No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.

Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.

The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.

        • derpgon@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          If you have 100x emissions, but 1000x the efficiency of the fuel (numbers may be overblown), then it’s still better for the environment.

          Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.

          However, we could always either repurpose it or yeet it into space, away from any other close planet collision course.

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            While yeeting things into space sounds cool, I am sceptical of the viability of that strategy.

            Putting things into space is very expensive and putting them in a solar orbit is even more expensive.

            Isn’t nuclear waste also really heavy? And guess what that means, it’s getting more expensive.

            It also isn’t very environmentally friendly to send shit into space and of course even less friendly considering how heavy nuclear waste is.

  • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I remember commenting on a post where China condemned Japan for doing this.

    I asked ppl there “is this actually bad or is this kind of par for the course of getting rid of the dangers left behind in Fukushima?” And most of them were like “it’s not a common occurrence but it’s not inherently dangerous and it’s not that big of a deal”

    To me it looks like the vast majority of objections to this came from strategic propaganda related to domestic relations of China and/or other nations.

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        1 year ago

        I don’t doubt nuclear power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.

          • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            This here is capitolist FUD, but I’m sure in all your great wisdom think humans can be trusted not to fuck up a 5th time.

            • osarusan@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              All you said that was humans mess up everything we do, as if that were something meaningful to say. That is not an argument against nuclear. That’s an argument against absolutely everything humans do. It’s meaningless. Look:

              I don’t doubt solar power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.

              I don’t doubt coal power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.

              I don’t doubt hydro power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.

              I don’t doubt steam power works. I just know how humans work. Everything we build we also destroy. Let’s not take the planet with us.

              All of those are exactly as meaningless as what you wrote. So don’t go on snarkily about my “great wisdom” like you’ve made any point at all. Nuclear is safer than oil and coal and gas, which is where the majority of the world’s energy comes from right now. Fossil fuels are actively destroying our planet right now, and you’re spreading nuclear FUD about things that haven’t happened. That’s not helpful, and it doesn’t match the reality we live in.

            • Roboticide@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              There’s nothing more capitalist than pushing coal and oil.

              And any rational green energy advocate knows it’ll take us decades to build enough solar/wind to fill the fossil fuels gap, but would only take us a couple years to fill that demand with nuclear and also produce fewer emissions. That’s simple numbers.

              So are you just irrational or a coal-snorting capitalist yourself?

              • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Show me this “fossil fuel gap” when it takes a decade for a nuclear power plant to run at full efficiency.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Y’kown we nuclear power plants cant explode like an atomic bomb right. Chernobyl was about the worst case scenario, and most of the blame is on dogshit soviet designs.

          Also if you bring up the Russian troops who got fucked up, that was caused by not using PPE and then promptly inhaling graphite dust and some randome mildly radioactive materials. It was fine while in the ground but breathing that shi in will do a number, probably still better than going to those old mining towns where the air is now made of asbestos.

          • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Chernobyl was about the worst case scenario, and most of the blame is on dogshit soviet designs.

            It’s happened three other times since then…

            Edit: one other time

  • Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    ignorance and paranoia about radioactivity go hand in hand.

    i know so many otherwise smart people who lose it on this issue. because they just think any radioactivity = destroy planet forever . completely ignorant to how it actually works, and just think every power plant must eventually chernobyl and that one barrel of nuclear waste is enough to destroy 1000s of miles or something equally absurd.

    totally sad.

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Yet one litre of oil can contaminate over a million litres of water.

      I talked about how water released are usually modeled and risk assessments done in another comment abour the pending release a few weeks ago but I can’t find it.

      While I can’t speak for all regulatory bodies, and you could be a shitass and release toxic crap without doing a risk assesmsent, it’s very unlikely that this is the case here, particularly because it’s TREATED water that’s being released. That means they have a treatment system (there’s a fucking rabbit hole and half…) which they are using to treat the water to some acceptable criteria/standard. This mean some sort of modeling and risk calculation has been done otherwise they would have just gone ‘yolo pump the water into the ocean’.

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      1 year ago

      I think most reasonable objections to this were that they would be unable to filter out the actual bioaccumulating radioisotopes from the water and it should’ve been kept in retention. In the end you either trust they will or not. I trust they will.

      • ours@lemmy.film
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        1 year ago

        Found the fellow Romand (French-speaking Swiss for the rest of the World).

        • Pfnic@feddit.ch
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          1 year ago

          Well I’m sorry to say that I’m a Schpuntz but at least I know what a “piscine” is :D

  • BeanCounter@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I live in South Korea and I get really frustrated how so many people(lefties) try to make a big deal out of this to shit on Japan.

    Please fucking stop smoking first before you try to talk shit about this. You sound like a complete idiot when you drink and smoke and worry about how filtered water that is probably safer than the seawater now. You’re literally paying to suck on carcinogens and radioactive shit.

    You’re just political about this. Not scientific.

  • roguetrick@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    If their reporting of the quantity of tritium is accurate, India’s candu style plants release more incidentally than this will.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Which is what the experts have been saying since the beginning, but the anti-nuclear propagandists explicitly ignore the experts.

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    4 months ago

    A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.

    Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.

    The banana’s potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it’s not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who’s amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.

    • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      All that other stuff was filtered out, but the tritium is near impossible to separate, because it is chemically identical to the hydrogen in normal water.

      As for caesium, there are still detectable amounts of Cs-137 in most of the word from the thousands of atomic bomb tests. It’s half life is just 30 years, but it will still be detectable for a hundred years or so because of the huge amount we released.

  • mufasio@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.

  • halfempty@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Sample size is critical to get a realistic result of the tritium toxicity. In this case, they sampled only two fish! That would not yield a statistically significant result!

    • osarusan@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Samples of local fish have been collected at two points within a 5-km radius of the discharge outlet, except during rough weather conditions, with the agency announcing its analysis results on an almost daily basis since Aug. 26.

      No tritium was detected in 64 fish, which included flounder and six other species, collected since Aug. 8.

      I mean… you could have read the article.

    • AdeptusPrimaris@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Wtf you’re just stating facts and giving a different opinion, and you’re being downvoted for that. Truly i don’t understand

      • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They’re claiming that some “exteaction” [sic] was done improperly during World War II when getting bomb material, and made a mess, and that that should be factored into the environmental effects of modern nuclear power.

        That’s a dumb argument.

        Also telling people to go look it up, is not stating facts.