Dr. Conca reports that scientists have been urging the Japanese government to slowly release tritium-contaminated water from the Fukushima accident into the Pacific Ocean over about a ten-year period. The water is stored on-site in 900 or so large tanks. All of the other radioactive elements have been removed from the water by chemical treatment. Although not intuitive, this is a very good idea.
Tritium is the mildly radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons and one proton, with radioactivity so low that no environmental or human problems have ever come from it, even though it is a common radioactive element in the environment. Tritium is formed naturally by atmospheric processes as well as in nuclear weapons testing and in nuclear power plants (in fluids, none released to atmosphere)....except from Chernobyl. It (3H ) is widely used for dating in groundwater, rocks, and bones because it was released to the atmosphere during atomic bomb testing of the 1950's through early 2000's, and then that contributed by the small tests by North Korea.
(On July 16th, 1945, the United States conducted the world's first test of a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere. Less than a month later, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the end of the Second World War. No nuclear bombs have been used as weapons since the attacks on Japan, but thousands of tests have been conducted, primarily by the US and USSR, China, Great Briton, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel (?) throughout the Cold War. See video on testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY (note years of the late 1960's and 1970's Most of the tests were in the atmosphere, which created the tritium we see in samples used for forensic dating.)
Tritium is assumed to be carcinogenic to humans at extremely high levels, although that claim is only hypothetical since adverse health effects from tritium have never appeared in humans or in the environment. Only laboratory studies on mice at extremely high levels have shown any adverse health effects and they were not fatal, even after ingesting 37,000,000 Bq/L.
Putting this water into the ocean is without doubt the best way to get rid of it. Concentrating it and containerizing it actually causes more of a potential hazard to people and the environment. And is really expensive. Unfortunately, the idea of releasing radioactivity of any sort makes most people cringe. But that’s the problem, only the perception of tritium is bad, not the reality. And in our new world of anti-science, such a wrong idea might rule over what is the right thing to do, wasting precious resources and time.
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