Discharges from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant

On August 24, the TEPCO electricity company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear plant began to unload the treated water from the hundreds of storage tanks where it has been accumulating since the day of the earthquake that caused the nuclear disaster.

The discharge into the ocean under the supervision of the international regulatory body will last 17 days and will release a total of 7,800 cubic meters of treated water, this is the first of four discharges scheduled from now until March 2024, since the disaster occurred, water has been pumped to the reactors to keep the remains of the nuclear fuel nuclei cold, in other words, more and more contaminated water accumulates every day; it is currently stored in more than 1,100 tanks around the plant that have the capacity to fill 500 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The water in these tanks has all kinds of radioactive elements from the disintegration of damaged reactor nuclei, but before it is discharged into the ocean it is treated with processes that filter out all radioactive elements except tritium, it is impossible to separate tritium from water so it will be discharged into the ocean with amounts of tritium, the amounts of tritium are minimal but it is enough for public opinion to oppose the Chinese government and Hong Kong have banned imports of seafood of Japanese origin causing an avalanche of fans from sushi who want to taste it one last time and panic buying of sea salt.

The South Korean government has been neutral but also does not applaud the decision to dump the tritium-laced water into waters it shares with Japan, and people have taken to the streets to make their displeasure clear, and there has been a stir around the world. anguish, it would not be the first time in 2013 a map showing how fukushima radiation would spread to all corners of the Pacific went viral incredibly; terrifying, fortunately it was not true.

The map was from 2011 and showed a prediction of how the earthquake in Japan would increase the waves in different parts of the Pacific Ocean, that is, it had absolutely nothing to do with radiation, but it contributed to the mistrust of public opinion on the subject of the disaster. nuclear in Fukushima.

On the other hand, in 2013 if the soil and ocean around the plant were contaminated with radioactive elements due to a leak of contaminated water in one of the concrete tanks surrounding the remains of a molten core, a radius was created where it banned all fishing activity for five years and shortly thereafter cesium 134 and 137 were detected in fish off the west coast of the United States.

If you only listen to this part of the information, you think that "we are already fried" that the Pacific is irremediably contaminated with radiation, but if you find out that the amounts of radiation found in these fish were less than those naturally present in a banana , are perfectly safe to eat, even these tiny amounts of cesium 137 were used to discover migratory patterns of many marine species, I'm not saying it's good to dump radioactive elements into the ocean I'm just saying context matters a lot.

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