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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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So if I understand you right, you’re saying that the dilution will be so quick that there will be no area immediately around the dumping zone with raised radiation levels? When I pour colored water into a bowl of regular water, the force of the water rushing in pushes the regular water out of the way, and the colored water stays mostly with its own kind, until it slowly spreads out to color the entire bowl of water. This would be different?
I kinda feel like people don’t understand how really, really big the ocean is.
Or that there are things like waves and currents in the ocean that help keep it mixed.
I kinda feel like the size of the full ocean isn’t relevant to the effects of acute radiation exposure to the fish immediately in the area around the dumping zone. I’m not saying the whole ocean will be irradiated, or even the entirety of Japanese seas. But there will definitively be a section of the ocean, that, at least for the duration of the dumping of the (300 million gallons was it?) irradiated water will be exposed to significantly higher than acceptable amounts of radiation.
What I’m trying to figure out is not if this zone will exist, it will, period. What I’m trying to figure out is how big will that zone be, and will iT persist after dumping has completed? It could be just the 30ft immediately surrounding the outlet, or it could be 30mi, but I can’t seem to find any estimates, everyone is using the whole ocean as their metric, when I’m talking about the immediate area around the dumping area.
According to this article it's 8 million gallons in total. That would fill a cube 31.5 meters on each side.
The water will contain about 190 becquerels of tritium per litre, below the World Health Organization drinking water limit of 10,000 becquerels per litre. That's before it's diluted. So you could drink it straight from the tap, before it goes into the ocean at all, and you still won't be exposed to higher amounts of radiation than is considered "acceptable."
Since dumping it into the ocean isn't going to make it more concentrated, the area of ocean water that will contain higher than acceptable amounts of radiation is exactly zero.
This whole thing is nothing but wild hysteria.
Thank you. I appreciate the response and data. I wonder what the difference in the WHO limit would be if, instead of being for drinking water, which enters and leaves your body the same day, it was for people to live 24/7 in a pool of water, as fish do. I imagine it would be a significantly lower number, but you’ve still done a lot to convince me this is safer than it sounds. Cheers!
Even if living in it 24/7 sucks for the fish, the exposure for a human that eats the fish is still transient - the tritium in the fish enters and leaves much like the water you'd drink does.
Glad to be providing helpful information. It's easy for fears to magnify and spread, humans have a bias towards paying attention to danger because that's really helpful in evolutionary terms when there could be a hungry leopard hiding in any bush.