Why discharge treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant

Public opinion is against discharging this tritium-containing water into the sea, this makes it seem like the villain of the story, when in reality treating and discharging the water is the first step to begin to fix the real problem.

Discharging the water from these tanks is necessary for two reasons, one is that the more time they spend there exposed to the sun and storms, the more likely it is that one will fail and spill water contaminated and untreated with truly dangerous radioactive elements, and the other is that It is necessary to clear the space around the plant to build the facilities for the most urgent matter, removing the remains of the nuclear fuel cores to store them in a safer and more appropriate facility.

All of this is not going to be easy, there are 880 tons of fuel in there that must be completely removed and facilities are needed around the plant to safely handle this material before taking it to its final destination.

Purifying and discharging the water stored around the plant as is being done at the moment will allow work to collect the remains of the core to begin as soon as October of this year, doing so is the most important thing to minimize the risk. that the concrete bottom where the cores are now located filters the contaminated water in which they are submerged.

On the other hand, the water with tritium that is being discharged into the sea is not so bad, tritium is an isotope of hydrogen that has a nucleus with a proton and two neutrons. It is unstable and when it disintegrates it becomes helium 3, emitting an electron in the form very weak Beta radiation, having a very low energy of 5.7 kilo Electro volts, these particles cannot even pass through the most superficial layer of our skin, but obviously if you drink crushed water or consume foods that contain it in high concentrations that can be dangerous .

Concentration is the key to this issue, the tritium water currently being discharged into the ocean is diluted at concentrations of 1500 becquerels per liter, the World Health Organization limit for the concentration of tritium in drinking water or What you can drink is 10,000 becquerels per liter, almost seven times higher than the concentrations that the Fukushima plant is discharging into the ocean right now.

In fact, discharging triated water is a common practice at nuclear plants, the Fuqing nuclear plant in China discharged 52 becquerels of water into the Taiwan Strait in 2020 much more than the Fukushima plant will discharge this year and that It is just one of the 55 nuclear plants operated by China, a country that strongly condemns the cleanup work that Japan is carrying out at its damaged nuclear plant.

There are 25 kilograms of tritium on Earth at any given time. Each year, 1.3 kilograms of tritium are generated naturally by cosmic rays that interact with the atmosphere, but a similar amount decays each year to become the stable element helium 3.