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by lifthrasiir 1028 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
defrost 1028 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.

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lifthrasiir 1028 days ago
> [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.

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freetime2 1028 days ago
> 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?

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lifthrasiir 1028 days ago
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.

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

[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...

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freetime2 1028 days ago
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.

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lifthrasiir 1028 days ago
> 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.

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freetime2 1028 days ago
> How can they verify whether you actually took the sample from the coast of Fukushima then or not? wink

I’m a random person or bot on the internet and I said so, that should be all the assurance anyone needs.

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