IAEA Team In Japan For Final Review of Fukushima Nuclear Plant Water Discharge -...

IAEA Team In Japan For Final Review of Fukushima Nuclear Plant Water Discharge

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  Yeah, just the weathering of rocks must add a pretty good amount of radioactive material to the sea all the time.

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    Hell, if it gets people around the world to eat a bit less seafood from the fear of radiation that would actually help sea life more than the harm the radiation causes.

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      Someone should tell the Japanese that radiation bioaccumulates in Minke whales at a thousand times the rate it does in, for example, cabbage, and the only way to stay safe is to stop slaughtering them wholesale.

• The radioactive isotopes in the water is not uranium, it is tritium. Why the fine article didn't cover this seems odd to me. The reason the tritium hasn't been filtered out of the water is because the tritium makes up the water.

  Hydrogen has three isotopes. These isotopes are common and unique enough that they have their own chemical names. There is protium, deuterium, and tritium. Protium is the most common isotope and is the kind most people think of when hydrogen is mentioned, an atom with only a single proton as the nucleus. Deuterium has a neutron to go with the proton, and is the kind of hydrogen that most people think of when heavy water is mentioned. Tritium is unstable and therefore radioactive, it has two neutrons with the proton in the nucleus.

  It is possible to get most of the tritium out of the water but that is an energy intensive process, and not typically applied to any water outside of the core of a pressurized heavy water reactor like those in a CANDU power plant. The water in question is a mix of what came from a light water reactor core and light water that entered the reactor since from rain, firefighting, and leaking cooling pools. The light water from the reactor core will have some small amount of tritium, far more than background but still nothing near what heavy water reactors would have.

  I don't know how much tritium is in this water but it can't be all that much if disposing it into the sea is considered viable. Even if every atom of hydrogen in the water was tritium we'd first have half the tritium gone by now because tritium has a half life of about 12 years. Then the water added to the ocean is tiny by comparison to the total water in the ocean, and it will mix in quickly like all water does. If anything it will flow to the bottom of the ocean, below where life can be sustained, and so not enter the food chain.

  There's no uranium, cesium, strontium, iodine, zinc, or other radioactive element in the water but tritium. They filtered everything but the tritium out already. This has to be some of the purist water on the planet right now, as pure as rain. It's as pure as rain because much of the water is from rain.

  Would I drink this water? Likely not since it sounds like this could have all kinds of diseases growing in it. I'd consider taking a swim in it though.

  • Wilson Tucker's The Time Masters

    Bit of a spoiler: The starship of Human looking alien spacefarers has an accident near Earth, and some of the crew manage to make it down. They are all but immortal, though they require Tritium as their "water of life", and what they have of it is limited.

    Their immediate problem is that humanity is thousands of years from having an industrial age, so at least one of them eventually decides to speed things along.

    Wilson Tucker was a beloved member of the SF fan community, and I read this novel during "the gol

  • Re:

    The radioactive isotopes in the water is not uranium, it is tritium.
    No it is not.
    Tritium is a gas, a variation of hydrogen.

    All the tritium that ever was in the reactor(s) burned of or simply escaped when the containment building exploded.

    Are you really that dumb or is it a new kind of hobby of yours to post utter nonsense and see if it's getting modded up?

    I really wonder if the rest of your post is a copy/paste from some wiki article:P

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  Good thing engineers only use "natural amounts" of Uranium in nuclear power plants.