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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I mean, Yoon is right on this. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they’re releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose of less than 4 mrem (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.

    But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn’t really understand radiation, and fear sells.



  • I agree wholeheartedly about not concealing origin information when food may contain things potentially impactful to their health. The difference is that even drinking straight tritiated water (at the Japanese release concentration) as your only beverage for an entire year is 1/10th the exposure you would get from a single mammogram. There is zero potential for any health impacts from this release of tritiated water. I direct your attention to this well-sourced chart from Randall Munroe to give a good visual on different relative radiation doses. One year of drinking tritiated water at a concentration of 1500 Bq/L (the concentration its being released at, and about 1/10th of the WHO limit) gives a dose of approx. 40 μSv, the same as the cross country flight in the above graphic.



  • This is such a non-issue it’s ridiculous. There is honestly more of a danger from heavy metals in the fish they ate than from radiation. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they’re releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose rate of less than 4 mrem/year (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA.. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.

    But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn’t really understand radiation, and fear sells.




  • 100% yes, it is safe. Tritium is a very weak beta emitter, so tritium itself cannot emit radiation strong enough to even penetrate your skin. According to the NRC, drinking water for an entire year from a well contaminated with 1600 pCi/ml of tritium (comparable to levels identified in a drinking water well after a significant tritiated water spill at a nuclear facility) results in a radiation dose of 0.3 mrem. That is 12 times lower than the dose you receive from a cross country flight (DC-LA and back). The federal limit (in the US) for radiation workers is 5 rem per year. 0.3 mrem is 0.00003 rem. This release of tritiated liquid by Japan is completely safe, and very far below any regulatory limit.



  • Honestly, not much in the way of alternatives. Tritium is very, very difficult to remove from water. Basically the only option, aside from discharge, is to store it in tanks and wait for enough half lives to elapse that the tritium effectively just decays away on its own. The half life of tritium is just over 12 years, so that’ll still be a while longer, and that gets expensive (in terms of both storage costs and space costs). However, tritium is not particularly dangerous, especially at low concentrations.

    As usual with radioactive liquids, dilution is the solution. And Japan has diluted this liquid to 1500Bq/liter, far short of their internal legal limit of 60,000Bq/liter, and even far below the WHO limit of 10,000Bq/liter.