There go my swimming on Korea’s east side plans for this year.

  • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I’m very rusty here, so please correct me where I’m wrong.

    Isn’t most of the radiation that makes it to the earth’s surface from the sun just EM radiation? That acts a lot different than radiation due to nuclear decay. Your use of the unit ‘tons’ makes me think you’re talking about particle radiation, of which the only one that reaches earth’s surface in large quantities would be muons, which may as well be ignored because they aren’t interacting with anything.

    The water being released by Japan has the following isotopes:

    Isotope Half-Life (years)
    Tritium (3H) 12
    Carbon-14 5,370
    Cobalt-60 5.2
    Strontium-90 28.8

    All four of these isotopes decay via beta decay.

    So, a comparison to the Sun seems weird here.


    Here’s an IAEA overview as of February 2023,

    The discharge of the ALPS treated water into the sea will be conducted after i) purification/re-purification to meet regulatory standards set based on international standards with an exception of tritium and ii) to allay the concerns of the consumers, the target concentration of tritium should be the same as the operational target (less than 1,500 Bq/L, that is less than 1/40 of the regulatory standard value for tritium) by sufficient dilution (more than 100 times) by sea water, prior to the discharge into the sea, and iii) The total annual amount of tritium to be discharged will be at a level below the operational target value for tritium discharge of the Fukushima Daiichi NPS before the accident (22 trillion Bq/year).

    So it’s diluted well below internationally accepted concentrations. Moreover, the release is even less than when it was operational!

    • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      This is the quality post that I love getting these discussions. Thanks for the info!

      • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        You’re right and I completely forgot about those somehow.

        For pespective,

        On average, Americans receive a radiation dose of about 0.62 rem (620 millirem) each year. Half of this dose comes from natural background radiation. Most of this background exposure comes from radon in the air, with smaller amounts from cosmic rays and the Earth itself.

        So, cosmic rays contribute hardly (about 4%) any to the radiation we receive every day.

        I’m no expert here, clearly, so I’m not sure how to compare these units of radiation with the ones being provided for the Fukushima water release; those numbers are provided in becquerel from the sources I found.