12098
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as early a
URL: https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/japan-to-start-releasing-fukushima-plant-s-18307738.php
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Japan to start releasing Fukushima plant's treated radioactive water to sea as early as Thursday By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated PressUpdated Aug 21, 2023 9:36 p.m. TOKYO (AP) — Japan will start releasing treated and diluted radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean as early as Thursday — a controversial but essential early step in the decades of work to shut down the facility 12 years after its meltdown disaster. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida gave the final go-ahead Tuesday at a meeting of Cabinet ministers involved in the plan and instructed the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, to be ready to start the coastal release Thursday if weather and sea conditions permit. Kishida said at the meeting that the release of the water is essential for the progress of the plant decommissioning and Fukushima prefecture’s recovery from the March 11, 2011, disaster. He said the government has done everything for now to ensure the safety, combat the reputational damage for the fisheries and to provide transparent and scientific explanation to gain understanding in and outside the country. He pledged that the government will continue the effort until the end of the release and decommissioning, which will take decades. A massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s cooling systems, causing three of its reactors to melt and contaminating their cooling water. The water is collected, filtered and stored in about 1,000 tanks, which fill much of the plant's grounds and will reach their capacity in early 2024. The release of the treated wastewater has faced strong opposition from Japanese fishing organizations, which worry about further damage to the reputation of their seafood as they struggle to recover from the nuclear disaster. Groups in South Korea and China have also raised concerns, turning it into a political and diplomatic issue. The government and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, say the water must be removed to make room for the plant’s decommissioning and to prevent accidental leaks from the tanks. Junichi Matsumoto, TEPCO executive in charge of the water release, said in an interview with the Associated Press last month that the water release marks “a milestone,” but is still only an initial step in a daunting decommissioning process that is expected to take decades. The easing of opposition from the fishing industry was key to the release because the government promised in 2015 not to start without “understanding” from fishing groups, after past accidental and unapproved discharges. Masanobu Sakamoto, head of the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives, who met with Kishida on Monday, reiterated his organization’s opposition to the release, but acknowledged that members of the fishing community have gained some confidence about the safety of the move. They still fear damage to their industry, he said, and welcomed the government pledge for support. The government has offered funding totaling 80 billion yen ($550 million) for sales promotion and other steps, and for sustainable fishing operations. The government and TEPCO say the water will be treated and then diluted with massive seawater to levels way safer than international standards, its environmental and health impact negligibly small. The International Atomic Energy Agency in a final report in July concluded that the release, if conducted as designed, will cause negligible impact on the environment and human health. Scientists generally support the IAEA view, but some say long-term impact of the low-dose radioactivity that remains in the water needs attention. Kishida’s government has stepped up outreach efforts to explain the plan to neighboring countries, especially South Korea, to keep the issue from interfering with their relationship. Kishida said the effort has made progress and the international society is largely responding calmly to the plan. Still, Hong Kong said it would suspend exports from Fukushima and nine other prefectures if Japan went ahead with the plan, while China has stepped up radiation testing on Japanese fisheries products, delaying customs clearance. |
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12105
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
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August 25, 2023 Is the Release of Radioactive Contaminated Water From the Fukushima Nuclear Site to the Sea Acceptable? Is It Safe? by Chris Busby Simulated model for dispersal of Cs-137, 81 days after release of water from Fukushima reactors. Source: Geomar. The Japanese government, having apparently run out of storage space for the million tons of radioactively contaminated water have decided to pour it into the sea. This upsets a lot of people, including the governments of China and Korea, who understandably (on a moral level, perhaps) regard this decision as unacceptable. The Japanese (also the entire nuclear industry, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a long list of self-identified experts) collectively say: no problems, the quantities are very small and pose no risk to health, neither to people nor marine life. The water has apparently been treated to remove the radioisotopes that the regulators believe pose the greatest risk, Strontium-90, Caesium-137, and Carbon-14. But to take out the Tritium is too expensive, and so the radioactive water is largely contaminated with large amounts of Tritium Oxide, in the form of Tritiated water HTO. Tritium is the largest contaminant in terms of radioactivity, disintegrations per second, clicks on a counter, from the operation of all nuclear energy processes. The neutrons, which are central to nuclear energy, produce Tritium by various processes in reactors, and even outside reactors, where the nuclide, a radioactive form of Hydrogen, is formed by adding neutrons to cooling water and various other processes. Tritium is interesting stuff. Its radioactivity is extremely weak: it emits a very short-range beta electron and itself then changes into Helium-3. What? Yes, it is a form of hydrogen, but shoots off an electron and turns into Helium-3. But we are mostly made of hydrogen, you say. Just So. In terms of radioactivity, because the decay electron is so weak, the method that the risk agencies use to quantify radiation effects has classed Tritium as almost a non-event, in terms of health effects. This is most convenient for the nuclear industry, as it means that the exposure limits for Tritium (in terms of Becquerels per litre) are truly enormous, when compared with other radioactive waste. Tritium has a 12-year half life, so it hangs about. And since all life depends on water, and indeed all life mostly is water, hydrogen and oxygen, introducing radioactive water into the environment might seem to be a bad idea. But No! The low beta energy of Tritium allows the regulators to argue that the releases of huge amounts to the sea and rivers is safe. But the regulators are wrong. The system of analysis using the concept of “Absorbed Dose” is unscientific, dishonest and at the origin of a huge historic public health scandal that has caused hundreds of millions of deaths from cancer due to badly regulated releases of certain specific contaminants, and this includes Tritium, Carbon-14, Uranium (as particles) and certain other substances produced by nuclear processes. Many years ago, the regulator BEIR committee in USA under Prof Karl Z Morgan tried to change the limits for Tritium, but he was overruled because it would make the operation of nuclear power very difficult. He wrote about this in his book The Angry Genie. He was convinced that Tritium was a serious hazard. So, lets look a bit closer at the quantities. The water in the tanks contains about 1500Bq/litre. A Becquerel is one decay per second. A litre of this water would produce 1500 clicks on a suitable measuring instrument (not a Geiger Counter, you won’t measure this stuff with a Geiger counter). Does that sound a lot? Would you drink this water? Even if the IAEA say it’s OK? Would They? The total amount to be released is 1.3 million tons. Or we are told, 22 TeraBecquerel. That is 22,000,000,000,000Bq. Sounds a lot. It is a lot. But of course, the Pacific Ocean is large, and hopefully it will just go away through dilution. And it seems 22TBq, is small compared with the quantities released by the nuclear reprocessing plants in Europe. Sellafield in the UK pumped out 432 TBq a year (20 times more) to the Irish Sea and La Hague in France 10,000TBq/y (450 times). So that’s OK then. The experts say (and you can Google them on the Science Media Centre), or you can believe the IAEA, or the Japanese, that this stuff has never shown any health effects in places where it is poured into the sea. Wrong. I have spent a lot of my research life on looking at the effects of releasing radionuclides including Tritium to the sea. I spent three years in the late 1990s looking at cancer and child leukemia near the Irish Sea supported by the Irish State. Tritium is measured in surface water. This water is driven inshore to be inhaled by populations living within 1km of the sea. The radionuclides concentrate in the coastal sediment which is also driven ashore. You find the Tritium in fish, in shellfish, in blackberries, everywhere near the Irish Sea, near the Bristol Channel. My Irish Sea study looked at small areas of Wales between 1974 and 1990 and found a clear and significant sea coast effect on cancer, particularly childhood cancer. I also, from, 1999 to 2006 studied cancer near the Bristol Channel, where there are also significant quantities of Tritium, and again, found a distinct increase in cancer near the sea. About 30% near the coast. That is a lot of dead people. I also studied leukemia in populations living near the nuclear submarine dockyard in Plymouth. Nuclear submarines are contaminated with Tritium and Carbon 14. They released it to the River Tamar and it ended up in the sediment. There was a significant leukemia cluster near the dockyard. This nuclear submarine operation was moved to Scotland some years ago. The Navy have a licence from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to discharge Carbon-14 and Tritium (1 million Becquerels a year from about 8 submarines). I have shown in a published paper in 2017 that sailors in nuclear ships in the USA Navy have a 10-fold excess risk of cancer. There is another clincher: Professor Awadhesh Jha (who I met in Plymouth when I gave my report on the leukemia study, together with the UK Environment Minister Mr Michael Meacher) has studied the effects of Tritium on the genetic development of marine invertebrates living in the Tamar mud. Very small amounts of Tritium have profound effects of chromosomes and on development in these creatures. You can Google his research. This is a big subject. But one I have studied in some depth. I was expert witness on a case in Korea some ten year ago where I was asked to advise the Korean parliament on the health effects of Tritium. The Koreans use the Canadian CANDU reactors which emit huge amounts of Tritium; there is a big cancer cluster around these sites. Tritium is very dangerous. It gets inside you easily. It exchanges with normal hydrogen, sometimes it becomes organically (covalently) bound. It causes genetic damage at tiny conventional doses (calculated using the energy per unit mass, Joule/Kg formula of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, employed by the IAEA). Those people living near the seaside near the east coast of Japan, especially the estuaries, need to watch out. Don’t eat anything from the sea, or inside 1km from the coast. The radiation risk model that regulates Tritium is obsolete and wildly incorrect. The experts that say there are no effects in populations living near Tritium contamination need to look out of the window. Finally, I was told something fascinating about Tritium by a colleague from Germany in 1998. Tritiated water has a much higher freezing point than ordinary water. So, when a fog appears as the air temperature drops. The initial fog is a pure Tritiated water vapour. But I want to add something here. We have heard a lot about fake news. But there are scientists out there spinning the issue of radiation and health to levels of hysterical nonsense. An outfit called the Science Media Centre was set up by one Fiona Fox in the early 2000s. It was an operation intended to support the polluters and contaminators by fielding dishonest scientists posing as experts to head off media stories about public health hazards. In examining this issue of Fukushima and the Tritium, I could not fail to google up three of these “experts” writing for the Science Media Centre on the issue. Tracking down their qualifications and experience as “experts” or their affiliations, was not hard—you can do this yourself. The funniest of the three was a certain Associate Professor Nigel Marks of Curtin University, Perth (What??Where??). Nigel tells us that on the basis of dose (and I suppose he has done the sums) that a “lifetimes worth of seafood from Fukushima is the radiation equivalent of one bite of a banana”. I am not going to unpack this nonsense—just to point out that it is wrong, dishonest, absurd and tendentious. And to warn everyone against these scientists. The web is stuffed full of them. The ordinary people are correct to view them as idiots, and to ignore everything they say. Nuclear industry science is cartoon science, based on nonsense, and supported by twisted epidemiology. It is now dead in the water. But not before it has historically killed hundreds of millions of people. Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Riskand the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org. |
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12100
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
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One might hope/think those crazy for space adventures: Musk & Bezos would like to ship that toxic radiation water to the Sun. But not, they'd rather do other things not necessarily helpful or healthful for the planet and people. |
12101
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
URL: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/sam-brinton-department-of-energy/index.html
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So are you saying Musk and Bezos can do a better job at managing nuclear waste than Sam Brinton? Or maybe they could be more trusted passing through baggage claim? Musk and Bezos nuclear waste rocket man management...scary ...probably explode on take off and we'd reach global doom faster (if that's possible). |
12104
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
| i'm thinking the best disposal location is up their insufferable arses... |
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12103
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
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What can I reply?: Its a clown's world, sad clowns at that. 😪🤡😣🥵🥴 |
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12102
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
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once guardian of U.S. nuclear waste disposal baggage claim cheesecake pose... |
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12099
From: The Hierophant, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Japan to start releasing Fukushima radioactive water to sea as...
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I saw that...and it really is frightening. This is radioactive water - radioactive elements decay at different rates from fractions of seconds to millions and billions of years. And this is going into the ocean that will eventually go around the entire globe affecting every and all life in the oceans. If you haven't stopped before, certainly now would be a good time to stop eating anything that comes from the oceans. |
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