this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I mean, Yoon is right on this. Tritium is a very, very low level beta-emitter, and at the concentrations they're releasing (less than 1500 Bq/L, ~4E-8 Ci/L), drinking nothing but water contaminated at that level for an entire year would yield a dose of less than 4 mrem (based on the NRC math that 60,900 pCi/L for a year yields a dose of 4mrem). For context, 4 mrem (40 μSv) is the amount of exposure you receive in a flight from NYC to LA. That is damn near a rounding error on the average yearly exposure to members of the public.
But people gotta be scared because Joe Public doesn't really understand radiation, and fear sells.
Japan also literally dug a giant cave under the sea bed they are slowly draining the water into very slowly. It literally will have no contact with sea life. All of this fear mongering is incredibly stupid, and demonstrates that it doesn't matter how much effort you go through to do something safely.
If Japan wanted to be beyond reproach, they would have held the wastewater for a few more years. The discharge will take decades anyway, so it's not like the risk profile has been reduced.
What difference would a few years make to public opinion?
Half life of most of these things isn't that long, so you could slash the concentrations to the point that you could drink straight out of the tank eventually.
The half life of tritium is 12 years, and they were on the verge of running out of storage space, as well as space to put more storage. And you can still drink it straight from the tank today with zero bad effects.