this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, Yoon is right on this. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they're releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose of less than 4 mrem (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.

But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn't really understand radiation, and fear sells.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Japan also literally dug a giant cave under the sea bed they are slowly draining the water into very slowly. It literally will have no contact with sea life. All of this fear mongering is incredibly stupid, and demonstrates that it doesn't matter how much effort you go through to do something safely.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oh what this water isn't even being released into the ocean?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Get out of here with that math proving that the amount of radiation is negligible!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


SEOUL, Sept 1 (Reuters) - A majority of South Koreans are worried about Japan's discharge of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea despite efforts by their government to allay fears, a poll published on Friday showed.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has led a campaign to ease public concern and encourage consumption of seafood.

Despite such efforts, South Korean environmental groups and many members of the public are alarmed and Yoon's disapproval rating has risen to the highest in months, a Gallup Korea poll of 1,002 people showed.

"Half of those who identify as conservative and supportive of the government ... also expressed concern," Gallup Korea said.

Yoon's disapproval ratings rose to 59%, up two percentage points from a week ago, to a 16-week high.

Yoon has pledged 80 billion won ($60.6 million) this year to promote seafood consumption and has vowed to tackle what he called "fake news" about the release.


The original article contains 313 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 50%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

According to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc1507, the variation of other radioactive isotopes in Fukushima wastewater is rather large between tanks: while tanks are on average within legal limits, different tanks may have different quantities of these radioactive isotopes that bioaccumulate in fish.

Moreover research into bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes is rather limited (because, y'know, people don't usually dump nuclear waste into the environment), so it's really not super well established how fish process these things.

Plus, Tepco's track record of not cutting corners isn't looking very good... But this will save Tepco and the Japanese government billions of dollars, so I guess go them?