2y ago

Fukushima wastewater released into the ocean, China bans all Japanese seafood

www.reuters.com

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.

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NightOwl @lemm.ee

2y ago

Fukushima wastewater released into the ocean, China bans all Japanese seafood

www.reuters.com /world/asia-pacific/japan-set-release-fukushima-water-amid-criticism-seafood-import-bans-2023-08-23/

94 comments

The water is less radioactive than humans, the ban is purely political and in no way safety related
- A government using "safety" for political reasons? Never seen thst before.
- Fish accumulate toxins and heavy metals as you move up the food chain. This is well-known.
  Even though swordfish swim in waters that have perfectly safe mercury concentrations, eating swordfish everyday is inadvisable because of their high mercury contents.
  
  That's a great point, however it ignores just one inconvenient fact:
  Tritiated water cannot bio-accumulate in the environment
  Source: "Current understanding of organically bound tritium (OBT) in the environment" S.B. Kim, N. Baglan, P.A. Davis
  
  Fish don't accumulate tritium. 🙄
Sure. Because Chinese food regulations are notoriously tight and the populace is so protected from contaminated foods.
I'm guessing this has more to do with fishing rights in the South China Sea and this is just convenient for them.
- Wasn't that virus issue that we just had and continued to have caused from wet markets over there?....or no that was the Japanese who caused it right?
  /S if no one got the joke
Well China should ban their own fish, since they release waste tritium themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
China has entire towns that are toxic wastelands. This is just a political statement, probably their usual brainwashing of self.
- Or just compare the dangers of microplastic, of which China is quite a source. The microplastic will be around long after (most of) the tritium is long gone.
- Do those towns produce food?
  
  Yes.
- Im almost 100% sure you pulled this propoganda out of your ass.
  Edit: i concede, there is at least 1 known toxic waste dump area in China that has a lake full of rare earth metals
  
  I'm almost 100% sure that if I doubled the effort it took to find this link, I'd have an entire essay on the topic.
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
  Weird, I just saw a thread you were involved in yesterday and thought you were fucking dumb. Guess it was only a matter of time before you proved yourself a tankie or a conservative.
  
  What I now think of brainwashing and those who fell victims to it is almost completely different than what I did when I was younger.
  I don't blame you for thinking this way. Since these aren't your ideas.
Does that mean China will stop fishing in those waters too?
- Does China even fish in Japanese waters?
  
  China constantly fishes in other countries waters. It got so bad that Argentina has just started sinking their ships caught illegally fishing in their waters.
  https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-fishing-vessels-going-dark-off-argentina-waters-2021-6
  
  There is a risk I'm wrong but... I'm pretty sure that if something is released into the Japanese part of the Pacific ocean it's not contained within the Japanese borders....
China having the audacity to take a stance on this while taishan has been leaking since 2020 is easily the funniest fucking thing I've seen all year. For anyone uneducated in the matter of radiochemistry, the water from fukushima is more well treated than the water that comes out of Canadian or American reactors from regular use.
At the very least people should be forced to read the IAEA report before being allowed an opinion on something they clearly do not understand, especially when disingenuous garbage information is being spread around by malicious actors and bots.
IAEA report for reference: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/iaea_comprehensive_alps_report.pdf
- This is standard geopolitical bullshit. They wanted to ban seafood imports from Japan and this is a good excuse. Radiation is easily detected. It's not like they would be taking some unpredictable , unknowable risk here. The radiation contamination risk isn't the point at all.
  It's the same as the international beef market. A cow falls over in Alberta somewhere and suddenly 5 countries ban Canadian beef imports across the board. The reason they give is "because of the possibility of mad cow" but the truth is they're constantly looking for an excuse to issue protectionist measures .
- Everyone is always looking for a cassus belli, maybe not for way but to at least be allowed to act like a duck to people
Let them worry about minute amounts of tritium in the ocean - it is political hubhub, nothing more. The tritium is less pollution and will vanish faster than microplastics in the seas.
- China release more tritium in the sea than what is planned at Fukushima, so yeah...
  
  And they release way more plastics in the sea, which is way more critical than the tritium.
- No poison acts like a boolean value, it's all about dosage and exposure. The idea that fish closer to the contamination site will be more contaminated than fish farther away seems pretty obvious.
  If I stand next to you while you fart, I will smell more than if I stand a kilometer away.
  Mind you, I'm not saying China is right, it's obviously a political ploy. But I disagree with your logic.
Just a question here but do you treat radioactive ☢️ water? I thought once it was radioactive that's it for like 100000 years
- 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!
  
  Makes me wonder, what if they just let it sit for another 20 years and then recapture the helium to sell it or something?
  
  Thanks for the knowledge.
- 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.
- https://www.grunge.com/1331356/how-radioactive-water-treated/
- 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.
  
  We didn't study this sort of thing in my school in the UK in the 90s.
It's pretty bad when China is in the right when it comes to a safety-related topic.
- You do realise that the potassium alone in your body is more radioactive than that water, right?
  You are literally more radioactive.
  This isn't even worth a story.
  
  Yeah, OP straight up says that this was given the green light by the UN and planned for years. The water is safe.
- LMAO. This IS a joke, right?
  
  No. Many people (especially in the US) are completely ignorant about science. This guy knows nothing that would help him (or her) to actually rate the danger.
- Yeah, it would be interesting to see that ever happen.
- It's pretty bad when you're this misinformed and frankly, extremely ignorant on a topic and then make a comment like this.
- yeah nah
- Then you better don't eat bananas. Because bananas are more radioactive than the Fukuchima water.
  
  Why would a troglodyte know anything about bananas? It probably subsists off of frozen pizza/hot pockets.

94 comments