@dystopian
charged with the treatment of the wastewater to be discharged has stated they will "gradually" release details of the process.
That is so encouraging.
And you are so right, a gravity fed emergency coolant tank would have prevented this disaster entirely.
One bumbling mistake after another.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Hi all, Hey E1, Hope it's all good out there...

It is a crime against humanity to dump the Fukushima radioactive water into a public water body. Doing it to one heavily used for fish consumption may well be insanity. The ocean is like magic, you just put it out there and it goes away.

These are people that with all their profit, engineers, and gold-seal wallpaper, could not conceive in earthquake-tsunamiland that emergency generators and fuel for them needed to be 100' up the nearby hill, not on site at ground level. The whole thing would not have happened, over that one simple thing. All it would have taken was a little bit of foresight in tsunamiland. Does it appear they have magically acquired that in the meantime? I see no indication of that having happened.

We have long treated waterways as waste repositories. Now we are up to advertising we are doing it with radioactive waste. This is called progress. Remember kiddies, out of sight out of mind. We dump into waterways with seemingly reckless disregard for downstream effects. Once upon a time where I lived, there was DDT that needed getting rid of by Montrose (which became Monsanto) so they dumped it in local waterways and in the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This has been sadly typical. The Valdez spill clean-up did no such thing. Probably not much different with the Horizon blowout by BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile we are overfishing almost all fisheries man deems important, e.g., uses for consumption. Look what we did to the 'you could never catch them all' Georges Banks Cod fishery, or PNW salmon. Once we almost killed all the whales because we needed them. They would be easier to spot if they glowed in the dark anyway ya know.

When it comes to dumping radioactive waste in the ocean, we have no idea what we are doing. So we should not be doing it. We know the Marshall Isls. still cannot eat veggies grown in many places there. So I am sure it will be fine.

I wanna be a radioactive glow-in-the-dark cynic.

Have good ones all!

@bondibox
Will calm down and have some breakfast, then watch your vid and get re- worked up and angry.
Then I'll listen to O'Joe's presser and fall asleep.
Good times.
Thanks for the post.

CSN wrote a song about the storage of nuclear waste in the ocean. Michael Finnegan delivers an emotional performance here, so don't play unless you're ready to get worked up and angry.

@usefewersyllables
by your learned familiarity with the history of it here in the PNW.
Hoping my well water is not affected.
Portland water comes from a pristine watershed high above the river and is considered the some of the cleanest water in the world.
Looking forward to your recalculation. Not expecting good news.
Thanks for the post.

with the start of the Manhattan Project.

All of the plutonium production reactors at the Hanford Works employed single-pass cooling with water from the Columbia River. The water was pulled out of the river, run through the reactor cooling loops, retained for a period of time for any contamination to partially decay, and then simply dumped back into the river. The irradiated fuel slugs were pushed out of the reactors into water-filled cooling canals, which resulted in direct contact of water and fuel elements- and even that water was just sent back out into the river, after a period of treatment and decay time. Rupture of the zirconium fuel slug cladding was relatively commonplace as production schedules were accelerated due to cold-war paranoia, so the original claims of "water never coming into direct contact with the fuel" were abandoned before the 40s were over.

We in the US have no standing whatsoever to complain about the Fukushima water at this point. We shoved much worse contaminated water right back into the river from 1943 straight through until 1987. They can't hold a friggin' candle to what we did.

I need to go back and recalculate how much heat (and how much tritium!) we quietly dumped during the plutonium-production era. The numbers are absolutely staggering. If time permits, I'll do that over the next couple of days...

The Russians were no better, of course. They dumped much of their process water from e.g. Mayak into a single big lake (Lake Karachay), and a single river (the Techa). But they more or less routinely dumped entire loads of spent fuel from their submarines (as well as entire decommissioned reactors!) into the Kara Sea at Novaya Zemla.

So the upcoming Fukushima water dump is bad. No doubt about it. It is a true tragedy that the ALPS ion-exchange decontamination process was overwhelmed and was essentially abandoned (and it couldn't remove tritium in any case). But we have to keep it in proportion: this release pales in comparison to the damage done in our names during the Cold War.

@QMS

read somewhere recently the fish being caught around the Japanese waters has something like
400 times the acceptable levels of radioactive content. You want a Geiger counter
with your sushi?

@humphrey
that some armor units are refusing to move forward because the Leopards and Bradley's have a bounty on them.
Heh, a tank with a $ sign on top, gotta be encouraging to the crew.
Then again, maybe it's a rouble.
I see light at the end of this tunnel.
Don't know if it's light of day or brimstone.
Have a good day.

#Ukranian soldier warning #Zelensky that another #Maidan is coming. This time the National Guard isn't going to protect the elites. Bc now they are angry. A few may protect you but not for long! He says we now learned a lot and trained a lot.
And I am sure he is not alone. pic.twitter.com/lMPyMiRIRJ

— Arthur Morgan (@ArthurM40330824) July 25, 2023

@soryang
from the Korean perspective.
I smelled a rat right off the top.

The articles on this subject typically mention only the tritium discharge, and don't discuss the technical issues in monitoring, maintenance, reliability and redundance necessary to remove the more harmful radionuclides consistently over long periods. One could make the process "meet international standards" by taking finite samples over short periods of time, but this process has to go on continuously over decades raising operational, maintenance and safety issues. The mere sampling schedule presents a selection bias that may miss lapses and unsafe discharges. While maintenance is going on ALPS components what is done with the continuously flowing contaminated discharge? A redundant system needs to be built. I'm not a scientist, I learned this from listening to South Korean nuclear engineers on independent media videos (on youtube), particularly Professor Seo (see the links below).

So Chosun Ilbo is sitting out the TEPCO dog and pony show press conference about ALPS at Fukushima, based on a freedom of press principle. I guess this is so the conservative major media publication could possibly regain some public credibility after its consistent support of Yoon Suk-yeol, who has become even more unpopular with his apparently unqualified approval of the Fukishima dumping operation (among other things). The Fukushima waste water dump is opposed by 84 percent of the Korean public whose diet includes large amounts of seafood. Hankyoreh was barred from the press conference because they've taken a very critical perspective on the IAEA "final" report which allegedly approved the process, which it didn't. MBC another disliked source is also barred from attending.

"Finally, I would like to emphasize the release of water stored at Fukushima Daichi Power Station is a national decision by the Government of Japan and this report is neither a recommendation nor an endorsement of that policy. However, I hope that all who have an interest in this decision will welcome the IAEA's independent and transparent review, and I give an assurance, as I said right at the start of this process, that the IAEA will be there before, during and after the discharge of ALPs treated water." Rafael Mariano Grossi

The report was coordinated with the Japanese government and vetted by several agencies and TEPCO before its release. It wasn't independent.

Ecology experts stated that insufficient studies have been done to say it won't harm the environment or contaminate the food chain. The IAEA report didn't really address this issue in any depth because they are not qualified to do so. As I recall, The US Ph.D. who addressed this topic at an international conference in Busan several weeks ago, which opposed this move by Japan, felt that there are insufficient scientific studies on this aspect of the discharge, and that new studies need to be done. He said, historically, insufficient biological/ecological studies have been done. This kind of reminds of the Oppenheimer documentary I watched a couple of days ago. At Trinity the radiological consequences were really not given much thought, they just wanted to see whether the bomb would work.

The Yoon administration had asked Japan for its Korean expert observers to be able to do sample testing independently on Fukushima waste waters scheduled for discharge. Never heard any movement there. That was July 8. I doubt Japan would ever go for that. This press conference about ALPS seems like an effort by TEPCO to gain trust. IAEA already failed in that respect in South Korea (and China too, as I understand).

Forgive me if I posted these earlier, I couldn't find them in my history.

Japan’s system for treating radioactive Fukushima water was never verified by IAEA, July 12
https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1099821....

Seo Kyun-ryeol, professor emeritus of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University “The clean water provided by Tokyo Electric Power is clean? The IAEA report is 指鹿爲馬 Pointing at a deer and calling it a horse."

Amid the accusations, the science community also has misgivings. Seo Kyun-ryeol, a professor emeritus at Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, is an outspoken critic. He is among several scientists who question the contaminated water filtration process and cautions that sea currents will ultimately bring some of discharged wastewater to Korea’s shores...

...Seo says, “There is no guarantee that all of the system’s many filters for different isotopes will work perfectly all of the time, given the condition and quantity of the water, let alone the period of time required.”

[Lee Kyong-hee] Fallout from Fukushima radioactive wastewater
https://www.koreaherald.com/common/newsprint.php?ud=20230607000843

Seo Kyun-ryeol, a professor emeritus at Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear and Atomic Engineering, has consistently questioned Japan’s decision to discharge contaminated water from the Fukushima reactors.

He highlighted the absence of standardized protocols for verifying the safety of the contaminated water, emphasizing the necessity of a more comprehensive and rigorous verification process.

A former vice president of the Korean Nuclear Society, Seo studied nuclear engineering at Seoul National University and earned his PhD at MIT. He has worked at the French Electric Power Agency, Westinghouse Electric, and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute.

Seo warned of the ongoing issue of contaminated water and groundwater emissions resulting from the damaged reactors and melted nuclear fuel. He argued that the release of highly toxic substances would intensify once the nuclear fuel undergoes re-salting.

Drawing a comparison with the Chernobyl disaster, where the site was sealed with concrete to prevent groundwater contamination, Seo expressed concerns about the exposed conditions at the Fukushima plant. Notably, he criticized the Japanese government for its silence on this matter.

Controversy Surrounds South Korean Inspection of Fukushima Discharge Process May 22
http://koreabizwire.com/controversy-surrounds-south-korean-inspection-of...