so on. Inside of Thailand, they use the Royal Th
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Fuqing power plant
There are six units... so you'd have "Fuqing unit 1," "Fuqing unit 2," etc. I guess if referencing the overall site, one might refer to it as the "Mother" Fuqing power plant?
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Fermi 2 in Michigan had a similar event where they released Tritated water into Lake Erie. It got some local press but that's about it.
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Your FAQ is designed to make people with concerns out to be idiots, while avoiding the difficult questions that you don't want to answer.
Q: For example, how much has all this cost?
A: The government and TEPCO estimated around $250 billion, but some experts have put the figure at more than twice that. Currently the water decontamination effort is costing around $7.5 billion/year. Compensation for victims is estimated at around $90 billion in 2023.
Q: Who pays for it?
A: The Japanese taxpayer and to a lesser ext
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The numbers estimated are in the 2 digit figures of Trillions.
Absurd big areas got evacuated.
The main corridor where the initial fall out went, the young people very visited by the government and urged to decide if they ever want kids: and then move away, or refrain from it.
Japan is still completely aware of the 50years of disabled people and cancer etc. happening after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the close areas, they tried to dig up 1m on top of the soil, drop it in valleys, then cover everything with 20cm
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Last I heard they had given up trying to decontaminate those towns. Too many failed attempts, too difficult to eliminate all the hot spots. The towns are dead anyway - even if people could move back, many have started new lives elsewhere already. There aren't enough willing to go back to make them viable, and it might reduce their compensation as well.
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Well, they did it all wrong anyway.
They have a street where they start at house #1, removing the top soil around it, splashing the house inside and outside with "what ever they use to clean it". Put the soil in plastic(?!) bags and on a truck. Move to house #2. Start cleaning and removing the top soil, while some "other company" is dropping fresh soil at house #1.
So the dust from digging at house #2 and house #3 falls on the fresh soil of house #1.
Basically every cleaned town is as radioactive as it was bef
Re: What I expect as questions... (Score:2)
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The waste water from a Coal Fired plant is certainly more radioactive then this water ...
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It certainly is not.
A) coal plants have no waste water that gets into contact with anything radioactive
B) radioactivity in coal is basically based on Thorium - and that has nothing to do with all the radioactive waste the water in Fukushima washed through.
CCP uses this to bash Japan (Score:4, Informative)
caused panic buying of nuclear particle treatment medicine leading to shortage. Nevermind CCP's own record is nothing to write home about.
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Not to mention many people in China bought geiger counters there and some found out that their surroundings is already polluted to a worst level.
So CCP, gun, shoot foot.
Godzilla! (Score:1)