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by pera 1515 days ago
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

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

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...

Is the carbon-14 an actual health concern, or just a PITA for future archeologists?
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
Except if you consider the "entropy" of doing that, you have an enormous amount of energy inputs required.