Fukushima Nuclear Accident Treatment – Release Radioactive Waste Water into the Sea!

On 13^th Apr, Japan’s decision to release more than one million tonnes of treated radioactive water from the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea! My first impression is the Three-Eyed Fish “Blinky” in Simpsons cartoon.  It is disaster for our ocean. 

I had studied Applied Physics long time ago but I only focused on how to measure radiation at that time and some radiation safety knowledge. Therefore I don’t understand why newspaper only stated the treatment of this contaminated radioactive wastewater with Cesium and Strontium and Tritium.  Most of Cesium and Strontium (¹³⁷Cs and ⁹⁰Sr) could be removed by solid-state materials such as resins and titanosilicate zeolites but no method to handle Tritium (³H).  As I know the fuel of nuclear plant mainly on ²³⁵U and ²³⁸U.  Their radioactive family with long decay half-life included ²³¹Pa (T_1/2=32760yr),²³⁰Th (T_1/2=75380yr), ²²⁶R (T_1/2=1602yr), etc.  Since the nuclear fuel was melt inside the reactor and the cooling sea water was direct contacted. It should be included all radioactive elements.

Thus, Japan previous treatment to use many containers to storage and isolate the radioactive waste water is right.  However, the capacity of storage is not able to extend forever.  It should find another method to solve it in an innovative way.

Why don’t make it as a close loop cooling system? Using the stored radioactive waste water as coolant and flow back to the reactor.  And then extract it into the container for cooling again until all melt radioactive fuel removed from reactor.  Close loop system is better choice than open loop system (release into the Sea).

Finally, I believe it is the whole human problem that the whole world and all countries need to join together so as to solve it for our next generation.

Reference:

Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish - https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky

20210413: Explainer: The toxic water at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/13/explainer-the-toxic-water-at-japans-fukushima-nuclear-plant

20210413: Japan to release treated Fukushima water into the sea: PM - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/japan-release-treated-fukushima-water-232018264.html

Backgrounder on Tritium - https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/tritium-radiation-fs.html#tnpp

Decay Chains - https://metadata.berkeley.edu/nuclear-forensics/Decay%20Chains.html

Previous related seminars in HK:

20110316: Ionizing Radiation Safety - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2011/03/ionization-radiation-safety.html

20110412: Seminar on Reliability of Nuclear Power - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2011/04/seminar-on-reliability-of-nuclear-power.html

20110622: Technical Workshop - On-site Detection of Radioactive Contamination - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2011/06/technical-workshop-on-site-detection-of.html

20110907: Seminar on "Responding to Nuclear Releases" - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2011/09/seminar-on-responding-to-nuclear.html

20120311: Symposium on One Year after the Fukushima Nuclear Accident - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2012/03/symposium-on-one-year-after-fukushima.html