Fukushima Aware

From: Enforceable Nuclear News

Regulators urge TEPCO to dump tritiated water into the Pacific Ocean

On Tuesday, Shinichi Tanaka, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority in Japan warned the press that low-level contaminated water stored at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant represented one of the biggest obstacles for the decommissioning process.  Tanaka advised that this obstacle could be avoided by releasing contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

TEPCO has been storing the tritium water, but is quickly running out of storage space for it all.  “You cannot keep storing the water forever,” Tanaka said, “We have to make a choice comparing all risks involved.”

(FULL ARTICLE---LINK)

A note about Tritium--Tritium is a radioisotope of Hydrogen with a half-life of roughly 12.3 years (it will remain toxic to lessening degrees for approximately 123 years). Because Tritium is a hydrogen isotope it combines well with water and when combined with water it permeates skin relatively easily. For this reason soaking in water contaminated with Tritium can be detrimental to health. Sea life that travel through the Tritium will uptake it rather quickly and it can be then passed on through eating contaminated fish. If there is an upside it is that the biological half-life is about 7-10 days so it does not stick around in the body long but does damage to the cells while it is maintained in the body and can cause cancer. Tritium is very rare and most of the existing Tritium is a result of fission in a nuclear reactor.  I have not found any source that states how many pounds of Tritium is expected to be dumped at Fukushima but prior to this expected dump there was only about 165 pounds of the stuff existing in the world.  Tritium easily permeates rubber, plastic and even some steel which makes one wonder how much Tritium has already leaked from the sub-standard tanks at Fukushima)