Tepco “Total tritium in Fukushima : 3,400,000,000,000,000 Bq”/JP Gov considers to dilute and discharge to the Pacific

The total volume of Tritium is 3,400,000,000,000,000 Bq in Fukushima plant, from the report that Tepco submitted to METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) on 4/24/2014.

 

This is 230 times much as the annual safety limit of 4 nuclear reactors to discharge to the sea.

 

Among 3,400 trillion Bq, 2,500 trillion Bq is assumed to be in the molten fuel debris.

 

The total Tritium volume increased by 17 trillion Bq from the estimate that Tepco released this January, which suggests the molten fuel is still releasing new Tritium when it’s cooled down.

 

This is beyond the removable volume at the current technology level. The task forse of METI suggested to dilute and discharge it to the Pacific as a “realistic solution”, stated it is necessary to study the “effective” way of diluting.

 

http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/pdf/140424/140424_02_006.pdf

http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/pdf/140424/140424_02_005.pdf

http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/20140424_02.html

 

 

You read this now because we’ve been surviving until today.

_____

Français :

Tepco : “Le total en tritium à Fukushima = 3 400 000 000 000 000 Bq”/Le Gouv envisage de le diluer pour le déverser dans le Pacifique

 

Selon le rapport que Tepco a remis au METI (Ministère de l’Économie, du Commerce et de l’Industrie) le 24 avril 2014, le total en tritium stocké dans la centrale de Fukushima est de 3 400 000 000 000 000 Bq (= 3,4 millions de milliards = 3 400 trillions).

C’est 230 fois la limite de sécurité annuelle de ce que peuvent déverser 4 réacteurs nucléaires en mer.

Sur ces 3 400 trillions de Bq, 2 500 trillions sont supposés être dans les débris des combustibles fondus.

Le total du tritium est monté de 17 trillions de Bq depuis l’estimation que Tepco a publiée en janvier dernier, ce qui laisse penser que le combustible fondu produit toujours du tritium pendant qu’on le refroidit.

C’est bien au-delà de ce que les techniques actuelles permettent de filtrer. Le groupe de travail du METI a suggéré que de le diluer puis de le déverser dans l’océan Pacifique était une “solution réaliste”, affirmant nécessaire d’étudier “l’efficacité” de la méthode de dilution.

http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/pdf/140424/140424_02_006.pdf
http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/pdf/140424/140424_02_005.pdf
http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake/nuclear/20140424_02.html

Vous pouvez lire ceci parce que nous avons survécu jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

  1. This is the equivalent of 9,4 gram Tritium.
    We must NOT believe such low numbers from TEPCO. They are usually liars, and quote their textbooks.

  2. Thanks Japan,

    Japan has already done their bit; end Life on Earth.

    Would it be too much trouble to pump the ALPS Filtered, (still tritiated) water into a hollowed out salt cavern?

    In 50 Years the tritium levels would be actually trivial.

    Please consider SHORT TERM UNDERGROUND STORAGE.

    Thank You,

    1. 50 years is 4 half-lives.

      2^(-50./12.5) = 6.25%

      so 50 years from now there would still be 3.5e15 *.0625 = 218,000,000,000,000 Bq left.

      A good “rule of thumb” that I use is 10 half-lives is a factor of 1000

      1. 4 Half Lifes

        The XRay and Beta Ray level to the Fukushima workers will drop significantly, since the water tanks are empty. After 50 years, the tritium concentration is 1/8 its present value, and it will still be underground. Even a small leakage (unlikely, but possible) from there becomes relatively trivial.

        After 50 years, the tritiated water will still be in the salt cavern. After 200 years the tritiated water will still be in the salt cavern.

  3. Tritium inventory at Fukushima estimated to be 3.5e15 Bq

    Volume of the ocean = 1.4e21 liters.

    So if we just dumped it in the ocean the tritium concentration in the ocean would increase by 3.5e15/1.4e21 = 2.5e-6 Bq/liter.

    Tritium deposits 5.7 KeV per disintegration = 9.1e-16 Joules/disintegration

    2.5e-6 Bq/liter = 2.5e-6 disintegrations/second/kilogram

    multiply the two; 9.1e-16 Joules/disintegration x 2.5e-6 disintegrations/second/kilogram = 2.275e-21 Joules/second/kilogram

    multiply that by 31.5e6 seconds/year to get 7.16e-14 Joules/kilogram/year

    1 Sv = 1 Joule/kilogram so that would add 7.16e-11 mSv / year to peoples exposure.

    In other words instead of getting an average background dose of 3.5 mSv per year.
    people would get 3.5000000000716 mSv / year

    Which over a lifetimes exposure would increase their dose by 4.9e-9 mSv. That would increase their likelihood of getting cancer enough to reduce their average life expectancy by 0.000004 seconds.

    1. Faulty Assumptions:

      1) Is Japan Telling the Truth about:

      Filtration of other radionuclides?

      Tritium Concentration Level?

      Water Volumes?

      Other Contaminated Water leakages?

      Other radioactive contamination mechanisms?

      Previous RadioIsotope Releases?

      Consequences?

      The short answer is NO!

    2. reply to diemos

      I understand the intent of your comment, and while I do not agree with it, there is a sane and reasonable basis for debate with your view.

      That being said, your math is misleading at best, especially by those without a strong background in physics/engineering/maths.

      Accuracy vs. precision is often used to confuse others. As you know accuracy is about being able to hit the bullseye in a target. While precision is about how close the bullet holes are to each other. Both are desirable, but for different reasons, and having one does not mean that you also have the other.

      The volume of water you talk about is so huge, that even 100 Trillion liters (100.000.000.000.000) is nothing but a rounding error. 3 drops of water in a swimming pool would be easier to measure.

      You calculate using even distribution of radiation, this is simply not a reasonable argument. The water will go into the Pacific in Japan. Your argument is the same as saying that Fukushima and New Zealand expose you to the same level of radiation.

      Your argument assumes that no radiation would be sequestered by the environment, or the surface area of the amount of skin on people of different sizes.

      There is simply no way to calculate length of life by such a small number, not even close to it. If such a thing were possible, life insurance companies would stop insuring people an hour before they died. If you figure out how to do this, you will be able to earn enough to buy your own private island.

      Please do not use silly arguments on this issue. The weakness and misleading nature of your comment removes trust in your reasonable comments.

      1. I trust in Mr Bill Duff, because he says the sky turned orange in The Great Radionuclide Storm of 2011, and also because no one knows more about Hitlers testicles than him. If that doesn’t qualify him as Nuclear Expert then I don’t know what does. Perhaps pasting more Science..

        1. There they are – coming from Niall!
          Hitler’s testicles – he must keep sharing them with all – shamelessly, despite being incredibly socially unacceptable.

          Please keep Hitler’s testicles to yourself where they apparently already have a loving home. 😛

        2. The sky became reddish over Hiroshima

          http www damninteresting com/ (eyewitnesses-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/)

          Eyewitnesses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Article #176 • written by Alan Bellows

          The sound of the American planes drew the attention of the city’s residents, many of whom were outdoors participating in work programs. A few saw a large parachute unfurl beneath the B-29 before it flew away, but most saw only the flash that soon followed. For those who didn’t see the planes, the sudden flare of harsh light was the first indication that something unusual had happened. After I noticed the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky. It was amazing. It was as if blue morning-glories had suddenly bloomed up in the sky. Then came the heat wave. It was very very hot. Even though there was a window glass in front of me, I felt really hot. It was as if I was looking directly into a kitchen oven. I couldn’t bear the heat for a long time. Then I heard the cracking sound. I don’t know what made that sound, but probably it came from the air which suddenly expanded in the room.

          The sky became reddish over Hiroshima, and saturated with smoke and dust. All who were alive and mobile quickly began to try to help the injured or flee the area, few realizing the magnitude of the destruction. The scent of char was on the air as fires began to break out around the city.

    3. Diemos’s estimate assumes the tritium would be evenly distributed across the world’s oceans. This is unlikely to occur before most of the tritium had decayed.

      If all the tritium were concentrated in 10 cubic kilometres (1e13 litres) of seawater along the Japanese coast, the resulting concentration would be 340 Bq per litre and fish caught in these waters would probably exceed 100 Bq/Kg.

      These figures tend to confirm that tritium poses less of a risk that cesium, plutonium and other contaminants. Nevertheless, the tritium risk alone would be enough to deter me from eating Japanese seafood.

      1. Yes! My calculation neglected the ocean mixing time which is a couple of thousand years.

        But I’ve given you all the information you need to calculate the dose from drinking 340 Bq/liter water.

        340 disintegrations/second/kilogram x 9.1e-16 Joules/disintegration = 3.1e-13 Joules/second/kilogram

        multiply that by 31.5e6 seconds/year to get 9.8e-7 Joules/kilogram/year

        1 Sv = 1 Joule/kilogram so that would add 9.8e-4 mSv / year to peoples exposure.

        In other words instead of getting an average background dose of 3.5 mSv per year.
        people would get 3.500098 mSv / year

        Which over a lifetimes exposure would increase their dose by 6.86e-2 mSv (assuming 70 year lifespan). That would increase their likelihood of getting cancer enough to reduce their average life expectancy by 10 minutes.

        These are exactly the calculations that regulators do to decide what is a “safe” level of discharge. And yes, I know you would like to define “safe” as “A level at which it is guaranteed that nothing will ever happen to anyone.” But that level doesn’t exist in reality and we don’t apply it to any other technology that humans use.

        But you bring up a fascinating point.

        If we loaded the water onto a ship, went out into the ocean, and released it at a depth of 3km, then the mixing time of the ocean would keep it sequestered away from surface life for long enough for it to all decay away.

        What a novel solution for disposing of medium lifetime waste that you’ve come up with!

        1. Diemos – Your statement that I would like to define “safe” as “A level at which it is guaranteed that nothing will ever happen to anyone.” is incorrect and your condescension is misplaced. I am not ignorant of the principles of scientific and statistical argument.

          If drinking 340 Bq/liter water is as benign as you suggest, why the EU has set a 100 Bq/l tritium limit for drinking water?*

          Your suggestion of dumping medium lifetime waste in the deep ocean is yours, not mine. The fact that even mixing throughout the world’s oceans would probably take centuries does not imply that the oceans are static or that over a period of years, currents would not circulate high concentrations of contamination to the surface and to coastlines.

          Granted, deep-ocean ‘disposal’ of tritiated water (assuming it is practical) would almost certainly be preferable to dumping it in shallow water off the coast of Japan. But in environmental terms I suspect it would be riskier than storing it in supertankers or in custom-built submerged tanks for 120 years.

          *www lenntech.com/applications/drinking/standards/eu-s-drinking-water-standards.htm
          *ec europa.eu/energy/nuclear/radiation_protection/doc/2012_com_147.pdf

          1. Quote of Professor Edmund Lengfelder from the article “Interview mit Strahlenbiologe Lengfelder: „Nie wieder Sushi“” [never again sushi]:

            “For milk there is in us a limit of 370 becquerels per liter” [Cäsiumnuklide?] “, which is controlled. However, limits are generally not the boundary between harmful and harmless. With the limit of the legislature tolerated for economic reasons already some small potential health damage extent. Therefore it makes sense to pay attention to contamination levels far below the limits.”

            “Edmund Lengfelder is head of the Otto Hug Radiation Institute. Previously, he was a professor at the Radiobiological Institute at the University of Munich.
            20 years ago he founded the German Association for Chernobyl aid. In the Belarusian city of Gomel, one of the most contaminated areas, he built a thyroid center and treats patients with thyroid cancer. (About)”

            . quoted from: http : //www.fr-online.de/japans-katastrophe/interview-mit-strahlenbiologe-lengfelder–nie-wieder-sushi-,8118568,8248854.html

          2. Mochizuki-san has previously linked a table compiled by “Japan.Gov” comparing various technologies submitted by the international community for Tritium seperation.

            http : //irid.or.jp/cw/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RFI_Result1118_1_21.pdf

            from –> http : //fukushima-diary.com/2013/12/jp-gov-no-drastic-technology-to-remove-tritium-was-found-in-internationally-collected-knowledge/

            Quote: “In order to store condensed tritiated water stably and for a long term after separation, the impact of radiolysis and Helium gas generated by the decay of tritium should be taken into account. There was no proposal that included those considerations.

            Moreover, since the impact of possible leak becomes larger than before the concentration, the storage of condensed triturated water must be judged carefully including the advisability of separation.

            Environmental release (mainly diluted discharge to the ocean) of tritiated water at a value less than the authorized limit has been carried out at nuclear facilities in and outside Japan.

            This method is high in technical implementability, and the risk is small to the environment.

            When the application of environmental release to Fukushima Daiichi isinvestigated, utmost consideration for prevention of a damage caused by rumors, and sufficient explanation to stakeholders are required.”

            diemos appears to have driven his math off-road and in alignment with Japanese Government conclusions. A re-read of Mochizuki-san’s article may be in order.

            PS: For Mr. Duff (involving an Oak Ridge scanning transmission electron microscope):
            http : //www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/30/grad_student_creates_worlds_thinnest_wires_just_three_atoms_wide/
            (apologies for sourcing this article from a pro-“nukular” site & ass. commentards)

  4. Fine, go ahead and do it. That will kill the oceans and be the end of humanity – problem solved.

  5. PROOF, according to the Atomic Energy Commission.

    Two documentary films describe an earlier uncontrolled atomic explosion in a nuclear reactor. There are many documented accounts of this fatal nuclear reactor prompt criticality. Perhaps it is simpler for non-technical readers to watch these military briefing films. It is easy to ‘cut to the chase’ about why the GammaCam readings are ‘proof positive’ of an uncontained nuclear explosion, ie ‘a smoking gun’. To view a description and explanation of this proof, simply fast-forward the film, to the indicated Elapsed Time (ET) [min:s]

    18:46, “Evidence of an uncontrolled chain reaction”
    19:18, “Only neutron capture could have transmuted (metals)”

    http www youtube com/ (watch?v=gIBQMkd96CA&feature=player_embedded#at=817)
    http highpowerrocketry blogspot com/ (2010/11/sl-1-nuclear-reactor-accident-video) html
    http www inl gov/ (proving-the-principle/chapter_15) pdf
    http www id doe gov/ (foia/archive) htm

    U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Idaho Operations Office

    The Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1), was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor. On January 3, 1961 the reactor was restarted after a shutdown of eleven days. Maintenance procedures commenced, which required the main central control rod to be withdrawn a few inches; at 9:01 p.m. this rod was withdrawn almost to the top of the core, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power surge caused water surrounding the core to begin to explosively vaporize. The water vapor caused a pressure wave to strike the top of the reactor vessel. This propelled the control rod and the entire reactor vessel upwards, which killed the operator who had been standing on top of the vessel, leaving him pinned to the ceiling. The other two military personnel, a supervisor and a trainee, were also killed. The victims were Army Specialists John A. Byrnes and Richard L. McKinley and Navy Electrician’s Mate Richard C. Legg.

    On the night of January 4, a team of six volunteers used a plan involving teams of two to recover the body of Byrnes. Radioactive gold 198Au from the man’s brass watch buckle and copper 64Cu from a screw in a cigarette lighter subsequently PROVED that the reactor had indeed gone prompt critical. Up until the recovery of radioisotopes of uranium, fission products, and the radioactive isotopes from the men’s belongings, scientists had doubted that a nuclear excursion had occurred, thinking it inherently safe. These findings ruled out early speculations that a chemical explosion caused the accident.

  6. Physicists not only detected evidence of fission neutrons, but also determined the dose received by analyzing the amount of radioactive Zinc in Japanese 5 Yen coins in the pockets of workers exposed in the Tokaimura Criticality Accident in 1999.

    It’s possible to determine if there was a criticality accident at Fukushima by detecting radioactive Zinc in e.g. galvanized fences, rivets, washers etc.

    Masuchika Kohno & Yoshinobu Koizumi, 2000. Tokaimura accident: Neutron dose estimates from 5-yen coins. Nature 406, 693, doi:10.1038/35021138

    Lots of references to the Takaimura Criticality Accident

    NRC REVIEW OF THE TOKAI-MURA CRITICALITY ACCIDENT
    IAEA, World Nuclear…

    http www nature com/ (nature/journal/v406/n6797/abs/406693a0) html

  7. Indeed.

    Nuclear transmutation can be used to determine if an object has been exposed to a neutron flux.

    And what object outside the containment at fukushima has been shown to have undergone transmutation?

    Oh right. Nothing.

    Oh Bill, you’re so funny.

  8. Many, Many Gamma Cam photos have indicated DEADLY Gamma Ray emissions from previously inert structural steel towers located on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

    Each such Gamma-Cam photo is DIRECT evidence of neutron flux and the nuclear chemistry of transmutation.

    A large number of similar elemental transmutation examples, due to neutron flux, have been provided on this website, in other threads.

    For example: “[Reactor3] 1st floor : 16℃, 2nd floor : 9℃ / The deeper you go, the warmer it gets at 4m from the primary vessel”

    http fukushima-diary com/ (2014/04/reactor3-1st-floor-16%E2%84%83-2nd-floor-9%E2%84%83-the-deeper-you-go-the-warmer-it-gets-at-4m-from-the-primary-vessel/#comment-1996768)

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About this site

This website updates the latest news about the Fukushima nuclear plant and also archives the past news from 2011. Because it's always updated and added live, articles, categories and the tags are not necessarily fitted in the latest format.
I am the writer of this website. About page remains in 2014. This is because my memory about 311 was clearer than now, 2023, and I think it can have a historical value. Now I'm living in Romania with 3 cats as an independent data scientist.
Actually, nothing has progressed in the plant since 2011. We still don't even know what is going on inside. They must keep cooling the crippled reactors by water, but additionally groundwater keeps flowing into the reactor buildings from the broken parts. This is why highly contaminated water is always produced more than it can circulate. Tepco is planning to officially discharge this water to the Pacific but Tritium is still remaining in it. They dilute this with seawater so that it is legally safe, but scientifically the same amount of radioactive tritium is contained. They say it is safe to discharge, but none of them have drunk it.

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