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Fukishima Springs Water Leak
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium
OK. This is embarrassing. At least use proper units.
500-1000 Ci of tritium (or Curies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU#Tritium_emissions
http://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/factsheets/tritium.cfm
and here is more sensetionalist article, but with some numbers to compare,
http://www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html
COMMENTS ON THE DUMPING OF 3500 CURIES OF TRITIUM INTO THE OTTAWA RIVER FROM THE NPD NUCLEAR POWER REACTOR ON JULY 19 1981
CANDU reactors emit more tritium than the so called massive spill above at Fukushima. Tritium is not very dangerous, especially in water. Even when exposed to tritium, your body has a biological half-life of only about two weeks - you pee it out along with water. Radiological halflife is 12 years so you get the idea.
Today most CANDU start to capture tritium instead of venting it, and then selling it.
Anyway, the story is not a very big story. There is a lot of worse things that could be leaked, like mercury. And mercury tends to poison things for much longer than a few years - just look at the state of oceans today and cry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.
Actually, the Becquerel is probably the easiest measure of radiation to understand: It's simply one decay per second.
No arbitrary scale factors based on grams of some rare element that most people have never even seen, and no complicated biological models. Just decays per second.
Nuclear energy is the most ecologically viable option in existence. The problems with not being able to build shiny, reliable new ones is a governmental and societal problem, not a nuclear one.
Or do you think pumping radioactive coal ash in the air is more ecologically viable?
Tritium is bad in that it is readily accepted into any cellular process involving water. It is good in that there's no natural concentrating mechanism. A fish's liver or the human body isn't going to concentrate tritium, like it would mercury. I'd be a bit more worried about the radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes.
Given how diluted the tritium leak is (being dumped into the ocean), I'm not concerned.