Japan announced it will start releasing radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean starting Thursday. The move has been condemned by a number of Pacific nations, including China. Wang Wenbin: “This is extremely selfish and irresponsible. … China strongly urges the Japanese side to rectify its wrongful decision and withdraw its plan to discharge nuclear-contaminated water into the sea.” Hong Kong and Macau said they will impose a ban on seafood imports from 10 Japanese prefectures. Opponents in South Korea and Japan have ramped up protests since the plan was approved last month by the international nuclear agency. This is a protester in Tokyo. Fumitaka Tsuzumi: “The nuclear disaster happened in Japan, and Japan should send a solid message to the world. But the government told the world that it’s safe without showing any scientific evidence. That’s really outrageous. In the future, the children will bear the burden and have health issues.”

Japan announced it will start releasing radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean starting Thursday. The move has been condemned by a number of Pacific nations, including China.

japan-cool

Also, I saw reddit libs downplaying it, coming up with excuses about low radioactivity, and why it's not a bad thing, so they can go back to brunch. All because it's Japan doing it, which can do no wrong. If it were China, they'd be frothing at the mouth. frothingfash Fucking clowns. They couldn't care about what long-term accumulation would do to the environment, the safety of food, and public health. At this stage, anyone who supports these sort of crimes against public health deserve the absolute worst. stalin-gun-1

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      I mostly agree. In the hypothetical that there's so much tritium that it's unsafe to release, even diluted so much, though, I'm thinking about what could be done. Apparently there are ways to distill tritium out from water, and because there's so little tritium relative to water, you could presumably store whatever was less in some tanks. Tritium's half-life is 12-ish years and 8 half-lives is enough for it to be almost nothing, so whatever storage they make would be fine if it only lasted for a century.

        • barrbaric [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          True, and tritium being basically water means that it's especially tricky to contain.