No tritium found in fish one month after Fukushima water release

ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.

i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.

totally sad.

I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.

I asked ppl there "is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?" And most of them were like "it's not a common occurrence but it's not inherently dangerous and it's not that big of a deal"

To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.

they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.

I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.

If their reporting of the quantity of tritium is accurate, India's candu style plants release more incidentally than this will.

Precious tritium

Probably because the octopuses used it all for their science experiments. It's a scientific fact that octopuses hoard tritium. Source: Spider-man 2.

Unsurprising.

Dangit, now how am I gonna get my piscine superpowers/fish shaped tumors?

Fantastic news! so many people are so afraid of the word "nuclear", and don't understand how large of a volume the ocean is. the lethal dose of Fentanyl is like the size of a grain of rice. Put all of the known legal and illegal volume of fentanyl into the ocean and it would be undetectable.

Sample size: 64

Also, are there other things like Caesium-137 that pose a risk?

The ocean is 1.335 × 10^{21 litres. That number is stupid big. There are 7.5 × 10}18 grains of sand on Earth. If every person in Japan flushed a litre of the reactor water down their toilet, it would be diluted to nothing in no time at all.

People have been far more concerned about the efficacy of the ALPS system at extracting other contaminants than they are about tritium contamination. The ALPS system is unproven and the wastewater they're releasing would be pretty toxic as far as other radioactive isotopes is concerned if the ALPS system isn't doing it's job perfectly.

I like this but would rather see a multi country coordinated oceanic study. We're all in this together.

Welcome back to Fact or Cap

Two questions: If it's only tritrium why does anyone really care? Why couldn't they just sell it rather than dump it?

I thi k I just realised those questions both have the same answer...

I for one would like to try this "nuclear fish"......preferably crumbed, deep fried and doused in lemon juice. With a serve of fries.

A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.

Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.

The banana's potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it's not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who's amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.

That's right.

Cool! So let's ramp up disposing of radioactive material into the ocean because this one fish is ok!

Sample size is critical to get a realistic result of the tritium toxicity. In this case, they sampled only 64 fish! That would not yield a statistically significant result!