Fukushima, ..well it's a cheap fix pouring our mess into the sea innit!?

[Paul_F]

While obviously high specific activity tritium compounds are a pain to handle, at lower concentrations (and this is already simply tritiated water at tremendously low concentration, I expect) the problems are not too serious - I am sure it is the other radioisotopes that are the problem, longer half life and far more energetic particles/rays.

The guys from our Active Gas Handling Plant went over there some years ago (when I worked at JET) to talk to them about it. As I understand it the water has already been filtered and Tritium is the main isotope of concern, the other known ones are due to the limit of detection being extremely low rather than actually being dangerous. Fundamentally this is a political problem with releasing "radioactive" water, not an actual health concern. It's also worth noting that the biological half-life of tritium is about 10 days since it rapidly gets replaced with non-tritiated water. The recommended treatment if exposed is beer (genuinely) - lots of water content and acts as a diuretic.
And yes, when I worked at JET the main health physics concern outside the Active Gas plant and inside the vacuum vessel was fall-out from Didcot power station.

I expect there is more Carbon-14 being ingested by living organisms (although not much will decay in the organisms’ life-time) but I’ll leave it to the experts to determine the real risks to the environment and no take too much notice of journalistic stories.

I did the calculations once. If I'd eaten a bag of Brazil Nuts and then taken a dump in the site toilets, it would almost certainly have been illegal to flush. The activity would have been above the site permit for wastewater, and we probably wouldn't have had a legal disposal route. Nobody was brave enough to try it though!

If nuclear is an investment, then price it based on the worst possible scenario, ( which ain't the empirical reality) & let people choose the consequence, not this shit (still playing out) rather than the govt approved bullshit.

How much per Kwh would fukashima disaster make tepco to be profitable, if we were to risk assess nuclear on the basis of such a grand mal

One of the problems here is that people are very bad at assessing risk for this sort of thing, and it then directly plays out in the costs experienced bearing no relationship to the actuarial ones.
To give a few real-life examples from Fukushima:

1. The evacuation zone was chosen based on an extremely low dose rate because radiation scares people, rather than based on an estimate of risk. If we applied the same criteria to the UK, we would have to evacuate Cornwall immediately.
2. Everyone was evacuated, regardless of risk. Pregnant women and young children, for instance, are at relatively high risk due to the lack of data and the very long-term over which effects could be manifested. The elderly are at very low risk - if you're 90 and might get cancer in 20 years, do you care?
3. Related to this, the evacuation almost certainly killed a significant number of elderly people. Being taken out of your community and losing your support system can be very dangerous for the elderly.

This is an issue because the majority of costs relating to Fukushima are related to loss of property in the evacuation zone and the clean-up efforts required to remediate extremely low levels of radiation (e.g. the tritiated water we're discussing). If you're getting people to chose - which to me assumes they're well informed, rather than repeating the Brexit referendum experience of lies on a bus - my suspicion is that they would probably have treated the whole thing differently from the off and that would lead to different real-world costs when Fukushima happened.

& How would we re-assess renewable power tech?

Coal and hydro would disappear overnight, tons of wind and solar farms but hardly any rooftop solar I suspect. Existing nuclear would probably stay but new would be unlikely.

I ask again on the basis of the cost of the millennium tent versus money "spaffed" on renewables (what would 625 mill of lottery funding be nowadays & where would it place is in terms of homes powered) etc.

& If we can designate it for that pos, then why not community renewables???

Lots of people wanted to mark the calendar changing over from "1999" to "2000", and governments tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing. It's unlikely that it would have been politically acceptable to Blair to spend all that money on things people can't see to mark an arbitrary date. If it hadn't been spent on the millennium tent then it would have been spent on a similar white elephant.

https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/blo ... different/

.....According to the latest report by the Japanese government, there are 621 radioactive isotopes were found in the existing nuclear water tanks in Fukushima, among which concentration of a radiouchile called tritium reached about 860 TBq2 – an alarming level that far exceeds the acceptable norm. Based on its survey studies, Greenpeace now highlights the findings of the following detrimental materials. .....

That's just plain painful to read. Quite apart from the reference to "Tritium-90", they're being very cavalier with their descriptions. 860 TBq is about 2.5 grams, in 1.2 million tonnes of water (i.e. about 0.002 parts per billion), Carbon-14 is naturally generated in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays in far higher concentrations, etc. etc. The bit about Strontium annoyed me the most - it's an isotope we really try to control, which is why permitted discharge rates are very low (orders of magnitude below what we think a safe limit is). The way it's described could be anything from really dangerous to a nothingburger - and they've deliberately written it in a way to make it impossible to work out which is the case, despite obviously having the numbers.
BTW, it's also worth noting that by global standards 860 TBq is nothing special. Cap de la Hague dumps about 1200 TBq into the channel ever year for instance.

[billi]

As for the concern about fish, it's pretty obvious that scaring people into eating less fish will be far better for populations than being hoovered up by industrial trawlers. On that basis I'd be perfectly happy to have a few supertanker-loads dumped off the UK in the various "marine protected areas" to actually give them some protection.
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Paul_F , how silly is that logic ? So you suggest to poison landscapes and souls for thousands of years , and take over the responsibility for that , and compare that with fishing ?

Well i can catch my trout with a line in clean water , but can you ?

[Oliver90owner]

There is also the fact that hydrogen is almost always found in organic compounds as single valency. That means it is likely less important than a carbon atom decaying to a nitrogen atom in the middle of a long carbon chain group in a DNA helix.
If a tritium atom goes ‘pop’ leaving a helium atom that has a valency of zero and is virtually unreactive (so will not combine with other elements - or even with another helium atom)

A huge volume, of admitted other nucleotides, at lower than measurable concentration of those isotopes can mean quite a lot of those radio-isotopes in reality. Any alpha emitters are far worse than either beta or gamma emitters in my book. But I will still leave it to the experts.

BTW, the tritium concentration will soon have halved from the original value. Do watch out for those that quote historical figures - they are all behind the curve where radioactive decay is concerned. There has been (virtually) no more tritium produced since soon after the disaster occured.

[Mart]

Lots of people wanted to mark the calendar changing over from "1999" to "2000", and governments tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing. It's unlikely that it would have been politically acceptable to Blair to spend all that money on things people can't see to mark an arbitrary date. If it hadn't been spent on the millennium tent then it would have been spent on a similar white elephant.

The same almost happened in Wales with the decision to build the Opera House, an ugly glass building, but there was so much backlash, that the money was spent on a new sports stadium instead, the Millenium Stadium, so I think we got away with it.

OK, here's something I'm almost scared to say because everyone might laugh at me, but I always thought the celebration was a year too early. We count from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9, so 10 ends a decade, 100 ends a century, and 2,000 years end two millenia, so we 'should' have celebrated the new millenium as we reached midnight on the 31st December 2000, not 1999, well ...... at least that's how I'd count, but I appreciate the date changing to 2000 does look prettier.

Back to Fukushima, I have to say that nuclear power is, in fairness, an extremely safe technology, it's just that the cost when something does eventually go wrong is immense, and that needs to be reflected in risk analysis - small chance multiplied by high cost. I worked briefly in internal audit, risk assessment blah blah blah. We had a presentation for people to explain the issues, from small risks and simple mitigation all the way up to a theoretical plane hitting the building, for which there was no way to avoid, so required insurance, and multi site storage of data. Not long after that in 2001 we had to quickly amend the presentation as it would appear to be in bad taste, but goes to show that anything can happen, or go wrong, if it's theoretically possible.

[Countrypaul]

OK, here's something I'm almost scared to say because everyone might laugh at me, but I always thought the celebration was a year too early. We count from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9, so 10 ends a decade, 100 ends a century, and 2,000 years end two millenia, so we 'should' have celebrated the new millenium as we reached midnight on the 31st December 2000, not 1999, well ...... at least that's how I'd count, but I appreciate the date changing to 2000 does look prettier.

OK, completely off topic I know.

I think the problem you have is we humans are totally inconsistent. How old are you? You will normally get an answer in completed years, so that is zero based. In that case if we ask how old is the calendar we are using, 2000 means 2000 completed years.

The whole thing seems arbitrary to me after all 2000 is supposedly based on 2000AD which should be 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, but it is widely accepted that the actual birth of Jesus occurred at least two years before AD 1, and so some argue that explicitly linking years to an erroneous birthdate for Jesus is arbitrary or even misleading.

Maybe we should have celebrated the milenia 1st January 1999 instead

[Paul_F]

Paul_F , how silly is that logic ? So you suggest to poison landscapes and souls for thousands of years , and take over the responsibility for that , and compare that with fishing ?

Well i can catch my trout with a line in clean water , but can you ?

I was explicitly replying to a major strand of opposition to the water dumping, which is based on "we won't be able to go fishing there any more".
As for poisoning landscapes for thousands of years, go take a look at Chernobyl nowadays. 35 years later and it's basically a nature reserve outside a small zone around the reactor. It's the half-life problem again: anything which has a long half life isn't very radioactive, and anything which is very radioactive is gone within days.

[billi]

Paul_F , how silly is that logic ? So you suggest to poison landscapes and souls for thousands of years , and take over the responsibility for that , and compare that with fishing ?

Well i can catch my trout with a line in clean water , but can you ?

I was explicitly replying to a major strand of opposition to the water dumping, which is based on "we won't be able to go fishing there any more".
As for poisoning landscapes for thousands of years, go take a look at Chernobyl nowadays. 35 years later and it's basically a nature reserve outside a small zone around the reactor. It's the half-life problem again: anything which has a long half life isn't very radioactive, and anything which is very radioactive is gone within days.

Well , basically you say you agree on those accidents , and that mankind have to live with those !
Basically you agree on that thousands or even millions of people , tradition , relations lost their homes
Basically you agree to allow genetic disorders to happen
Basically you agree to not force Japan to monitor exactly what they flood into our Earth
Basically you agree , that shit happens and that shit then gets just washed away
Basically you agree that nature can cope better without humans
Basically you agree on a technology that is dangerous

[billi]

As for the concern about fish, it's pretty obvious that scaring people into eating less fish will be far better for populations than being hoovered up by industrial trawlers. On that basis I'd be perfectly happy to have a few supertanker-loads dumped off the UK in the various "marine protected areas" to actually give them some protection.

So you are comparing one Evil with the other Evil and try to make one Evil look good ?

And agree on that method that we poison the food chain in general , because it is so cruel to kill a lobster and therfore we are fine to dump our nuclear waste into the ocean ?