Fukushima wastewater released into the ocean, China bans all Japanese seafood
reuters.com
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.
The water is less radioactive than humans, the ban is purely political and in no way safety related
A government using "safety" for political reasons? Never seen thst before.
Fish accumulate toxins and heavy metals as you move up the food chain. This is well-known.
Even though swordfish swim in waters that have perfectly safe mercury concentrations, eating swordfish everyday is inadvisable because of their high mercury contents.
That's a great point, however it ignores just one inconvenient fact:
Source: "Current understanding of organically bound tritium (OBT) in the environment" S.B. Kim, N. Baglan, P.A. Davis
You need to quote a source for knowledge of high-school level physics?
If you have a source, quote a source.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195419846/fukushima-radioactive-water-japan#:~:text=The%20government%20has%20been%20working,radioactive%20contaminants%20from%20the%20water.
ALPS isn't perfect at extracting non-tritium contaminants.
Your own source says they used other filtering systems besides ALPS, which would further mitigate the risk you seem stuck on.
Fish don't accumulate tritium. π
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195419846/fukushima-radioactive-water-japan#:~:text=The%20government%20has%20been%20working,radioactive%20contaminants%20from%20the%20water.
Tritium isn't the only thing coming out of the water
Read your article. Tritium is the only isotope left.
US psyops trying to gaslight the content of the article. There are trace elements of other contaminants... Of unknown concentration, and we have to take TEPCO's word that it's "like, totally safe man, just like our nuclear reactors"
There's 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean, I'm pretty sure a couple milligrams of trace elements isn't going to change anything.
Oh, because that's a great answer to a localized ban.
Guess what? Most of the volume of the ocean isn't chilling in Japanese territorial waters.
currents exist
even without currents mixing the water, diluting trace elements into the fucking ocean is fine
Not at concentrations noticeably higher than normal ocean water.
Lower*
[citation needed]
But he does think that non-tritium contaminates missed by the ALPS system could build up over time near the shore.
"Nearshore in Japan could be affected in the long term because of accumulation of non-tritium forms of radioactivity," he says. That could ultimately hurt fisheries in the area.
US psyops trying to gaslight people again?
The radioactive content of the released water is lower than that of seawater. How is it going to build up
Ah yes, because the only danger of nuclear meltdown industrial wastewater is tritium.
One big concern is that the ALPS system is imperfect: it supposedly removes other radioactive contaminants to within legal limits, but those legal limits ARE higher than that of seawater. The ALPS has also been custom-designed for this project: it is a bespoke system that hasn't been tested in production.
Plus, this is coming from the same private entity that mismanaged the Fukushima plant enough to cause the disaster... How much faith do you have in them to not fuck up again? Tepco's optimizing for their bottom line, not for what's best for society.
Everything is imperfect. The ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium and that only contributes a small fraction of the natural radioactivity of the ocean. This is not a public health concern and insisting on some stupid demand for perfection when the water you're exhausting is less radioactive than the water you're putting it into is fucking idiocy
I recommend reading the article again. They got anything but the tritium out of the water. Which is comparable easy to accomplish, and also important. The remaining tritium is as harmless as radioactive things can get in the first place.
A radiation scientist here reminded people of those radium-based glow-in-the-dark wrist watches, and compared the radiation caused by this wastewater release to adding about 70 to 80 of those watches to the pacific ocean.
Sure. Because Chinese food regulations are notoriously tight and the populace is so protected from contaminated foods.
I'm guessing this has more to do with fishing rights in the South China Sea and this is just convenient for them.
Wasn't that virus issue that we just had and continued to have caused from wet markets over there?....or no that was the Japanese who caused it right?
/S if no one got the joke
Well China should ban their own fish, since they release waste tritium themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
China has entire towns that are toxic wastelands. This is just a political statement, probably their usual brainwashing of self.
Or just compare the dangers of microplastic, of which China is quite a source. The microplastic will be around long after (most of) the tritium is long gone.
Do those towns produce food?
Yes.
Im almost 100% sure you pulled this propoganda out of your ass.
Edit: i concede, there is at least 1 known toxic waste dump area in China that has a lake full of rare earth metals
I'm almost 100% sure that if I doubled the effort it took to find this link, I'd have an entire essay on the topic.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
Weird, I just saw a thread you were involved in yesterday and thought you were fucking dumb. Guess it was only a matter of time before you proved yourself a tankie or a conservative.
This is kind of an interesting connection if you are bitching about me saying China doesnt own Taiwan given this article that you posted is about an autonomous region of China known as Inner Mongolia. Do you believe autonomous regions like Taiwan or Inner Mongolia are their own or are they Chinese?
Secondly, this article is 100% about rare earth metals being disposed and how our consumption forces them to have these sorts of places. Sure you are right, they have a lake in Baotou that is basically poison and its a biproduct due to Chinese practices in manufacturing. Ill give you that, but keep buying made in China, force your problems to someone else and then blame them for the conditions they have. You are the type to look the other way to slave labor as long as you get the product you want.
No, actually I don't buy anything made in China.
Stay mad tankie.
The cell phone you are holding had components made in china. About 80% of all battery production comes from China.
Its ok to say you dont know where you are buying the materials of the things you use, just dont forget what your purchasing power is helping to create. Its a toxic lake in northern China.
Purchased 6 years ago, before I monitored what I buy.
I remembered why I thought you were a fucking moron. You make assumptions and shift goalposts like a section of a rubik's cube.
Nice brigading btw, I'm sure you people will make Lemmy a better place.
I conceded to you already after seeing the article you sent me... You were the one that brought up my post history so I was talking about that. Then you went and made a confusing statement about calling me a conservative and a tankie which made no sense. Now you are saying I brigade and strive to make Lemmy a worse place. You are the one calling me names and talking shit for seemingly no reason. You could have just dropped the link and left like a sane person but you had to hit me with the "i read your post history you nerd now i got you where i want you π€ "
Bro what do you feed these goalposts? They are NOT supposed to move this much.
Look around, you are the only one seeing goal posts here. There is no argument here. I told you already that. I was just saying if people want to complain about chinas waste, then they need to look in the mirror and see who is the real culprit
Yeah, I'm sure buddy. Just like that other thread full of shifting goalposts.
You got slapped down there, you got slapped down here. Stop.
Lol im sorry i didnt realize I was talking to a kid. I am capable of having a discussion where I can change my mind and still have a nuanced opinion. I apologize if you cant and you have a single brain cell to work with.
You just want to punch down for some reason. I already said you got me on the issue on these places existing. From what it looks like, you just learned what goalposts were and you are seeing them everywhere. You are the one that also came to me saying my takes on other shit is stupid. Im okay to keep talking to you about how your take is stupid but at this point its a waste of time.
What I now think of brainwashing and those who fell victims to it is almost completely different than what I did when I was younger.
I don't blame you for thinking this way. Since these aren't your ideas.
Does that mean China will stop fishing in those waters too?
Does China even fish in Japanese waters?
China constantly fishes in other countries waters. It got so bad that Argentina has just started sinking their ships caught illegally fishing in their waters.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-fishing-vessels-going-dark-off-argentina-waters-2021-6
A little shitty by Argentina due to the risk of life IMO but I don't blame them
They weren't left with much of a choice. They would hail the illegal fishing boats and the boats would just book it back to international waters, wait for the Argentinian boats to leave then immediately go back and start fishing again. These fishing boats were turning off their transponders right before crossing into Argentinian waters, it's isn't like they didn't know exactly what they were doing. If you continously knowingly and deliberately violate a countries borders then you should really expect to be shot at.
That wasn't the question.
There is a risk I'm wrong but... I'm pretty sure that if something is released into the Japanese part of the Pacific ocean it's not contained within the Japanese borders....
Correction: does China fish near the Fukushima side of Japanese waters?
Let them worry about minute amounts of tritium in the ocean - it is political hubhub, nothing more. The tritium is less pollution and will vanish faster than microplastics in the seas.
China release more tritium in the sea than what is planned at Fukushima, so yeah...
And they release way more plastics in the sea, which is way more critical than the tritium.
Just a question here but do you treat radioactive β’οΈ 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. Itβs because the tritium hydrogen atoms arenβt in the place of regular hydrogen in H2O.
So essentially they canβt 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.
It's pretty bad when China is in the right when it comes to a safety-related topic.
You do realise that the potassium alone in your body is more radioactive than that water, right?
You are literally more radioactive.
This isn't even worth a story.
Yeah, OP straight up says that this was given the green light by the UN and planned for years. The water is safe.
LMAO. This IS a joke, right?
No. Many people (especially in the US) are completely ignorant about science. This guy knows nothing that would help him (or her) to actually rate the danger.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see that ever happen.
It's pretty bad when you're this misinformed and frankly, extremely ignorant on a topic and then make a comment like this.
yeah nah
Then you better don't eat bananas. Because bananas are more radioactive than the Fukuchima water.
Why would a troglodyte know anything about bananas? It probably subsists off of frozen pizza/hot pockets.