Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarising move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.
China is “highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by… Japan’s food and agricultural products,” the customs bureau said in a statement.
The Japanese government signed off on the plan two years ago and it was given a green light by the U.N. nuclear watchdog last month. The discharge is a key step in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant after it was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.
Just a question here but do you treat radioactive ☢️ water? I thought once it was radioactive that’s it for like 100000 years
This is tritiated water, that is water with tritium (aka hydrogen-3 , regular hydrogen [a proton] with two additional neutrons) in place of regular hydrogen.
Tritium has a half life of 12 years. The incident was in 2011, so there’s been one half life already. The remaining tritium will be diluted with seawater and naturally decay over a few more half lives until it’s indistinguishable from background radiation.
Edit: the decay product is helium and an electron +and strictly speaking a neutrino, but those don’t really interact with much so we can ignore it). Nothing to really worry about!
Makes me wonder, what if they just let it sit for another 20 years and then recapture the helium to sell it or something?
Thanks for the knowledge.
My understanding is that they can chemically remove damn near everything except the tritium. It’s because the tritium hydrogen atoms aren’t in the place of regular hydrogen in H2O.
So essentially they can’t filter the water out of the water, if that makes sense.
https://www.grunge.com/1331356/how-radioactive-water-treated/
Which shows one of two things: Either you were fast asleep in physics in school, or your physics teacher was an idiot.
All that tritium water release is about as “dangerous” as losing 70-80 glow-in-the-dark wristwatches in the ocean. And in comparison to the microplastics issues, the Fukushima water is laughably harmless.
We didn’t study this sort of thing in my school in the UK in the 90s.
Disappointing. Things like nuclear decay chains was something we had in tenth grade, fourth year of physics in 1985, Germany.