Some of you may die, but that's a chance we're willing to take
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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No for real it is negligible.
The thing about radiation is that the dosage is what matters so having all that tritium in one water tank is bad because it’s concentrated but very slowly leaking it into the ocean where it’s diluted so rapidly you won’t be able to detect it is truly harmless.
Anger at this is misguided. It’s the correct decision. Holding the stuff concentrated in one place is an ecological disaster waiting to happen - let’s say another tsunami hits and it all gets released at one now that’s a problem but sending an actually small volume into the ocean everyday that’s not even going to register as background noise.
radiation-wise you're correct, but I'm not sure the same holds true for some of the isotopes themselves. Admittedly, I'm neither physicist nor biologist, so my knowledge here is limited at best, but as far as I'm aware, certain particles can bio-accumulate and bio-magnify along food-chains and make entire species inedible as a result. The radiation doesn't even have to be that strong, once that shit is inside of you, there will be cancer. I'm thinking for example of mushrooms in Germany after Chernobyl - the radiation levels in forests overall were mostly fine shortly after the disaster but mushrooms remained (and I think, remain to this day, at least in certain regions?) inedible due to the accumulation of isotopes they manage to accomplish through their wide-and-deep-reaching mycelium networks. Of course, anything eating the mushrooms also becomes inedible. Which literally lead to radioactive hogs, but that's for another time.
As long as nature lives, there are constant accumulation processes happening and they may just end up gathering all that finely diluted stuff together again. Again, I'm no expert and I'm sure the experts have taken at least some of this into account - and still I remain skeptical in regards to the harmlessness of this release, just because dumping nuclear waste-water in statistically-negligible and expert-certified safe manner has been a pretty standard procedure for the UK nuclear sector - and over the years I've heard enough critiques of that, to at least remain skeptical. Maybe anger is misguided, sure, it often is - but maybe unquestioning acceptance of it as the only rational thing to do, is too.
Not disagreeing on principle here, but I am not sure this is an apples to apples comparison. The Chernobyl meltdown caused the uncontrolled release of large amounts of radioactive cadmium. Fungi (unlike most plants) tend to be less discriminatory about what metals they pick up from the soil because they're capable of sequestering the harmful stuff in their cell walls. This isn't to say that bioaccumulation up the food chain doesn't also happen in the oceans (the mercury problem in fish is caused by releases from coal plants), but this is (a) much smaller, (b) treated to reduce the radioactive heavy metals, and (c) not into soil, where things have a chance to persist and accumulate.
You're right that this isn't an exactly viable comparison. Though there do seem to be signs that tritium too, is subject to biomagnification. I've posted a link below
Edit: for clarity, here's the link again. The main takeaway for me is that phytoplankton can make tritium bio-available and that this bio-available form of tritium is both getting bio-magnified up the food-chain and is entirely disregarded by current legislation, since the bio-available form of tritium is technically in a different chemical configuration. If I'm getting any of this wrong, feel free to correct me, everyone
I love getting reminded that I don’t actually know shit and that’s a very good reason to not be reactionary. Thank you, I gotta read into this a little more.
I have a vague background as a nuclear technician, (very far removed from that life) so I initially thought this was more reactionary behavior against nuclear energy. Nuclear powered ocean vessels also treat their water and release it into the ocean. Dilution is the solution sort of, but tritium becoming bio-available is not something I’ve heard mentioned here.
That's an interesting, read, thanks for sharing! For what it's worth, the study used massively higher doses of tritium than what's being released: 10 million becquerels/L in the study water (which is 1,000x the drinking water limit) compared with - per Reuters - 63 becquerels/L in the wastewater.
I stopped short of saying that I didn't think there would be environmental harm because it does seem like there's cause for concern, even if the tritium has a relatively short half life. But I don't know if the claims being made by opponents are justified.