New Radioactive Water Leak At Fukushima: 300 Tons and Growing 198
AmiMoJo tips this news from the BBC:
"Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, operator TEPCO says. Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which measures nuclear events. This is the first time that Japan has declared such an event since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."
There was a significant leak back in April as well.
It do. (Score:0, Interesting)
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
They think it don't be like it is,
But it do.
Re:So.... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you care, sign the petition:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-united-states-petition-un-and-japan-seek-assistance-removing-spent-fuel-fukushima/LHSB04r0 [whitehouse.gov]
Re:I like fish (Score:5, Interesting)
300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
Make that 300 tons of contaminated water per day, something that Japan's environmental agency says has been happening since very soon after the initial accident in March of 2011. According to NPR [npr.org], the next plan is to dig a bunch of cooling pipes into the ground and create an underground "ice wall" to stop the contamination from flowing out in to the ocean. No, really
You can trivialize all you want, but if I were you I'd avoid eating the fish from anywhere near the Japanese coast, and anything that eats there during annual migrations. Could be bad for your health. Radioactivity builds up in plants and animals over time, and it's been pouring in for 2 1/2 years now.
If that isn't bad enough, a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, there will be 40 million people in the Tokyo area without access to safe water.
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not nearly as reactive as this FUD however.
Interesting choice of words.
Why would you consider information about a radioactive leak which includes very bio-active beta-emitters to be FUD? The BBC article from TFA doesn't even identify bioaccumulation as the biggest risk factor in this current leak, despite strontium 90 being one of the beta emitters detected in the puddles.
Re:I like fish (Score:0, Interesting)
Or in other words, you pulled it out of your arse. "Common sense assumptions" are worth, to a first approximation, bugger all.
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:2, Interesting)
While it's sad that children now have to start dealing with a lifetime of the effects thyroid cancer causes, especially when the whole situation was preventable, here's how I expect this to be reported on in some sectors of the press:
"ONOZ! WTF!? Kiddies haz cansur! Newclear powah is bad! Reactorz, what r u doin? Shhhtap!" ...or something along that kind of intelligence level. I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take before things started getting out of control. The consequences of that are still a miniscule fraction of the damage to both the environment and human / animal health that the facility's equivalent in coal-based electricity production over it's life-time would have caused.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation due to the uranium content of coal - did that stand up to scrutiny?