[janmalec]

Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible case, this water will do less harm than what the other industries are releasing routinely, including water treatment plants. If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else. People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution, because we are irrationaly overestimating the dangers of nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity. These deaths are SOLELY a consequence of fear-based decision making. I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start evaluating the consequences of different scenarios with a scientific approach and stop taking decisions based on feelings.

Edit: spelling of tritium

[Reason077]

> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"

Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!

[pera]

Tritium is not the only radioactive isotope present though:

https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-japan-stateless/20...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reac...

> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90, TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water

[Reason077]

The idea is that the strontium-90, carbon-14, etc can be filtered out, leaving just the tritiated water to be discharged.

[pera]

According to the article I cited:

> Greenpeace said it had confirmed with Tepco that the system was not designed to remove carbon-14

Maybe there are updates on this matter but I couldn't find anything online.

[Reason077]

Sounds like you're right about the carbon-14:

"C-14 also cannot be removed by ALPS, but its concentration is far lower than its regulatory standard for discharge."

Source: https://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissi...

[tablespoon]

Is the carbon-14 an actual health concern, or just a PITA for future archeologists?

[gus_massa]

Nitpicking: The archeologist already have tables to fix variations of the C_14 vs C_12 in the past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_calibration

[xyzzy21]

Except if you consider the "entropy" of doing that, you have an enormous amount of energy inputs required.

[littlestymaar]

And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).

This is a complete non-issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fission

[kyrra]

> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution.

You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.

Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.

Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.

Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.

Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).

People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.

[Reason077]

> "Wood and animal waste"

Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.

Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.

[brnaftr361]

I've never actually sat down and worked it out, but it seems to me that this is more of a political buoy than legitimately optimized.

Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".

And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.

[Reason077]

You're quite right that wood biomass is not fully carbon-neutral when fossil fuels are expended in harvesting it and transporting it.

UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.

[tablespoon]

> Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.

And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."

The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.

[cupofpython]

>The only bad aspect of biomass fuel

Let's not forget the simple logistical difficulty of using biomass. It is not as energy dense, which makes moving its own weight around more expensive too.

"The net energy ratio between energy output and input was 10.41.. Energy used for hauling hog fuel represented the largest part (36.27%) of the total energy input. The net energy ratio decreased 0.11 with each additional transportation mile

the net energy ratios reported here were on the high end of this range as energy input for possible active drying, storage, and final delivery was not included. " [0]

"The energy content was taken at 137,000 BTUs per gallon for diesel, and 125,000 BTUs per gallon for gasoline (Adams 1983)...

output: the mean HHV ranged from 8,946 to 9,105 BTUs/pound " [0]

A gallon weighs about 6 pounds, so it seems like pound-for-pound (pine-tree) biomass is less than half as productive as gasoline.*

Honestly, I was expecting worse. But over doubling energy costs isn't negligible, especially for poorer countries.

*this is at a glance work, not an actual deep dive

[0] Net energy output from harvesting small-diameter trees using a mechanized system Fei Pan Han-Sup Han Leonard R. Johnson

FOREST PRODUCTS JOURNAL VOL. 58, NO. 1/2 William J. Elliot

[pojzon]

> Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.

They can only do so if we help them. Providing the technology FOR FREE.

Human race is slowly outgrowing the concept of money. Current system does not fit into the future we have ahead of us. And quite a bit of high profile ppl see that and are afraid of losing power.

[cwp]

What does renewability have to do with climate change?

[hypertele-Xii]

When you burn a tree, everything that's released into the atmosphere is something the tree absorbed from the atmosphere as it grew. So it's plus minus zero in terms of pollution.

When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.

Pollution that changes the climate.

[titzer]

> Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions

Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.

Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

[martinald]

But keep in mind methane's halflife is 'only' ~8 years.

[twojacobtwo]

Keep in mind that this is really just a nicer-sounding way of saying that we get xxx-xxxx (can't be arsed to do the half-life based math at the moment) years worth of equivalent C02 warming in just 8 years. Given how global warming is accelerating toward/through various points-of-no-return, stopping to point out that it's 'only' 8 years is doing a disservice to the efforts of communicating the danger of our current situation.

[WithinReason]

Also, for another bit of comparison, there's 4.5 Billion metric tons of uranium in the ocean already:

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6191296

[teawrecks]

That number doesn't mean anything on its own. How about a ppb ratio?

[WithinReason]

The article specified the amount in absolute quantities as well instead of a ppb ratio.

[yandrypozo]

Thank you for saying that, I still don't get how so many people who claim to take decision based on science are so against nuclear tech.

[jerf]

Well, one reason is that a lot of people casually assume that the baseline level of radiation in the natural environment is 0.0000000...., but it's not.

Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.

Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.

Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.

[yandrypozo]

Awesome, that's truly great to know, makes total sense in fact nothing is 0.00% pure or safe in nature and that's beautiful.

[MomoXenosaga]

Science is irrelevant. There still hasn't been a political decision in my country on where to store nuclear waste.

[yandrypozo]

I would say science is only relevant for political agendas.

[bsagdiyev]

Sure but other countries can figure it out. So that's a you problem, not an us problem.

[7952]

No one really does make decisions like that though. The world is not a lab where you can control all the variables. Nor can anyone have the breadth of knowledge to understand all relevant research. We just adopt a set of heuristics based on our own experience and understanding.

And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.

[forty]

Nuclear is like a religious thing. No one is actually looking at facts and science, they just have belief that this is a solution or the problem. Look how conclusions from an expert panel are shrugged at as "nuclear is obviously the only right solution", no one cares whether those conclusion are based on science or not.

Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.

[causi]

I maintain that "being utter horseshit" should be added to the reasons to flag a submission.

[photochemsyn]

Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.

> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/whats-wrong-with-japans-anti...

[7952]

And in order to come to any of those conclusions you have to get independent experts to perform a review. Your comment is an emotional defence of your own heuristics. Science requires verification.

Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.

[teawrecks]

> Tritium is already present in the ocean

Would that be like saying "carbon dioxide is already present in the atmosphere"?

[DennisP]

We've increased the atmosphere's CO2 concentration by 50%. A few grams of tritium won't significantly change its concentration in the ocean.

[forty]

Is that true locally though?

There is sure a lot of water in the ocean, but it's still possible to poison stuff locally, wherever you drop the stuff is going to have higher concentration, at least for a short while.

[yreg]

Another commenter down the thread:

>The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.

[janmalec]

It would be if we added way more tritium. We are adding a very small amount compared to what is already there naturally and even that will decay away.

[engineer_22]

>I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start...

The future is bright whether you see it or not. Take a vacation, find a less stressful job, start enjoying life.

[Pyramus]

> nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity

Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.

[SECProto]

> At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.

First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[Pyramus]

That's the issue with "safe" - it's difficult to capture in a single factor like number of accidents and for this factor, the distribution of the metric is very different.

Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?

It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: It's not black and white unfortunately, and it's both a technological and societal effort to make nuclear power safe.

[SECProto]

> Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?

Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.

[Pyramus]

Very unlikely. In this case 'the market' is not WallStreetBets, it's experts around the world who do nothing else but assess and estimate the risks.

There are two explanations I can think of:

> Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.

This may be one reason. The risk of a 'meltdown' is actually so high cost but very low risk, that the corresponding distribution has no first moment. The 'expected cost' is infinite. I've heard folks use it as a real-world example of a Cauchy-type distribution, for more info see [1].

Another explanation might be that there is some sort of recency bias. But that would mean the cost was estimated correctly for the past - which is not what you would want to hear either.

You make a good point that externalities for fossil fuels are not priced in either, but that doesn't explain the phenomenon here. And I'm not arguing for or against the use of nuclear power - societies have already agreed to socialise the cost. I'm pointing out it's not as black and white ("nuclear power is and has always been safe") as some HN commenters may think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution

[adgjlsfhk1]

no it's not. coal gives millions of people cancer, but it does so in ways that are hard to prove in court on an individual level.

[Pyramus]

That is correct - if we were to price in "cancer" for coal maybe indeed coal may not be economic anymore.

But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?

I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.

[Archelaos]

> If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.

This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.

> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.

Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...

[janmalec]

You have completely missed my point. Every time you drive to work or flush your toilet you make an impact to the environment. How do you justify this action? Is it ok because you think that the impact to the environment is small? Will the end result of your action be a "massive destruction of the ecosphere"? Maybe it will be, but you have no other choice in life than evaluate all impacts and improve where you can and where it matters most.

[Archelaos]

I think, I understood you very well. The flushing of the toilet is of course also a liability. But my point is, nevertheless to take it serious, even though its impact might be small. I think we should not only focus on where it matters the most, and ignore the rest, but try to improve the situation across the board, including the smaller things.

[madsbuch]

I think this comment very well encompasses the modern discourse on sustainability: With a complete lack of a principle of proportionality.

The problem by elevating the seriousness of flushing a toilet, is that it dilutes more severe cases where one could do an actual impact.

[Archelaos]

The problem is that people think there is a lack of proportionality until they discover that there reall isn't. That happend again and again. And this is the reason why an ecologically sensible society fights on all fronts. There are reaons why you are not allowed to flash anything down the toilet, there is ongoing research how to improve wastewater management, etc., etc.

To get back to the original issue: the OP told us that the dumping of Tritium does less harm than other discharge and thus we should look elsewhere for improvements. As I understand this sentence, he means we should not worry about it at all. This is out of proportion: he could have claimed that we should worry less about it, but it does not follow, that we should totally ignore it.

[TedShiller]

Right, it’s all safe and fine as long as we don’t release the water into your own backyard and swimming pool.

[yreg]

What a pointless and unnecessarily personal attack. A rotting tuna is safe and fine in an ocean and I wouldn't want it in my own swimming pool.

[janmalec]

Well actually, at 1/40 the regulatory tritium limit for drinking water, it is perfectly suitable for any backyard and/or swimming pool.

[contravariant]

How did you arrive at that number? Going by one of the comments in this thread it would be 760 TBq of tritium, which would require 76,000,000 m^3 of water to get below the 10 Bg/m^3 limit of the world health organization.

(granted I don't know where the 760 TBq figure came from either, I'm just trying to get some clarity)

[saalweachter]

The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.

[contravariant]

Ah I see I may have misinterpreted the comment. I took it to mean it should somehow fit in a regular size swimming pool.

As far as I can figure out it probably does not.