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Comment by ffhhj | Hacker News Reader

"...it will run out of space by 2022, and then they will have to dump radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. It is not known yet how much water would need to be put into the ocean."

Yeah, put the dirt under the rug.

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If all the stored water was dumped in a single year, the population's estimated radiation dose is around 0.02% of yearly background radiation. It's really not a problem.

See https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...

Not to mention that the tiny increase is almost a decade of stored water (but not a decade of Tritium coming out of the reactor due to the relatively short half life of tritium). If it was just releasing enough stored water to make room for more untreated water to be processed the level would be even lower. Also unless something has changed wasn't there a plan for injecting the treated water into some stable geologic structure? In which case no radioactive tritium would be released to the environment and by the time the water could possibly permeate out and up to aquifers the tritium would have already decayed. The "dump it in the sea" plan is only on the table because it would be pretty inconsequential, especially in comparison to the standards the fossil fuel industry is held to in regards to naturally occuring radioactive material.

Meanwhile Scandinavian countries and big chunks of Scotland are already more radioactive than areas close to the closed Fukushima plant...

Yes, due to radon gas from the ground which is really a big problem in Scandinavia. Just making sure nobody thinks a big part of the accumulated dose when living here is due to Chernobyl.

I lived in Aberdeen, and one of its claims to fame is "Granite City"... which also means the building exhibit more radioactivity than the norm.

We've got the same problem over here in Sweden, granite in a lot of places. We also, just for good measure, constructed a lot of buildings in the 50s and 60s from radioactive autoclaved aerated concrete made from alum shale containing high concentrations of uranium. Fun days. Apparently there's still half a million homes here exceeding the radon limit of 200 Bq/m3 indoors.

Perfectly functioning coal plants dump radioactive soot into the air every day. We're just breathing it up.

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