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.
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.
Fish don’t accumulate tritium. 🙄
Tritium isn’t the only thing coming out of the water
Read your article. Tritium is the only isotope left.
US psyops trying to gaslight the content of the article. There are trace elements of other contaminants… Of unknown concentration, and we have to take TEPCO’s word that it’s “like, totally safe man, just like our nuclear reactors”
There’s 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean, I’m pretty sure a couple milligrams of trace elements isn’t going to change anything.
Oh, because that’s a great answer to a localized ban.
Guess what? Most of the volume of the ocean isn’t chilling in Japanese territorial waters.
But he does think that non-tritium contaminates missed by the ALPS system could build up over time near the shore.
“Nearshore in Japan could be affected in the long term because of accumulation of non-tritium forms of radioactivity,” he says. That could ultimately hurt fisheries in the area.
US psyops trying to gaslight people again?
The radioactive content of the released water is lower than that of seawater. How is it going to build up
Ah yes, because the only danger of nuclear meltdown industrial wastewater is tritium.
One big concern is that the ALPS system is imperfect: it supposedly removes other radioactive contaminants to within legal limits, but those legal limits ARE higher than that of seawater. The ALPS has also been custom-designed for this project: it is a bespoke system that hasn’t been tested in production.
Plus, this is coming from the same private entity that mismanaged the Fukushima plant enough to cause the disaster… How much faith do you have in them to not fuck up again? Tepco’s optimizing for their bottom line, not for what’s best for society.
I recommend reading the article again. They got anything but the tritium out of the water. Which is comparable easy to accomplish, and also important. The remaining tritium is as harmless as radioactive things can get in the first place.
A radiation scientist here reminded people of those radium-based glow-in-the-dark wrist watches, and compared the radiation caused by this wastewater release to adding about 70 to 80 of those watches to the pacific ocean.
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
You need to quote a source for knowledge of high-school level physics?
ALPS isn’t perfect at extracting non-tritium contaminants.
Your own source says they used other filtering systems besides ALPS, which would further mitigate the risk you seem stuck on.
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.
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.
This is kind of an interesting connection if you are bitching about me saying China doesnt own Taiwan given this article that you posted is about an autonomous region of China known as Inner Mongolia. Do you believe autonomous regions like Taiwan or Inner Mongolia are their own or are they Chinese?
Secondly, this article is 100% about rare earth metals being disposed and how our consumption forces them to have these sorts of places. Sure you are right, they have a lake in Baotou that is basically poison and its a biproduct due to Chinese practices in manufacturing. Ill give you that, but keep buying made in China, force your problems to someone else and then blame them for the conditions they have. You are the type to look the other way to slave labor as long as you get the product you want.
No, actually I don’t buy anything made in China.
Stay mad tankie.
The cell phone you are holding had components made in china. About 80% of all battery production comes from China.
Its ok to say you dont know where you are buying the materials of the things you use, just dont forget what your purchasing power is helping to create. Its a toxic lake in northern China.
Purchased 6 years ago, before I monitored what I buy.
I remembered why I thought you were a fucking moron. You make assumptions and shift goalposts like a section of a rubik’s cube.
Nice brigading btw, I’m sure you people will make Lemmy a better place.
I conceded to you already after seeing the article you sent me… You were the one that brought up my post history so I was talking about that. Then you went and made a confusing statement about calling me a conservative and a tankie which made no sense. Now you are saying I brigade and strive to make Lemmy a worse place. You are the one calling me names and talking shit for seemingly no reason. You could have just dropped the link and left like a sane person but you had to hit me with the "i read your post history you nerd now i got you where i want you 🤓 "
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
A little shitty by Argentina due to the risk of life IMO but I don’t blame them
They weren’t left with much of a choice. They would hail the illegal fishing boats and the boats would just book it back to international waters, wait for the Argentinian boats to leave then immediately go back and start fishing again. These fishing boats were turning off their transponders right before crossing into Argentinian waters, it’s isn’t like they didn’t know exactly what they were doing. If you continously knowingly and deliberately violate a countries borders then you should really expect to be shot at.
That wasn’t the question.
There might be a risk in wrong but I’m gonna take the risk this time… 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…
Correction: does China fish near the Fukushima side of Japanese waters?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Anyone who thinks dumping toxic material into the ocean is fucking stupid.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
People always forget that the dose makes the poison, radiation or not!
Bold of you all to assume that they ever knew these things in the first place.
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.
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.
yeah nah