Good, it’s about time. Tritiated water just isn’t dangerous. The ocean naturally contains billions of tons of URANIUM. A few kilograms of short lived tritium isn’t going to matter at all.
4 billion tons at 3 ppb… It’s so much water, don’t try to drink it either.
This is what I’ve heard too. It’s really no big deal. Concerned local fishermen are probably just not introduced to the physics of this. In general, humans tend to worry a bit more about radioactivity than necessary. This in particular will be diluted into basically nothing. The only real problem is the PR work that lies ahead for them. In practice, their people should probably be more concerned about constantly dying early from pollution and protest more about that.
It’s not that the impact will be minimal, it is that it will not be present. It’s not that it’s possible that the release will be harmless. It’s a fact that it will be harmless. China and Korea are “raising concerns” because if they can economically punish the Japanese for being monsters during WW2 and the Japanese occupation of Korea, they will. And they’ll do that whether the water is properly released now or if we futz about for ten more years and THEN release it.
People really need to educate themselves before protesting. There’s plenty of actually bad shit to protest, like South Korea’s ridiculous work ethics.
Or in terms of actual nuclear containment issues:
We really need to clean it up properly, not to mention take care of the people impacted by it’s creation.
Though with the Tomb, this passage from Wikipedia should be kept in mind:
However, the soil around the dome was found to be more contaminated than its contents, so a breach could not increase the radiation levels by any means. Because the cleaning operation in the 1970s only removed an estimated 0.8 percent of the total transuranic waste in the Enewetak atoll, the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.
This only makes the whole thing more fucked up, but at least the tomb itself isn’t quite as bad as it sounded when I started reading up about it. By virtue of everything else being much worse. Fuck. I think that’s enough internet for today. :'(
If you wantwd to do some further watching on the subject, here’s a great video on the Marshall Islands and their current state of affairs in regards to the Tomb and climate change
linky link to an ABC News video
Just a warning though, it’s a pretty frustrating and depressing situation.
Also the video is like 40 minutes long.
Don’t tell the people fighting this about coal power plants and other things that actually fuck the environment and kill us.
It’ll be fine. Like, virtually harmless, kinda fine.
This news article doesn’t have the dates announced, but bloomberg does.
I didn’t want to post something with a paywall.
Update: I have now learned about archiving, the correct article is posted
