this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Good, it's about time. Tritiated water just isn't dangerous. The ocean naturally contains billions of tons of URANIUM. A few kilograms of short lived tritium isn't going to matter at all.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Finally someone who understands it's not as scary as news want it to sound like.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Better yet, the water they're releasing has less tritium in it than average ocean water, so releasing it will actually be an improvement for the ocean (190 vs avg of 500 of some unit)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait I get that the ocean is gigantic but billions of tons?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Yep. Best estimate I have seen is 4.5 billion tons of uranium. Course, most of the natural radioactivity of our ocean is from potassium, actually. But either way, natural levels of radioactivity will not change.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

4 billion tons at 3 ppb... It's so much water, don't try to drink it either.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

For anyone curious:

From Wikipedia:

The total mass of Earth's hydrosphere is about 1.4 × 10^18 tonnes, which is about 0.023% of Earth's total mass.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is what I’ve heard too. It’s really no big deal. Concerned local fishermen are probably just not introduced to the physics of this. In general, humans tend to worry a bit more about radioactivity than necessary. This in particular will be diluted into basically nothing. The only real problem is the PR work that lies ahead for them. In practice, their people should probably be more concerned about constantly dying early from pollution and protest more about that.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People really need to educate themselves before protesting. There's plenty of actually bad shit to protest, like South Korea's ridiculous work ethics.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Don't even have to look so far. Japan's work ethic is awful, suicide rates are high and because of this the birth rate is declining.

I was very suspicious on China's remarks as they have a track record of doing PR for themselves and no one else.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or in terms of actual nuclear containment issues:

The dome (accurately nicknamed "The Tomb") filled with nuclear waste the US left in the Marshall Islands from all it's nuclear bomb testing there.

We really need to clean it up properly, not to mention take care of the people impacted by it's creation.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though with the Tomb, this passage from Wikipedia should be kept in mind:

However, the soil around the dome was found to be more contaminated than its contents, so a breach could not increase the radiation levels by any means. Because the cleaning operation in the 1970s only removed an estimated 0.8 percent of the total transuranic waste in the Enewetak atoll,  the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.

This only makes the whole thing more fucked up, but at least the tomb itself isn't quite as bad as it sounded when I started reading up about it. By virtue of everything else being much worse. Fuck. I think that's enough internet for today. :'(

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you wantwd to do some further watching on the subject, here's a great video on the Marshall Islands and their current state of affairs in regards to the Tomb and climate change

linky link to an ABC News video

Just a warning though, it's a pretty frustrating and depressing situation.

Also the video is like 40 minutes long.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/autMHvj3exA

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

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Don't tell the people fighting this about coal power plants and other things that actually fuck the environment and kill us.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It'll be fine. Like, virtually harmless, kinda fine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll take 5 litres please, how much?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

When you're so salty that you drink sea water!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This news article doesn't have the dates announced, but bloomberg does.

I didn't want to post something with a paywall.

Update: I have now learned about archiving, the correct article is posted

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Post it with an archive link

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

12ft.io works well. Not sure if a bot could auto generate known paywall sites?