[Prickle]

It's not arbitrary, and I don't understand why you think it is. It's not even a mathematical issue. At it's core, it has always been an environmental issue.

Fundamentally, the complaint is that the tritium water will cause environmental damage. => And will lead to damage to humans. If we go down to the roots of the issue, it has not, and never was centered around whether the bq/L was below human drinking limits. It has always been about whether the bq/L amount is safe for the environment. That's why I brought up the natural range in the first place. If anything, claims about it being safe to drink have been a distraction brought up to placate protestors. (And it misses the point)

Therefore, the powerplant should be (and has been) required to reduce environmental effects. When it comes to controlling the Catastrophically F'd reactors, they've been less than capable to say the least. But that's not explicitly related to the tritium water we are discussing about right now.

So, the goal should be to minimize environmental damage. In order to better ensure that, the Tritium water should not cause a major change in composition of the water. Therefore, the bq/L of tritium in water, should preferably, not change beyond the naturally expected amount. (ie: 0.4–1.2 bq/L) Hence why I brought up how your solution violates that basic idea, while the sea release does not. I even showed you the very basic napkin math that made me come to that conclusion.

You do realize, one of the other proposed solutions was actually release by air? After all, Tritium is an isotope of Hydrogen. That plan was specifically dropped because the amount of expected tritium per cubic liter of air, would be greater than when released in water. The decision from the start, has been about minimizing the becquerels per cubic liter. Certainly, the government would accept nothing else.

I should point out, the water is more dangerous when stored. By default, the stored water has a significantly higher concentration until it is diluted. Certainly, higher than the safe level. A leak from the tanks would cause significantly more environmental damage. Just like with aircraft design, where every contingency is considered, we must also consider every contingency for when that containment fails. History has shown us multiple times, that inevitably, even the best built systems are destroyed by human error.

Quite frankly, your complaints are more arbitrary than mine. You are proposing that Japan should take the concerns of uninformed individuals, over the concerns and claims made by professionals.

[dirtyid]

No, I'm highlighting professionals, ESPECIALLY policy makers, are politically constrained in what they can recommend/advocate. They are more compromised by default. I'm aware of the release by air solution, and it reinforces my fact that domestic storage/disposal, though expensive, was likely never properly considered, not because of science or viability, but because domestic politics forbids it. Fundamentally, the problem is one of (geo)political trust. No one trusts TEPCO not to fuck up regardless of oversight, hence the actual science is _politically_ irrelevant. When that's the trust baseline, the region would prefer Japan to keep their domestic nuclear mess up as a domestic problem, within their borders either via domestic storage or disposal. JP political incentive is the opposite, they'd rather dump it off into commons to prevent blowback citing good science, when good science is irrelevant because it can be trivially invalidated by conspiracy/coverup, which TEPCO+JP politics name a more iconic duo. Good science isn't causing SKR/PRC residents to panic and stock up salt or reduce fish consumption if JP fish isn't banned to reduce perception of contamination risk. JP politicians did what's optimal/expedient for them and constituents - offload a literal radioactive problem into regional geopolitics. Which is... fine, even if dick move because one would expect wealthy countries with capability to keep these problems domestic despite cost. The original response to OP was to point out that JP domestic politics at its worst is what’s driving regional geopolitics, which is not responding in a vacuum, and political responses not constrained by science, because science is not sufficient without political trust.