this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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GenZedong
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People love overreacting to any high-profile nuclear energy news, especially when it has a political character. The IAEA has a comprehensive report on this (https://www.iaea.org/topics/response/fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-accident/fukushima-daiichi-alps-treated-water-discharge) and, while I'm not a nuclear energy expert, just an enthusiast, it's all predictably mundane and low-risk and there's many, many far more dangerous sources of ocean pollution that never get nearly this amount of attention.
However,
For one thing, dumping into the ocean wasn't the only realistic option, vapor release was also an option. More expensive and harder to monitor, yes, but in the event of some kind of unlikely cataclysmic fuck-up (which has never happened in the history of nuclear energy, as we all know), the fallout would likely be more contained to Japan rather than distributed to every nearby country's seafood supply.
That Japan chose the option that saves money but, in an incredibly improbable worst case scenario, results in maximizing contamination to it's neighbors, was either extremely short sighted and stupid or intentionally inflammatory. Of course people in China were going to react this way. In all likelihood it's an overreaction but it's also a reaction that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of nuclear energy history could have predicted. Throw in the history of shit Japan has done to China and it's no wonder that they're furious for being expected to trust a Japanese corporation with their best interests.
That's the real issue here, and arguing over the technical details of safety doesn't address it. Japan had multiple options here, and chose self interest and cost cutting over cooperation with and consideration for it's neighbors, and China is perfectly justified in being unhappy with that outcome.
How would vapor release have been better? That just sounds like choosing to release it into the atmospheric global commons instead of the oceanic global commons, so people would make the same complaints. Is there any data showing expected radiation dispersal in the air vs the ocean?
I wish I could find a detailed study on this but I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Based on my knowledge of undergraduate physics and chemistry though, I think it goes something like this:
Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen. Water is H~2~O and the tritium here occupies some of those hydrogen atoms. This is why it can't be filtered out, because you're trying to separate water from slightly different but basically chemically identical water. If conducted properly, both options for diluting and releasing this stuff is quite safe.
But let's say some untreated waste water gets released. The water that has all kinds of unpleasant isotopes and toxic heavy metals. If that gets dumped into the ocean, it enters the food chain and gets carried around by ocean currents and ends up everywhere. Water vapor is different through because the tritium is chemically part of the water. Caesium, iodine, lanthanum, whatever the fuck else, isn't part of the water, it's dissolved in the water, and when you vaporize water, the other elements don't go with it (this is how distillation works). Highly toxic, really bad stuff, even if it was thrown into the air in a plume of steam or something, will tend settle out or get rained out near the source because it's, y'know, heavy. Furthermore, vaporizing water takes more time and energy than just dumping it in the ocean, so even in some catastrophic failure scenario the rate of release of the worst contaminants would probably be much, much slower with the vapor option meaning less damage done before the problem is detected and fixed.
China and Russia recommended the vapor release option, which seems to suggest that the tritiated water isn't their main concern, it ends up on their coasts regardless. I think that also is strong evidence that any articles or editorials focusing on tritium are sensationalist nonsense because if the tritium was the issue, China and Russia wouldn't have wanted a vapor release solution either.
I think another part of their concern with different isotopes was the source of the tests. The company responsible for testing is also the owner of the power plant. As shown so many times in the past, we can always fall back on our trust in parties with a conflict of capital interest.
Bingo. The IAEA can monitor things all they want, but a big part of the plan still involves taking TEPCO and the Japanese NRA at their word because they're the ones that actually implement the plan.
It's probably going to be fine, but even if it is, "I'm doing what I want, just trust me bro" isn't how a reasonable government conducts relations with it's neighbors. Even if they are right and even if they do already have the best plan (extremely debatable), cooperation, education, and building consensus should still be the next step, not unilaterally making decisions that piss off hundreds of millions of people without addressing their concerns.