this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
251 points (95.0% liked)

News

23266 readers
3229 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarising move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.

China is "highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by... Japan's food and agricultural products," the customs bureau said in a statement.

The Japanese government signed off on the plan two years ago and it was given a green light by the U.N. nuclear watchdog last month. The discharge is a key step in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant after it was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Rand0mA@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Just a question here but do you treat radioactive ☢️ water? I thought once it was radioactive that's it for like 100000 years

[–] Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is tritiated water, that is water with tritium (aka hydrogen-3 , regular hydrogen [a proton] with two additional neutrons) in place of regular hydrogen.

Tritium has a half life of 12 years. The incident was in 2011, so there's been one half life already. The remaining tritium will be diluted with seawater and naturally decay over a few more half lives until it's indistinguishable from background radiation.

Edit: the decay product is helium and an electron +and strictly speaking a neutrino, but those don't really interact with much so we can ignore it). Nothing to really worry about!

[–] royal_starfish@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Makes me wonder, what if they just let it sit for another 20 years and then recapture the helium to sell it or something?

[–] Rand0mA@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the knowledge.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago

My understanding is that they can chemically remove damn near everything except the tritium. It’s because the tritium hydrogen atoms aren’t in the place of regular hydrogen in H2O.

So essentially they can’t filter the water out of the water, if that makes sense.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which shows one of two things: Either you were fast asleep in physics in school, or your physics teacher was an idiot.

All that tritium water release is about as "dangerous" as losing 70-80 glow-in-the-dark wristwatches in the ocean. And in comparison to the microplastics issues, the Fukushima water is laughably harmless.

[–] Rand0mA@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We didn't study this sort of thing in my school in the UK in the 90s.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Disappointing. Things like nuclear decay chains was something we had in tenth grade, fourth year of physics in 1985, Germany.