Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reac...
> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90, TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water
> Greenpeace said it had confirmed with Tepco that the system was not designed to remove carbon-14
Maybe there are updates on this matter but I couldn't find anything online.
"C-14 also cannot be removed by ALPS, but its concentration is far lower than its regulatory standard for discharge."
Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...
This is a complete non-issue.
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".
And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.
UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.
And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."
The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.
Let's not forget the simple logistical difficulty of using biomass. It is not as energy dense, which makes moving its own weight around more expensive too.
"The net energy ratio between energy output and input was 10.41.. Energy used for hauling hog fuel represented the largest part (36.27%) of the total energy input. The net energy ratio decreased 0.11 with each additional transportation mile
the net energy ratios reported here were on the high end of this range as energy input for possible active drying, storage, and final delivery was not included. " [0]
"The energy content was taken at 137,000 BTUs per gallon for diesel, and 125,000 BTUs per gallon for gasoline (Adams 1983)...
output: the mean HHV ranged from 8,946 to 9,105 BTUs/pound " [0]
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds, so it seems like pound-for-pound (pine-tree) biomass is less than half as productive as gasoline.*
Honestly, I was expecting worse. But over doubling energy costs isn't negligible, especially for poorer countries.
*this is at a glance work, not an actual deep dive
[0] Net energy output from harvesting small-diameter trees using a mechanized system Fei Pan Han-Sup Han Leonard R. Johnson
FOREST PRODUCTS JOURNAL VOL. 58, NO. 1/2 William J. Elliot
They can only do so if we help them. Providing the technology FOR FREE.
Human race is slowly outgrowing the concept of money. Current system does not fit into the future we have ahead of us. And quite a bit of high profile ppl see that and are afraid of losing power.
When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.
Pollution that changes the climate.
Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.
Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.
Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.
Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.
And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.
Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?
There is sure a lot of water in the ocean, but it's still possible to poison stuff locally, wherever you drop the stuff is going to have higher concentration, at least for a short while.
>The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
“A Japanese official said it’s okay if you drink this water,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news briefing. “Then please drink it.”
That was why, to try to avoid sounding disingenuous, I tried to apologize upfront for the question, and recognized and appreciated the poster qualifications.
I was trying to qualify what safe means in this context. A bit like when talking for example to an aircraft manufacturer CEO, for example as in:
1) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly" ...type of safe
OR
2) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly, I will do a weekly trip on it with my family" ...type of safe
You could have asked something like "do you agree with the Japanese claim that the water is safe to drink? Would you be willing to drink it?"
Tritium is very different. It is an isotope of Hydrogen, and a water molecule containing one atom of Tritium is fairly indistinguishable from any other water molecule. The most important thing is that it has no reason to stick to any other Tritium from that glass that you drank. It will spread throughout your body. Like all other water molecules, it will probably be out of your body in a mater of days. Tritium's half life is 12 years, so the vast, super vast majority of all the Tritium you'd drink with that glass of water will be long gone before it has a chance to decay.
But even if some of these atoms decay, their decay is a beta particle (an electron, and if you really care one antineutrino as well, although that antineutrino will probably travel through a few galaxies before it interacts with anything). The beta particle is not very damaging (compare that with the gamma rays emitted by Plutonium). For sure a single one is not damaging at all. Now, in contrast with the speck of the radioactive metal above, this beta particle will not be followed by others like it, because the Tritium that emitted it doesn't have any other Tritiums next to it.
I’m not sure how much the half life matters a lot if you ingest a lot. To be fair, kinda unlikely from drinking water, but might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life (but then, it’s probably already doing that now for much larger quantities).
Either way, I suppose the 3 X-rays I had today completely obviate any relevance of the tritium.
Unless fish have some mechanism for selectively keeping tritium (which might be very useful) or don't replace their water, there's no way for a fish to "[gather] Tritium its whole life".
Correct; it's in liquid, which blocks its radiation even more effectively.
The mucous layer in the stomach and intestines will stop it cold. It can't even get past the layer of dead cells that make up our skin.
Note that I am not arguing that the tritium releases proposed in Japan are dangerous. They are far below any theshold for risk that should concern us. But that's because the concentration is so low, not because ingested tritiated water isn't potentially dangerous.
I am quite sure there are more naturally occurring reservoirs of water that is strictly more lethal; also non-diluted.
His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
It seems that they are trowing money to the sea after paying yet for storing it for the last 11 years.
Same reason we don’t use nuclear reactors to turn lead into gold, even though we can: it’s far more expensive than it’s worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Human_production
It's *ten* times more expensive than gold!
(If I remember correctly, medical ³He MRI's are done on a closed rebreather -- they literally want to recycle your lung air, it's that valuable).
Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi... [Q6]
Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Health_risks
“HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
> Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
Yes, you can beat the biological half-life if you eat whopping doses of the stuff. That's... not a common situation.
If you ate said factory worker, you'd be back to normal in a couple weeks, as long as you didn't keep eating factory workers.
Drinking (or inhaling) 50,000 gallons of the (undiluted, so best case in terms of volume) water from storage tanks would probably get you with kidney failure somewhat before the tritium does.
Huh? It has a half-life of 12 years.
A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.
More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.
Source: I’m a dropout and frequently encounter highly educated idiots
The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).
Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: It's not black and white unfortunately, and it's both a technological and societal effort to make nuclear power safe.
Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
There are two explanations I can think of:
> Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
This may be one reason. The risk of a 'meltdown' is actually so high cost but very low risk, that the corresponding distribution has no first moment. The 'expected cost' is infinite. I've heard folks use it as a real-world example of a Cauchy-type distribution, for more info see [1].
Another explanation might be that there is some sort of recency bias. But that would mean the cost was estimated correctly for the past - which is not what you would want to hear either.
You make a good point that externalities for fossil fuels are not priced in either, but that doesn't explain the phenomenon here. And I'm not arguing for or against the use of nuclear power - societies have already agreed to socialise the cost. I'm pointing out it's not as black and white ("nuclear power is and has always been safe") as some HN commenters may think.
But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?
I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
The problem by elevating the seriousness of flushing a toilet, is that it dilutes more severe cases where one could do an actual impact.
To get back to the original issue: the OP told us that the dumping of Tritium does less harm than other discharge and thus we should look elsewhere for improvements. As I understand this sentence, he means we should not worry about it at all. This is out of proportion: he could have claimed that we should worry less about it, but it does not follow, that we should totally ignore it.
(granted I don't know where the 760 TBq figure came from either, I'm just trying to get some clarity)
As far as I can figure out it probably does not.
Edit: spelling of tritium