Tritium isn’t a problem unless you inhale or ingest it as the outer layer of our skin blocks its weak beta radiation and one human lifetime will decay tritium to irrelevance. Still dumping it into the ocean is bound to be an emotional issue with the sea food heavy diet of the Japanese and their WWII history.
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Ah the sweet sound of insanity....The food chain takes up tritium whether we like it or not so yes, plants, fish, humans are all going to ingest tritium. That whole “one human lifetime” is a farce since ingesting radioactive waste has negative effect on lifespan and quality of life. EMOTIONAL issue? State of the art, peer reviewed medical science has documented the hazards of exposure to radiation for decades. I recommend the BEIR VII for light reading to begin educating yourself.
It’s not just the Japanese, we all eat products from the sea. Heard of carageenan? It’s in everything. We like eating fish, don’t we? 6 months after the explosion in Fukushima, 15 out of 15 sampled food fish in San Diego had traces of Fukushima radioactive wastes in their flesh. Now, dumping of nuclear wastes has continued for two more years so we can project that concentration is increasing in the foodweb and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
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Still the very well followed atomic survivors have had much less long term cancer problems than most would think.
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Not true and really an irrelevant comparison. The bombs had less radiation and were not detonated over and over and over and over for years to continue release of radiation as is happening with the cores. The bombs didn’t deliver their payload to the water table, as is happening in Fukushima.
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And those hit by Chernobyl have had MUCH less cancer mortality than was predicted.
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You do know that the Soviets made it illegal for physicians to report deaths and illnesses as radiation related for 3 years after the Chernobyl disaster right? People were dropping like flies (for example, physicians in the hospital where the firemen who responded to the explosion were taken - simply no radiologic measures in place, hauling heavily contaminated people out of contaminated ambulances and right through the hospital etc.)
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IIRC, in Russia there were about 4000 early cases of thyroid cancer in children, but only about 10 died.
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Uhmmm....if you don’t count those sickened in the years when it was illegal to report illnesses from radiation, you might have a shoddy estimate at best.
The people who lived through it tell of their experiences in books like “Voices of Chernobyl” and others. The Soviets knocked down a heavily irradiated cloud heading for Moscow with old fashioned cloud seeding. The region ‘rained on’ was rural but populated. People “died in place” where the heavy contamination came down and the SOviets barred entry into the region, preventing people from retrieving or looking for family members (talked to a woman whose husband died within 4 months of Chernobyl and she talked about the rural village where her aunt lived - everyone “down” and no entry including bringing water/food to any potential survivors. Nope - just a scrub operation.
The Ukraine was a region where “all children are ill” for a long time. Many many people are still forced to live in contaminated regions (no place else for them) and contend with raising their families in contaminated zones and all the medical problems that entails. The radioactive waste that sickened and killed 25 years ago is hard at work, sickening and killing today.
The reality doesn’t resemble your happy talk.
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Environmentalists like to present the former, but never the latter number. And since that thyroid cancer surge the best reported data shows NO further cancer of any kind above the expected baseline.
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Pathetic lies. Even the IAEA grudgingly admitted to 40thousand deaths and that number is low. The area is still heavily contaminated and people are still getting cancer and other illnesses today.
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Certainly not the large predicted spike, which should have been too large to cover up. There certainly was plenty radioactive cesium and strontium there, but Chernobyl makes me wonder if their toxicity is overstated. For the Japanese sake I hope that is so.
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No. Do some reading. And you leave out quality of life. What’s it like to be reared in an area known for it’s leukemia among children? What’s it like to be pregnant in that zone? Happy? Yeah I get to raise my whole family in a contaminated zone. It’s hell and it’s not overstated - there’s a real effort on the part of the nuke industry to act as if Chernobyl was over 25 years ago and Fukushima was over 3 years ago. No. They will be with us for many many years. Haven’t you read of wild mushrooms being imported from the Ukraine being flagged as far over the safety level for contamination? Wild boar is illegal game in those regions, too contaminated. It’s indecent to hear the destruction of quality of life portrayed as “not so bad afterall.”
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I still think it is reasonable try extracting what’s already semi-contained in that water and parking it someplace safer for a few hundred years. Just don’t let perfection there get in the way of doing “good enough.” Getting the spent fuel somewhere safer than the damaged pools and then dismantling the reactors and recovering their escaped cores is more important. Don’t let the reactions restart.
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The Japanese have other ideas. They are burning radioactive wastes and flushing contamination into the waterways - I believe it isn’t entirely accidental that they have erected flimsy short term tanks to hold contaminated waste long therm through typhoons. I believe these efforts are intended to transfer radioactive wastes off the island nation into other waterways and nations, leaving Japan cleaner and the rest of the world dirtier.
They claimed to have achieved 'cold shutdown' 22 months ago. IF (a significant if) they can maintain that, production of new radiation will be limited, accumulated fission products within will decay away and they will become safer to handle over several years, just as do cores removed during normal refueling. We survived all the uncontained nuclear testing of the cold war, the sinking of multiple nuclear subs, all the nuclear dumping by the Soviets into the Arctic and the Urals (much worse than our dumping at Hanford, etc.). This, presuming shutdown can be maintained, will be less of a hit than that.
The Russian's ability to coverup Chernobyl effects took a large hit with the fall of the Soviet Union a few years later. Free Ukrainians were much less willing to hide what Russian stupidity had done to them. My comments regarding its eventual death toll being much less than expected were based on imperfect recollections of the UN's multiagency (including IAEA), 25th anniversary report, which can be found here. It didn't admit to potentially 40k+ extra deaths as you'd claimed they'd admitted and as you claimed was too low. The report estimated merely 4000 excess deaths — 3% over baseline cancer rates — an increase they said would be difficult to detect.
It looks like pretty reasonable science to me. Of course there will be loads of anecdotal stories about dire consequences. It was a big, scary, REAL event. There was dramatic physical damage and certainly major psychological trauma. God knows we've had GB full of stories of dire alleged consequences from events we now KNOW weren't real problems generated by fear of the unknown in scared honest people fanned by fear mongers and a media blessed with either an agenda, or at best with incompetence. The stories are data; they aren't, alone, science.
The atomic bomb survivors, the experience of 100+ years of medical radiation use and the experience of sundry other accidental exposures gives us some ideas of the risks resulting from exposure patterns and dosages. It also gives us an idea of the timing of those risks. Thyroid cancers and leukemias happen early. Other cancers take longer to develop, longer than the 'Soviet' propagandists lasted. Skin, the largest organ and the one with the most cancers (over half of all cancer in the US is skin cancer of various types) As a Dermatologist I do know something about that. Fortunately radiation mostly seems to cause low risk basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas; melanomas aren't much increased.
Most radiation induced skin cancers will be indistinguishable from their epidemic sun induced cousins, but sometimes they stand out. My non-nudist patient presenting with three at once on his scrotum, 30 years after curing testicular cancer with radiation therapy, was one such. My literature suggests the skin cancer risk starts rising 15 years out and probably remains elevated for life. I've not seen reports of increases in weird skin cancers coming out of Kiev, etc. and I've been paying some attention. That dog isn't barking in Chernobyl. Yet I've heard it barking in Bangladesh. Even with less media attention and with coverups by a guilty UN. I've seen reports of weird skin cancers from UNICEF's mass arsenic poisoning there.
Maybe it's still too early, but I haven't heard of any spikes in thyroid cancer or leukemia in Japan either. Or maybe the harm there is less than feared also. Japan will collect and release solid data on this. In very few years we'll KNOW whether there were any such spikes — the first solid biomarker whether we're panicking too much or too little.