“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