Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

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This article makes it seems like no big deal as all radioactive contaminants have been removed by the so-called ALPS except tritium (which has a half life of 12.43 years). However, that's simply not the case. TEPCO has been repeatedly lying to the public about the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and downplayed the impact but we now know that it's a INES Level 7 accident. The only INES Level 7 was Chernobyl disaster. But Chernobyl nuclear plant was an inland site - Fukushima is ocean-front power plant site that has the risk of leakeage to sea, so the long term effect is very likely to be much much worse.

Greenpeace released a report[1] recently, and to no one's surprise, most of the decontaminated area are still heavily contaminated today. Also TEPCO's current approach on clean up in unsustainable - certainly not with hundreds of the tanks to store contaminated waste water. Additionally, the cooling of nuclear fuel debris should be switched from water to air cooling. What this means is that there will be more waste water generated and more radioactive to be released into the environment and now into the Pacific ocean. It only takes 400 days for the water to be circulated around the global and the water can be evaporated and rain into inland areas too - the spread would affect more than just oceans.

Dr. Ken Buesseler, a senior marine radiochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he would prefer to see all the water treated properly before any is released. As he noted in his paper[3], there are actually a dozen more radioactive contaminants (perhaps more) in the waste water to be removed. WaPo has a more balanced reporting[2] on this.

So yeah, this news is anything but good. To be fair, Japan being a island nation cannot solve this clean up effort by themselves, they do need other countries to help and figure out a better permanent solution for the nuclear waste disposal here.

[1]: https://www.greenpeace.org/japan/nature/publication/2021/03/...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/fukushima-...

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344036480_Buesseler...

Is Greenpeace a reliable source on the subject of nuclear? It's not my sentiment. Greenpeace France at the very least are well known for their constant lies on the subject.

Why would Japan being an island nation prevent it from handling this situation?

Japan is a highly populous nation. They simply don't have enough land that's far away from human habited area to permanently "store" nuclear waste. America has the Yucca Mountain, USSR/Russia has the Siberia. China has Gobi deserts.

The water will be treated properly, the tritium is going to be diluted to less than 25% of the maximum level permitted before being dispersed.

You seem very confident that proper procedures will be followed by organisations that have been caught lying and massively distorting the facts.

More likely is that we're (once again) part of an experiment, the outcome of which we'll find out in a few decades.

> permanent solution

Dispersal to the point where the concentration is inconsequential seems like a good permanent solution.

I mean, contextually.. sort of?

Preferably a permanent solution is one that other such calamities could responsibly use as well without eventually ruining the world.

The impact of tossing it into the ocean is negligible , but

1) it sets a precedent unless the rest of the world reacts in a negative way and punishes the guilty (of which it seems TEPCO has plenty)

2) the negligibility of such action is rendered moot if the precedent set allows for such action to be considered a viable clean-up method in the future.

"A good permanent solution" should be one that can be enacted safely by future people confronted by similar issues.

'Out of sight, out of mind' has never been a responsible tactic, look at the ongoing legal struggle between countries behind the cleanup of the Ganges, for one example.

I don't have a better alternative, but I don't like the idea that system operators in the future may now view this kind of action as appropriate anywhere but the most dire of situations.

We already use dispersal. For air pollution, for example.

Detectable amounts of Fukushima radiation have already washed up on the shore of Washington State. After the Chernobyl disaster, detectable levels were in the air over the US.

Although they were detectable, the amounts were insignificant and posed no danger. After all, we're bombarded with background radiation every day.

The carbon 14 in all organic material is radioactive. That's why radiocarbon dating works.

Or for water contaminated with radioactive materials, for instance, it's routine at La Hague.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site

Of course the particulars matter quite a lot, I'm have no idea whether the planned release at Fukushima is comparable to the releases at La Hague.

La Hague site incident was a INES Level 1 incident. Fukushima disaster was a freaking Level 7!

La Hague routinely releases radioactive water, I'm not talking about an incident.

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