Unfortunately, from Japan's Fukushima we are getting more and more scary news, which does not let us be optimistic about all those who follow the development of events 7 years after the largest nuclear disaster in Japan in the twenty-first century.
The nuclear power plant operator, TEPCO, is still seriously considering pumping tritium contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive liquid for the last 7 years is accumulated in hundreds of large tanks located on the site of the power plant.
The Japanese, however, make it clear that they can not control the storage of such huge amounts of contaminated water. They announced this in autumn last year, but later the matter subsided, and now it returns again like a boomerang. So that you can imagine how much of it is in large reservoirs in the power plant, see the pictures below. Specialists from TEPCO claim that every 4 days a new tank is placed, in which 600 tons of water can be stored.
From the very beginning, the water was filtered for particularly dangerous radionuclides, such as cesium and strontium, but it could not be purified from the hydrogen isotope or tritium. The side effect of cesium and strontium filtration is stored in the form of sodium in specially created tanks on the site, located at a safe distance from the others.
Trit, though, is radioactive, but its radiation is not as intense as iodine. This does not mean, however, that the threat does not exist. Specialists from TEPCO want to get rid of well over a million tons of contaminated water as soon as possible, because there is no more storage space (150 tons per day), which arise from the cooling of reactors, because the temperature still prevails there.
The company also wants to start cleaning and dismantling the object destroyed by the tsunami wave. The TEPCO plan was agreed with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Japanese institution supervising nuclear power plants. The authorities assure that the stored water already contains only radioactive tritium, which in small quantities and after dilution is not a threat and the whole project will not have any dangerous consequences.
Importantly, other nuclear power plants in Japan and the world use this method. Only that such a procedure does not take place in such quantities. But the people of Japan and all those who follow the events are against it. Fishermen expect much smaller catches, and society's health problems. Both the government and TEPCO are, therefore, helpless.
Currently, it is not known exactly how much TEPCO wants to pump out contaminated water to the Pacific. Specialists have only informed that the upper limit for tritium is 60,000 becquerels per liter of water. Meanwhile, according to the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the upper limit for drinking water is 10,000 becquerels.
It is not a secret that organizations associated with nuclear energy, including the most private corporations, such as TEPCO, are trying to minimize the threat as much as possible and every now and then come up with more and more loose radiation emission standards, but this fact is not escaping environmentalists, who exert such pressure on the government that he has his hands tied.
It is difficult to say whether it is a good idea to store such quantities of contaminated water in one place, and in extremely seismic areas. If the new tsunami were struck, the effects would be much more deplorable than the gradual release of water into the Pacific Ocean.
Well, we have to wait and see how it all goes and whether the whole undertaking will affect the marine fauna and flora and the lives of the Japanese and inhabitants of the countries lying on the Pacific Ocean.