The Japanese government has recently announced controversial plans to liberate over a million tons of weewee from the remains of theFukushimaDaiichi nuclear power plant . While the move has raisedconcernsand anger from local fishing community and neighboring body politic , how safe is this decision ?
On 11 March , it will have been 12 years since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake strickle the east coast of Honshu , Japan ’s main island . The earthquake generated a 15 - meter ( 50 - foundation ) tsunami that kill over 18,000 people along Japan ’s northward - east coast and struck the Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant , disable its major power supply and cooling systems . This led to a meltdown in three of its reactors , which transmit pregnant amounts of radiation syndrome into the atmosphere . The chance event has since been rated horizontal surface 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale and is recognized as the worst atomic tragedy sinceChernobylin 1986 .
picture to the reactor has result in the H2O becoming contaminate withfission productsfrom the melted fuel and surround debris . As the number of tank carry on to build up up , store space is reaching capacity , which will slow down the plant ’s on-going decommissioning procedure .
But this stored water has not been left untreated ; it is being cleaned through a filtration process called Advanced Liquid Processing System ( ALPS ) , which take out most of the worst radioactive contaminants . This isachievedthrough a series of chemic reactions that remove 62 radionuclides from the water and can be repeated until contamination density are well below regulating levels . However , this process is not able to remove tritium from the treated water .
Tritium is a course pass off radioactive form of hydrogen that is created in the air when cosmic rays collide with strain particle . It has a half - life of 12.3 yr , which mean that after 12.3 years , only one-half of the tritium in any given amount will remain due to radioactive decay . Unfortunately , there are no existing technologies that can remove low levels of tritium that are present in the big bulk of body of water store at Fukushima .
So how bad is this tidings ? Well , according to the Nipponese government , the International Atomic Energy Agency ( IAEA ) , and alarge routine of independent scientists , the planned release of the urine at Fukushima is reasonable and safe .
The most significant point here is that tritium is already present in our atmosphere ( in rain and tap weewee ) and in the Pacific Ocean , and in quantities far eminent than the small amount at Fukushima .
Moreover , the treated piss will not be released all at once but will be gradually released in small quantities each year in a unconscious process that could take 20 - 30 years to discharge . By the time it is released , the water will have been diluted by seawater to such an extent that there will be less than 1,500 Antoine Henri Becquerel per liter , which is 1/40th of the government ’s criterion for unload piddle into the environment . This is in reality grim than the levels of many nuclear readiness in operation across the world .
