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Japan to release Fukushima water into ocean starting Aug 24 (www.reuters.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/worldnews@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 20 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Ehhh, it's been as cleaned of radiation as possible. My dad did nuclear inspection for a living, including disposal, so I asked him about this when it first hit the news.

In theory, as long as they follow existing protocols, the water isn't going to be harmful. But that's the question, really; have they followed protocols? They have oversight, so it shouldn't be possible for then to half-ass it.

There really isn't a way to remove tritium though. The levels of that should be low enough to be unimportant.

It's going to be higher than background radiation, but well under international standards. It isn't something to be happy about, but it's as low risk as it gets. Tokyo pumps out way more dangerous things every day just by being a busy city.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's sad that nowadays when we read about a limit considered safe by an organization, we have no way of knowing if it came from real studies and analysis or is it just a lobbied value that big players are using to weed out smaller competition because current technology can't get below the really safe limit anyway

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    Well, in the case of radiation levels, the science goes back far enough, and with enough duplication/replication that it is as solid as anything that's an ongoing endeavor gets.

    Like, everything is unreasonable technically going to be "to the best of current knowledge" because science is a process, and even when there's mountains of evidence, there could be newer evidence that contradicts previous conclusions.

    But the general dosage limits have been in place and matched predictions for at least my lifetime (around 50 years), since those standards were used by my dad at that time and are still the same. A lot of the nuclear stuff wasn't done for profit, nor were the standards. So it's a tad bit better than something like petrochemical data.

    I'd phrase it like this; I wouldn't want to go swimming in the tank the water is stored in, but I wouldn't worry about swimming in the ocean a few days later at all. The levels are just so low at that point that any danger is a non issue compared to things like smog.

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