5.5 tons of radioactive water leaked from Fukushima nuclear plant
5.5 tons of radioactive water leaked from Fukushima nuclear plant
I'm shocked that a nuclear power plant run by a private corporation would ignore safety concerns, leading to a preventable meltdown during an earthquake, and subsequent malpractices!
This was impossible to forecast.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
5.5 tons of "radioactive" water. Water isn't radioactive. If I drop 1kg of uranium pellets into an olympic pool, I did not transform that into 3000+ ton of radioactive material.
Most of the leaked water appeared to have seeped into the soil, but monitoring of a nearby drainage channel did not show any significant radiation level changes, it added.
Water isn’t radioactive.
This is plain wrong. Hydrogen-3 (“tritium”) is an unstable isotope with a half-life of just over 12 years. Just like other hydrogen, this radioactive isotope can bond with oxygen and form water.
This is exactly what happened at Fukushima and literally the main concern about the released water. Only one half-life has passed, so 50% of the tritium present in 2011 has not decayed.
If you're dealing with tritiated water, no sane person would just call it "water"."
And you're missing my point. Using my example again, if you mix radioactive materials with water, you're not gonna have a chain reaction causing every water molecule to become radioactive. The water is just a medium. Adding another 10 ton of water to the leaked 5,5 would only dilute the concentration, not add to it. "Radioactive water" says nothing without concentrations specified.
If somebody asked what's worse, 1 ton radioactive water or 100 000 ton radioactive water? Your first response would surely be asking for the concentrations. For all you know that 100 000 ton of water could be sea water with natural concentrations of uranium.
If someone grinds up a bar of lead into fine powder and pours a bowl of mercury into a big vat of soup and then sends that vat out for delivery, do you think your precious western media is going to wait until the lab report comes in about the exact amounts of those contaminants present or are they going to say that person served up a vat of lead and mercury poisoning? Are you still going to eat some of the soup? Technically most of it by volume is not either of those two dangerous substances so you should be fine by your logic, just eat around those things.
It fully depends on the concentrations of the toxic elements. Pretty sure I've swallowed my share of uranium or potassium while swimming in the ocean. The volume of water says little about the severity. Power plants release tons of "radioactive" water every year, the concentrations are simply managed to safe levels.