| HN Mirror

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20230824/k10014172021000.ht...

ammo1662 1035 days ago

and also

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

They seems to be more willing to put money on propaganda instead of actually dealing with the problem. Just check the page 7.

- Discharge into the sea: 3.4 billion yen

- Vapor release: 34.9 billion yen

- Hydrogen release: 100 billion yen

- Underground burial: 243.1 billion yen

And for propaganda, 70 billion yen

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...

Japan has spent more than ¥4 trillion on the decontamination effort so far. So it's definitely not true that they have spent more on propaganda than "actually dealing with the problem".

> Total decontamination costs have exceeded 4 trillion yen as of the end of December. Going forward, additional costs are projected to grow by trillions of yen. [1]

Is ¥70 billion a lot? Sure. But to put it in perspective, more than $14 billion (¥2 trillion) was spent on federal election campaigns in the US in 2020 [2]. Gaining public favor is expensive in a democratic country. And misinformation is a real problem with real costs (e.g. to Japan’s fishing industry) - so it makes sense economically as well as politically.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

So people don't trust the Japanese government or TEPCO. That's fine, and that's why the IAEA is there monitoring. Don't trust the IAEA? I feel like anyone should be able to conduct independent testing on water and fish samples from the area.

> Don't trust the IAEA?

You can trust the IAEA to actually do monitoring, and also believe that monitoring might be not effective enough. The IAEA failed to effectively monitor the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade, so why should we expect the opposite?

> I feel like anyone should be able to conduct independent testing on water and fish samples from the area.

You have to tap into the wastewater source, which is much more hard to do independently and also why the IAEA had to show up. The wastewater will then be subject to the ocean currents, so the actual effect would be inconsistent and delayed (up to 10 years, according to simulations). At that point nothing could be done about the year-long dump.

defrost 1035 days ago

> The IAEA failed to effectively monitor the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade,

Wwhich decade was that then (more to the point why did they fail to monitor if they were montoring?)

There's a big difference between easy monitoring of peacetime allied country nuclear reactors and monitoring the enrichment program of a country actively attempting to develp weapons grade material in the absence of any binding agreements.

> [Which] decade was that then (more to the point why did they fail to monitor if they were montoring?)

2009--2019 if my understanding is correct. Note that this period does overlap with major sanctions against Iran, and since the IAEA itself later acknowledged the breach of agreements in this period, it's fair to say that the IAEA monitoring was not as effective compared to Western intelligences.

> There's a big difference between easy monitoring of peacetime allied country nuclear reactors and monitoring the enrichment program of a country actively attempting to develp weapons grade material in the absence of any binding agreements.

This doesn't matter, because it does show that countries can hide (or more accurately, delay the detection of) evidences if they are really willing to do so. And the absence of any binding agreements actually gives Japan more incentive to do that.

> The wastewater will then be subject to the ocean currents, so the actual effect would be inconsistent and delayed (up to 10 years, according to simulations).

Do you have a source for these simulations?

[1] https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...

Sure, see Yi Liu, et al. (2021) [1] and Kim, Kyeong Ok, et al. (2023) [2]. AFAIK they all predict a rapid initial diffusion into the Pacific ocean with a much delayed inflow back to the Korean waters among others.

[2] https://sciwatch.kiost.ac.kr/handle/2020.kiost/43977 (no actual paper available, I inferred its details from [3])

[3] https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_internatio...

So it might take years for the treated water to reach South Korea, but in water samples taken in the vicinity of the East coast of Japan a higher than expected dose of radiation would show up almost immediately after release. And of course the concentration will always be strongest off the coast of Fukushima, so if concentrations are higher than expected off the coast of Japan, they could immediately stop releasing the treated water, and the concentration by the time it reached Korean waters would be orders of magnitude lower (note the colors on the dispersion graphs represent exponential changes in concentration) than what was detected near Fukushima.

That’s what I mean when I say anyone who really wants to can conduct their own tests and sound the alarm. Hell, if the Chinese government wants to pay me I’ll go take a boat off the coast of Fukushima and collect some water samples for them myself.

> Hell, if the Chinese government wants to pay me I’ll go take a boat off the coast of Fukushima and collect some water samples for them myself.

How can they verify whether you actually took the sample from the coast of Fukushima then or not? wink

But seriously, yes, independent groups can take and measure samples and alram in advance. Alas, many such alarms tend to be ignored. Jurisdictions matter here, and there is a reason that Japan didn't try to dump all the wastewater until South Korea (among others) somehow changed the opinion.

> [...] fear that the Japanese government / Fukushima’s owners can’t be trusted to release only what they say they will.

Especially given the fact that Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan at the time of the Fukushima accident, had to go to the TEPCO HQ to force them to continue the response instead of giving up and watching a full meltdown. Japan has a lot to do in order to regain the lost trust.

Prickle 1035 days ago

Regaining trust is IMO, impossible with all current politicians.

The government has basically designated the nuclear agency seat as a "Send the guy we don't like there" seat. Only incompetent idiots have been placed there since Fukushima.

Add in all the BS red-tape that the government made up, the notoriously slow bureaucracy, and sometimes even sabotage? (Combine that with the new nuclear regulation agency created after Fukushima, which complicates it further) It's not happening without a strongman leading the charge and really forcing it.

Would be great if we could copy-paste France's setup. But Japan is obtuse and inflexible.

minebreaker 1035 days ago

So sad that many Japanese saw it as a micro management and blamed him