News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I work with radiation. Radiation is hard for lay people to understand, and they are all afraid of it.
The technical language in this article is not helpful for lay people, but it is for me.
You get a much larger dose of a much worse kind of radiation exposure by eating a banana than drinking a liter of this seawater.
And things like Brazil nuts, your basement, living at altitude or near certain kinds of rocks, flying, smoke detectors, or dental X-rays are much, much worse.
Not to mention higher dose medical procedures (CT, PET, SPECT, and radiation therapy). Those, however, are borderline dangerous, but there's a trade-off. Your radiation therapy may lead to secondary cancer down the line, but your primary cancer is killing you right now.
These articles also need to mention that the actual experts -- the people who know what they're doing and understand this -- agree this is the best and safest course of action. I'm not that kind of person, but I know plenty of them. I assure you, they are very cautious.
Thank you! I took ONE 100 level science class on radiation and every one almost always seem to be wrong in their understanding. Enough that I doubted everything I learned (for a while)
Thank you for this!
Isn't the problem as much with the radiation itself as consuming radioactive elements that will stay in your body likely to the rest of your life and provide radiation from the inside?
Tritiated water mostly has a 12 day lifespan in your body, at max. Some of it may be used as tritium instead of normal hydrogen in putting things together, but it's not like other nasty radionuclides.
Yup. The other stuff has been removed. All that's left is the actual water, which is radioactive.
That 12 days is not a half life, but it is how long it stays in the body before you pee it out. This only matters if you had a single incident of drinking the water or eating contaminated food not if you are constantly exposed to it then each time you consume affected foods you know it stays with you for about 12 days and small part of it stays with you forever as your body doesn't see the difference between tritium and hydrogen, so it will be happy to use the radioactive version, which could increase your chances of cancer as well as your future generations.
I don't want to be insulting, but what you've described is exactly what a half life is.
But like I said, drinking a liter of this water is much less dangerous radiologically than eating a banana, and drinking a liter of sea water is not going to be good for you either.
When I said half life, I made a mental shortcut that it degrades into harmless compounds.
The 12 days just means how long the body keeps most of tritium.
You are talking how much radiation the water causes and that it is smaller than radiation from banana, and I'm talking that this "banana" stays in your body for 12 days and part of it your body integrates by replacing your hydrogen with its radioactive counterpart.
You work with radiation, but this isn't just about radiation, but also involves organic chemistry and metabolism.
I think the gap between you two is that you are describing the "biological half life" of tritium while using the term "half life" to exclusively refer to the "physical half life". In Health Physics the distinction between the two is very important and generally once you start talking about the effect on people it is best practice to always clarify which one you're talking about.
The biological half life of tritium is also a little more complicated than "12 days", it depends on the form it is in. If inhaled as water vapor it almost immediately gets re-exhaled, whereas if drunk as liquid water it can be ~10 days depending on the person's water turn over (<8 hours if dialysis is used for treatment following extreme exposure) ... tritiated water is one of the few things that you can speed up the elimination of by drinking more water. For tritium bound up in organic molecules and ingested (food/fish) the biological half life can be closer to 40 days.
Yeah, that's why I have concerns about constant tritated waste dumping from an active plant. Not so much in this case. It's a very small amount over a very long time.
Edit: and in regards to it using it as hydrogen, even in that case, the tritium will likely damage whatever it's made into and quickly turn back into water. That's why fully titrated water is so oxidizing. It knocks it's own hydrogen off.
Ok but, people aren't talking about drinking the sea water, are they? It's about eating fish and sea vegetables that are living/growing in it. Do we know what the affect of eat these foods will be?
A fish will be consuming a lot more than a litre of water over its lifespan.
Maybe this one act considered independently isn't that bad. What I don't like is the "dilution is the solution to pollution" attitude that comes from acceptance of this type of activity.
All radioactive elements decay. Tritium has a half life of about 12½ years and it turns into ordinary hydrogen. If they keep releasing tritium at the same rate for a long time, it will reach a maximum concentration in about 25 years (or maybe less, depending on how accurate my fuzzy math is). Once it reaches that point, it will decay as fast as it's released.
It's also worth noting that if they want to release the tritium at a constant rate, they'll have to gradually increase the rate at which they release the contaminated water, because the tritium is already decaying in storage.
For tritiated water, it largely is. For other bioaccumulative radio-isotopes it's not. There's still potential for concerns. But I think this release is good.
Agreed. Sometimes dilution is the solution.
But, I wouldn't say this is "good". I'd rather it not be necessary, but it is, and the relative amount of badness is basically nil.
If the water is fine, why does it have to be released?
Also, would the water from the plant be safe to swim in, or only once it's diluted with the sea?
Because at the concentration it's being stored at, it will continue to be dangerous for a long time, and we can't count on it being contained indefinitely because shit happens, like earthquakes and tsunamis.
I believe it's because they don't have the capacity to store it properly anymore. So diluting it and releasing it little by little is what they came up with. It's not ideal but it's the least worse solution they have.