778

No tritium found in fish one month after Fukushima water release (www.japantimes.co.jp)

submitted 9 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

103 comments fedilink hide all child comments

No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.

Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.

The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social 112 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 30 points 9 months ago

Yet one litre of oil can contaminate over a million litres of water.

I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can't find it.

While I can't speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it's very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it's TREATED water that's being released. That means they have a treatment system (there's a fucking rabbit hole and half...) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone 'yolo pump the water into the ocean'.

load more comments (4 replies)

[-] roguetrick@kbin.social 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should've been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works 78 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Unaware7013@kbin.social 50 points 9 months ago

Its also classic anti-nuclear power FUD.

load more comments (21 replies)

[-] set_secret@lemmy.world 71 points 9 months ago

they did however find an absolute fuck tonne of microplastics.

[-] mufasio@lemmygrad.ml 47 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social 75 points 9 months ago

china is causing a fuss for political gain. a huge chunk of their fishing practices are illegal and violates international law anyway. their concern is theatrics to drum up their anti-japanese nationalism.

[-] parpol@programming.dev 37 points 9 months ago

Not only that, but China's Fuqing power plant also releases 3 times more tritium into the Pacific than the Fukushima plant so they're also full of shit.

[-] InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 9 points 9 months ago

I'm not doubting you at all, but can you provide a link for emphasis?

[-] roguetrick@kbin.social 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/08/8388ba8002bb-tritium-at-13-china-monitoring-points-above-fukushima-water-level.html

It's a pressurized water plant like Fukishima was. Not quite 3x but still more than 2. Qinshan is a CANDU reactor, so that's why its 10 times more than what they're annually releasing from Fukishma. They release a lot of tritium because they use heavy water as a moderator. Any nuke plant that has a Lithium channel for producing tritium for nuclear weapons will also, of course, release a lot of it comparatively.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] 0110010001100010@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago

The old "trust but verify" position. Agreed 100%. If everything is perfectly safe there should be no reason not to have multiple independent, third-parties with no skin in the game to verify. This is good for everyone as it reassures the fishermen, those buying fish, and really the rest of the world.

[-] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 9 months ago

Is somebody preventing them from catching and testing fish?

[-] roguetrick@kbin.social 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 23 points 9 months ago

Which is what the experts have been saying since the beginning, but the anti-nuclear propagandists explicitly ignore the experts.

[-] Kahlenar@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago

Precious tritium

[-] toolCHAINZ@infosec.pub 21 points 9 months ago

The power of the sun..... in the palm of my hand

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 21 points 9 months ago

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

[-] Scrof@sopuli.xyz 17 points 9 months ago

Unsurprising.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Hyggyldy@sffa.community 16 points 9 months ago

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

load more comments (4 replies)

[-] luckyhunter@lemmy.world 15 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] remotelove@lemmy.ca 11 points 9 months ago

Sample size: 64

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

[-] Canadian_Cabinet@lemmy.ca 18 points 9 months ago

Not really. This video by Kyle Hill does an amazing job at explaining it.

[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 7 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

This video by Kyle Hill

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[-] mjq07@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

Cs-137 and other fission and activation products can be largely removed by treatment. H-3 is a bit trickier since it literally is part of the water. Luckily it's a fairly weak beta emitter with a relatively short half life so causes very, very little long term harm.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] zephyreks@programming.dev 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

load more comments

this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023

778 points (98.4% liked)

World News

37341 readers

2495 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect!
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.