Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarising move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.
China is “highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by… Japan’s food and agricultural products,” the customs bureau said in a statement.
The Japanese government signed off on the plan two years ago and it was given a green light by the U.N. nuclear watchdog last month. The discharge is a key step in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant after it was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.
The water is less radioactive than humans, the ban is purely political and in no way safety related
A government using “safety” for political reasons? Never seen thst before.
Fish accumulate toxins and heavy metals as you move up the food chain. This is well-known.
Even though swordfish swim in waters that have perfectly safe mercury concentrations, eating swordfish everyday is inadvisable because of their high mercury contents.
That’s a great point, however it ignores just one inconvenient fact:
Tritiated water cannot bio-accumulate in the environment
Source: “Current understanding of organically bound tritium (OBT) in the environment” S.B. Kim, N. Baglan, P.A. Davis
You need to quote a source for knowledge of high-school level physics?
If you have a source, quote a source.
- Michael Scott.
ALPS isn’t perfect at extracting non-tritium contaminants.
Your own source says they used other filtering systems besides ALPS, which would further mitigate the risk you seem stuck on.
Fish don’t accumulate tritium. 🙄
Tritium isn’t the only thing coming out of the water
Read your article. Tritium is the only isotope left.
But he does think that non-tritium contaminates missed by the ALPS system could build up over time near the shore.
“Nearshore in Japan could be affected in the long term because of accumulation of non-tritium forms of radioactivity,” he says. That could ultimately hurt fisheries in the area.
US psyops trying to gaslight people again?
The radioactive content of the released water is lower than that of seawater. How is it going to build up
Ah yes, because the only danger of nuclear meltdown industrial wastewater is tritium.
One big concern is that the ALPS system is imperfect: it supposedly removes other radioactive contaminants to within legal limits, but those legal limits ARE higher than that of seawater. The ALPS has also been custom-designed for this project: it is a bespoke system that hasn’t been tested in production.
Plus, this is coming from the same private entity that mismanaged the Fukushima plant enough to cause the disaster… How much faith do you have in them to not fuck up again? Tepco’s optimizing for their bottom line, not for what’s best for society.
US psyops trying to gaslight the content of the article. There are trace elements of other contaminants… Of unknown concentration, and we have to take TEPCO’s word that it’s “like, totally safe man, just like our nuclear reactors”
There’s 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean, I’m pretty sure a couple milligrams of trace elements isn’t going to change anything.
Oh, because that’s a great answer to a localized ban.
Guess what? Most of the volume of the ocean isn’t chilling in Japanese territorial waters.
I recommend reading the article again. They got anything but the tritium out of the water. Which is comparable easy to accomplish, and also important. The remaining tritium is as harmless as radioactive things can get in the first place.
A radiation scientist here reminded people of those radium-based glow-in-the-dark wrist watches, and compared the radiation caused by this wastewater release to adding about 70 to 80 of those watches to the pacific ocean.
Sure. Because Chinese food regulations are notoriously tight and the populace is so protected from contaminated foods.
I’m guessing this has more to do with fishing rights in the South China Sea and this is just convenient for them.
Wasn’t that virus issue that we just had and continued to have caused from wet markets over there?..or no that was the Japanese who caused it right?
/S if no one got the joke
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Unfortunately that shows that it’s probably a bad sample, the paper calls it out at the end. The curious issue here is they found it in Jan 2020 but them March of 2019…but nothing in between. So the odds of the march sample being a false positive are pretty high.
The medical community is pretty well positive it originally came from the Wuhan lab, that was found to be selling their used animals on the wet market, I don’t think I’ve seen anything for a while now say different. Unless it’s a Chinese source which doesn’t want to take responsibility at all.
Covid was also found in blood samples in Norway from 2019 https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/RrQw05/coronaviruset-kan-ha-vaert-i-norge-allerede-i-2019-forandrer-historien
Yeah but that’s Dec of 2019, it was pretty well known at that time that it had already left Wuhan. It’s why a lot of people who were following the spread figured the walling off of Wuhan like china tried was fruitless. 80mil+ people, someone has traveled at that point in time.
Well China should ban their own fish, since they release waste tritium themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
China has entire towns that are toxic wastelands. This is just a political statement, probably their usual brainwashing of self.
Or just compare the dangers of microplastic, of which China is quite a source. The microplastic will be around long after (most of) the tritium is long gone.
Im almost 100% sure you pulled this propoganda out of your ass.
Edit: i concede, there is at least 1 known toxic waste dump area in China that has a lake full of rare earth metals
I’m almost 100% sure that if I doubled the effort it took to find this link, I’d have an entire essay on the topic.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
Weird, I just saw a thread you were involved in yesterday and thought you were fucking dumb. Guess it was only a matter of time before you proved yourself a tankie or a conservative.
This is kind of an interesting connection if you are bitching about me saying China doesnt own Taiwan given this article that you posted is about an autonomous region of China known as Inner Mongolia. Do you believe autonomous regions like Taiwan or Inner Mongolia are their own or are they Chinese?
Secondly, this article is 100% about rare earth metals being disposed and how our consumption forces them to have these sorts of places. Sure you are right, they have a lake in Baotou that is basically poison and its a biproduct due to Chinese practices in manufacturing. Ill give you that, but keep buying made in China, force your problems to someone else and then blame them for the conditions they have. You are the type to look the other way to slave labor as long as you get the product you want.
No, actually I don’t buy anything made in China.
Stay mad tankie.
The cell phone you are holding had components made in china. About 80% of all battery production comes from China.
Its ok to say you dont know where you are buying the materials of the things you use, just dont forget what your purchasing power is helping to create. Its a toxic lake in northern China.
Purchased 6 years ago, before I monitored what I buy.
I remembered why I thought you were a fucking moron. You make assumptions and shift goalposts like a section of a rubik’s cube.
Nice brigading btw, I’m sure you people will make Lemmy a better place.
I conceded to you already after seeing the article you sent me… You were the one that brought up my post history so I was talking about that. Then you went and made a confusing statement about calling me a conservative and a tankie which made no sense. Now you are saying I brigade and strive to make Lemmy a worse place. You are the one calling me names and talking shit for seemingly no reason. You could have just dropped the link and left like a sane person but you had to hit me with the "i read your post history you nerd now i got you where i want you 🤓 "
What I now think of brainwashing and those who fell victims to it is almost completely different than what I did when I was younger.
I don’t blame you for thinking this way. Since these aren’t your ideas.
Do those towns produce food?
Yes.
Does that mean China will stop fishing in those waters too?
Does China even fish in Japanese waters?
China constantly fishes in other countries waters. It got so bad that Argentina has just started sinking their ships caught illegally fishing in their waters.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-fishing-vessels-going-dark-off-argentina-waters-2021-6
A little shitty by Argentina due to the risk of life IMO but I don’t blame them
They weren’t left with much of a choice. They would hail the illegal fishing boats and the boats would just book it back to international waters, wait for the Argentinian boats to leave then immediately go back and start fishing again. These fishing boats were turning off their transponders right before crossing into Argentinian waters, it’s isn’t like they didn’t know exactly what they were doing. If you continously knowingly and deliberately violate a countries borders then you should really expect to be shot at.
That wasn’t the question.
There is a risk I’m wrong but… I’m pretty sure that if something is released into the Japanese part of the Pacific ocean it’s not contained within the Japanese borders…
Correction: does China fish near the Fukushima side of Japanese waters?
Let them worry about minute amounts of tritium in the ocean - it is political hubhub, nothing more. The tritium is less pollution and will vanish faster than microplastics in the seas.
China release more tritium in the sea than what is planned at Fukushima, so yeah…
And they release way more plastics in the sea, which is way more critical than the tritium.
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No poison acts like a boolean value, it’s all about dosage and exposure. The idea that fish closer to the contamination site will be more contaminated than fish farther away seems pretty obvious.
If I stand next to you while you fart, I will smell more than if I stand a kilometer away.
Mind you, I’m not saying China is right, it’s obviously a political ploy. But I disagree with your logic.
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Did I say so?
You’re acting like it’s crazy to say: the further I physically am from something, the less it will affect me.
Why do we have to pretend reality is not a thing, just because it’s China?
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OK, I’m not sure if you’re arguing with me, or really aggressively and antagonistically agreeing with me.
I’m arguing against your initial point. I don’t think I’m being “really aggressive and antagonistic”.
I’ve been through graduate psychopharmacology and know all about toxicity. I think you should consider reading my post, again, in a different light, and maybe terminating this conversation.
Please explain to me which light I should read your post in. It seems to me that you said: even if China were right, their fish would be just as contaminated as Japans fish, as you wrote:
Even if your premise was anything but political-- and it’s not-- how would your seafood be any better?
This is obviously wrong if you understand that toxicity is based on exposure and dosage, since Japans fish would be closer to the point where contaminated water is poured out.
Later you wrote:
They’re not fishing from the damn power plant.
Nobody stated this. However it’s not like “distance to powerplant” is a boolean value (in powerplant/not in powerplant). It’s a distance. Japans fish are closer to the point where the contaminated water is poured than Chinas fish are. So why is your retort only that they’re not fishing from the power plant?
How else am I supposed to read your comments?
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This is tritiated water, that is water with tritium (aka hydrogen-3 , regular hydrogen [a proton] with two additional neutrons) in place of regular hydrogen.
Tritium has a half life of 12 years. The incident was in 2011, so there’s been one half life already. The remaining tritium will be diluted with seawater and naturally decay over a few more half lives until it’s indistinguishable from background radiation.
Edit: the decay product is helium and an electron +and strictly speaking a neutrino, but those don’t really interact with much so we can ignore it). Nothing to really worry about!
Makes me wonder, what if they just let it sit for another 20 years and then recapture the helium to sell it or something?
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My understanding is that they can chemically remove damn near everything except the tritium. It’s because the tritium hydrogen atoms aren’t in the place of regular hydrogen in H2O.
So essentially they can’t filter the water out of the water, if that makes sense.
Which shows one of two things: Either you were fast asleep in physics in school, or your physics teacher was an idiot.
All that tritium water release is about as “dangerous” as losing 70-80 glow-in-the-dark wristwatches in the ocean. And in comparison to the microplastics issues, the Fukushima water is laughably harmless.
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Disappointing. Things like nuclear decay chains was something we had in tenth grade, fourth year of physics in 1985, Germany.
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