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

[Mr Gus]

UN to review Japan’s plan to release Fukushima water into Pacific
Taskforce will ‘listen to local people’s concerns’, as government plans to release more than 1m tonnes

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... to-pacific

[Paul_F]

Safest thing to do with it TBH. Tritium is a low energy Beta emitter, and it spreads really easily (has a nasty habit of swapping places with other hydrogen atoms). It's also pretty short-lived (14 year half life) so will go away as a problem relatively quickly. That mean the choices are either massively dilute it so it poses in practice no risk, or keep it concentrated and isolated from everybody else.

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.

[Moxi]

They never seemed to worry about all the mercury and cadmium poisons that were tipped in to the sea and absorbed by fish. The Trit wont be around as long as the other pollutants as others have alluded to here already.

I seem to recall that there was a shortage of Tritium some time back linked to closure of the CANDU reactors?? (fairly recent though) that was problematic for some industry or other either radio pharma or maybe fussion ? Seems odd that they are dumping lots of it in the sea if that was the case? does that ring any bells with anyone else?

Moxi

[Oliver90owner]

has a nasty habit of swapping places with other hydrogen atoms

Tritium IS hydrogen! Just one of the three isotopes of hydrogen. Other isotopes of elements (there are literally hundreds for the 92 natural elements) are not given special names. With such a short half life, unless more is manufactured, tritium would not (practically) exist in about 123 years time (ten half-lifes).

I don’t expect that tritium is the only radio-nucleotide in that stored waste.

[Mr Gus]

Based on all the shortcomings of the Fukushima & what it will likely open the floodgates to more watered down solutions (no pun intended)

You caused this mess, you pay for storage TEPCO. (you have a colourful history of fraud)

"Safety incidents
On August 29, 2002, the government of Japan revealed that TEPCO was guilty of false reporting in routine governmental inspection of its nuclear plants and systematic concealment of plant safety incidents. All seventeen of its boiling-water reactors were shut down for inspection as a result. TEPCO's chairman Hiroshi Araki, President Nobuya Minami, Vice-President Toshiaki Enomoto, as well as the advisers Shō Nasu and Gaishi Hiraiwa stepped-down by September 30, 2002.[24] The utility "eventually admitted to two hundred occasions over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities".[25] Upon taking over leadership responsibilities, TEPCO's new president issued a public commitment that the company would take all the countermeasures necessary to prevent fraud and restore the nation's confidence. By the end of 2005, generation at suspended plants had been restarted, with government approval.

In 2007, however, the company announced to the public that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered during the 2002 inquiry. Along with scandals at other Japanese electric companies, this failure to ensure corporate compliance resulted in strong public criticism of Japan's electric power industry and the nation's nuclear energy policy. Again, the company made no effort to identify those responsible.


Why don't they evaporate the bloody stuff & minimise the dry package that needs storing rather than pollute more of an already screwed over environment, retrieve anything useful separate the rest, ..god knows they've "buried" enough other forms of waste from scraping contaminated areas, ..or simply left it out on the dunes / sea edge.

[Paul_F]

I seem to recall that there was a shortage of Tritium some time back linked to closure of the CANDU reactors?? (fairly recent though) that was problematic for some industry or other either radio pharma or maybe fussion ? Seems odd that they are dumping lots of it in the sea if that was the case? does that ring any bells with anyone else?

They aren't dumping lots of it in the sea. They've got a vast amount of water which has been pumped out of the reactor buildings that has low levels of contamination. Recovering the tritium from this is really hard - essentially you've got to electrolyse it all to hydrogen, use the difference in mass to charge ratios to separate out the protium and deuterium from the tritium (pretty complex plant and expensive to run since you're dealing with neat Tritium). The actual mass of the stuff is very modest - 860 TBq, which works out at 2.4g. Yes, that's grams not kilograms or tonnes.

has a nasty habit of swapping places with other hydrogen atoms

Tritium IS hydrogen! Just one of the three isotopes of hydrogen. Other isotopes of elements (there are literally hundreds for the 92 natural elements) are not given special names. With such a short half life, unless more is manufactured, tritium would not (practically) exist in about 123 years time (ten half-lifes).

Yes, I know. I used to work with the stuff. The point is specifically that it swaps places very readily with other hydrogen atoms in substances like plastic. That makes it a real pain to work with - you've got to use all-metal seals for instance, and even cleaning out metal parts afterwards is tough because of the propensity to be adsorbed onto metal surfaces. Typically you've got a Health Physics guy watching you telling you to change your outer gloves every 5 minutes because of this, need local extract ventilation, etc. etc.

Why don't they evaporate the bloody stuff & minimise the dry package that needs storing rather than pollute more of an already screwed over environment, retrieve anything useful separate the rest, ..god knows they've "buried" enough other forms of waste from scraping contaminated areas, ..or simply left it out on the dunes / sea edge.

You realise that if you evaporate the water off (not easy - it was building up at hundreds of tonnes per day for years) the absolute best case is that it'll immediately condense back to water and land in the sea. If it doesn't, anybody downwind will get a much bigger dose than they would swimming in the outfall from the dump pipe.

[billi]

I ready that the total Costs of that accident will BE more than 500 Billion Euro ..... , Guess they need to find cheap solutions , to not even more make a big laugh out of their Technology

[Oliver90owner]

Paul_F post_id=8838 time=1645208620 user_id=65]

Yes, I know. I used to work with the stuff. The point is specifically that it swaps places very readily with other hydrogen atoms in substances like plastic. That makes it a real pain to work with - you've got to use all-metal seals for instance, and even cleaning out metal parts afterwards is tough because of the propensity to be adsorbed onto metal surfaces. Typically you've got a Health Physics guy watching you telling you to change your outer gloves every 5 minutes because of this, need local extract ventilation, etc. etc.

I used to work with all sorts of radio-isotopes about 50 years ago. There were limits to how much tritium was labile in tritiated compounds - the usual way was to find anything volatile that contained tritium. Water from the sample was removed by vacuum evaporation and recovered at liquid nitrogen temperatures and analysed for any labile tritium carried over in the water.

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.

Some supposedly well-educated idiot once contaminated us all with high specific activty tritiated acetic anhydride. 1000s of contaminated sample bottles, the whole chemical balance room, the main Beta scintillation counter - all contaminated and all of us, working in the lab, with P-bottles for the following fortnight.

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.

[Mr Gus]

Thanks fellas for the reply, I knew the answer would not be simple, which is why I posed it..
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 ?

& How would we re-assess renewable power tech?

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 renwables???

[billi]

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. .....