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The Japanese environment minister says Japan may have to dump the radioactive water from the destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima into the sea.
Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, has collected more than 1 million tonnes of contaminated water from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting since the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
"The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it," the minister, Yoshiaki Harada, told a news briefing in Tokyo.
"The whole of the government will discuss this, but I would like to offer my simple opinion."
The government is awaiting a report from an expert panel before making a final decision on how to dispose of the radioactive water.
[...] The utility says it will run out of room to store the water by 2022. Harada did not say how much water would need to be dumped into the ocean.
Any green light from the government to dump the waste into the sea would anger neighbors such as South Korea, which summoned a senior Japanese embassy official last month to explain how the Fukushima water would be dealt with.
An unreliable source noted that Cthulhu have muttered something along the lines of "fools ... godzilla ..." something or other.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday September 14 2019, @08:23PM (4 children)
Tritium has a half-life of what, 12 years? If that's all that's involved, then it's probably relatively safe. (Relatively because hydrogen, including tritium, is a bio-active element. And it can get embedded within DNA.) The danger is not so much that it's radioactive, as that it might get embedded into DNA and then change into something else (Helium) that causes the molecule to break. Unpredictable results. Often the cellular repair can handle it...but sometimes not, and the change would be really random, and unlikely to be desirable.
That said, gene-line changes are still quite unlikely.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 14 2019, @08:28PM (2 children)
In another word, godzilla.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 14 2019, @09:53PM (1 child)
Well, no. If it happens you might expect death or cancer, but not godzilla. Favorable mutations are extremely rare, and usually trivial. The best you might hope for is the ability to, say, excrete DDT after you eat it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @05:16AM
Mix a little energetic alpha particles with some Gaia magic, BAM big angry iguana! Comin' to get that Jeep which ran over his little girl!
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday September 14 2019, @08:34PM
What I don't get is very different. Japan is experiencing a deflationary shock and overproduction for a few decades already. Any money burning is good for them. People used to build pyramids for exactly the same reason. Why don't they clean the shit to the baby feed formula quality to drain some of their capacity for free. What the fuck is wrong with the system?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.