No One Knows What to Do with Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water

http://nautil.us/blog/no-one-knows-what-to-do-with-fukushimas-endless-tanks-of-radioactive-water

by rl3 • 11 years ago

77 135 11 years ago

skidoo• 11 years ago

Sell it to Jim Beam.

filoeleven• 11 years ago

This is more for fixing the surrounding area than the water, but if some fungi really do eat radiation then there should be a way to filter the water as well.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-helps-fu...

Based on experiments with three different types of fungi, they believe the melanin-containing breeds absorb the high levels of energy in ionizing radiation and somehow turn it into a biologically useful (and benign) form, akin to a dark and dangerous version of photosynthesis.

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/using-fungi-remediate...

G. glutinosus has been reported to absorb – via the mycelium – and concentrate radioactive Cesium 137 more than 10,000-fold over ambient background levels. Many other mycorrhizal mushroom species also hyper-accumulate.

The second method still leaves you with radioactive waste (harvested mushrooms are burned, the ash is turned into glass) but it gets the radiation out of the environment.

notatoad• 11 years ago

Is there a reason it can't just stay in the tanks indefinitely?

luckman212• 11 years ago

My interpretation is that the water continues to accumulate, so the problem isn't only what to do with the existing contaminated water, but how to avoid having to build an endless amount of storage tanks.

joshuapants2• 11 years ago

I think the biggest problem is that it isn't just a few tanks of water, it's a constantly growing amount. It's expensive and impractical to keep building tanks, it's expensive and impractical to filter out the tritium, and it's questionable whether just pumping it out to sea is acceptable (I imagine that if they were able to dump it far into the ocean away from any land it would be more palatable, but that would also be, you guessed it, impractical and expensive).

eck• 11 years ago

it's a constantly growing amount.

If they're still pumping coolant into the reactors, why aren't they reusing the water that's already radioactive for that purpose?

mattzito• 11 years ago

Well, IANAPP but a quick google skim shows that the half-life of tritium is 12 years, roughly. That's a long time to store something to get down to levels where you could feel confident dumping the water out, or accepting the risk that it would end up in the groundwater.

kansface• 11 years ago

There will be another earthquake/tsunami before it decays.

velodrome• 11 years ago

A few of the tanks are leaking...

tptacek10• 11 years ago

If it's just tritiated water, is there a good reason it can't just be dumped into the ocean? It won't bioaccumulate, right?

melling• 11 years ago

That's what the article says but I guess there's still concern. The disaster has cost $150 billion.

http://rt.com/news/183052-japan-fukushima-costs-study

joshuapants2• 11 years ago

As they say in the article, tritium is usually not considered a health hazard, but organizations are starting to question that standpoint. It would, as they also say in the article, be politically unpopular to do so regardless of what the actual effects are.

tptacek10• 11 years ago

Well, there's two questions, right? The first is how harmful tritiated water is to begin with. It's a low-energy beta emitter and, because it mixes quickly and permanently with water, it's eliminated quickly as well. You wouldn't want to go out of your way to drink it, though.

The second question is, what is the environmental impact of dumping it in the ocean? No matter how dangerous it is, the ocean is gigantic. So you want to know: are there environmental processes that concentrate or amplify it?

Later: I had to leave before writing this last part.

Obviously, all things being equal, you'd rather TEPCO keep spending money to keep this stuff out of the ocean. But are all things equal? Is it riskier to try to contain it?

stretchwithme• 11 years ago

Freeze it and drop it in an antarctic glacier that will take a long time to melt.

Bury where there's already plenty of radioactivity. It does occur in nature, I hear.

The more radioactive it is, the shorter the half-life, right?

krschultz• 11 years ago

The half life is 12.3 years. If the amount of water was not growing it wouldn't be a huge problem. The tanks they are building will probably last at least 40+ years before having to be replaced, at which point we're talking about water that is not all that dangerous. If you release a tiny bit at a time it shouldn't be a problem.

However the water keeps accumulating. I don't think that part is sustainable. Until they fix the root cause of a seemingly endless amount of water that needs to be stored, this is going to be a problem.

mirimir4• 11 years ago

The half-life of Tritium is 12.3 years. So as long as substantially everything with longer half-life has been removed, storage for a century or so would suffice.

Maybe put it in a bunch of large bags and tow it to Antarctica. But you'd need to avoid the bits that are already collapsing.

icanhackit• 11 years ago

Could you create robust, modular storage vats that double as interlocking elements of a sea-wall to hold back future tsunamis? I imagine it'd be expensive but you're killing a few birds with one stone. If containment in a single vat fails then the radioactive water is dispersed in a vast sea as opposed to a small land area.

I also wonder if you could blast pellets of radioactive waste with a very big laser like the one at the NIF [0]. I don't know much about physics so I accept this could be a disastrous or futile idea but if anyone can comment that would be great.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

Nogwater• 11 years ago

Sounds like a really expensive way to make radioactive steam. :)

tdy7215• 11 years ago

The NIF is not the answer here. I suspect that the facility will only "Blast" a few grams or kilograms of material in its lifetime, we need to deal with TONS of water.

tdy7215• 11 years ago

This is not the kind of problem it's being made out to be here.

First of all, Tritium is an beta emitter, blocked by a piece of paper or the skin. It's not dangerous in the environment unless it's consumed. Even better, it does not bio-accumulate, because it's water.

Second, the half life of Tritium is 12.4 years.

Consider this excerpt:

""" The World Health Organization’s standard for tritium in drinking water is 10,000 becquerels per liter (34 ounces). According to Mayumi Yoshida, a TEPCO communications officer, Fukushima’s stored water contains between 1 and 5 million becquerels per liter. """

So our radioactive waste is acceptable as Drinking Water at 10K.

Lets do the math

5000000/(2^9) = 9765.625

9*12.4 = 111.6 years

No one knows what do about the Radioactive Water?

How's about we wait few generations, and drink it!

This is child's play next to the real problems posed by long lived (400K+ year long half life) bio-accumulating isotope disposal.

I wouldn't mind if they dumped it in the ocean TBH.

mirimir4• 11 years ago

They're going to run out of room for tanks. And there must be access, because the tanks are going to rust out, and will need replaced. So storing the Tritium-contaminated water for a century or so is nontrivial.

Lazare3• 11 years ago

Again, we're talking about something which is maybe 5 million becquerels per litre, but if it was only 10,000 becquerels per litre, we could just drink the damn stuff.

So if you diluted it all 500 times, the problem goes away. 620,000 tons of water is about...2 supertankers. So if you mixed it with 1000 supertankers worth of water, you could safely drink it (at least as far as the tritium is concerned).

Now, where near Fukishima could we find 1000 supertankers worth of water? Right, the ocean.

tdy721 wasn't joking; dumping it all into the ocean is a perfectly sensible (and safe) solution. (Although as the article notes, it's politically a non-starter.)

irishcoffee2• 11 years ago

So lets make a kickstarter to build tanks. This doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve.

pvaldes8• 11 years ago

Send it to California then?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/North_Pac...

nosuchthing• 11 years ago

Assuming it's only Tritium?

At no point since the meltdown began, through when radiation began leaking into the atmosphere - of which was dispersed and detected around the globe, has any entity associated with the Fukushima plant or Japan shown any signs of willingness to be upfront and transparent about the situation.

The US Navy seemed to be one of the only real orginizations who offered an upfront warning of radiation exposure to citizens. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/15/japan.us.navy.ra...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-...

[3] http://www.radiationnetwork.com/Message.htm

[4] http://nypost.com/2013/12/22/70-navy-sailors-left-sickened-b...

manigandham• 11 years ago

Considering we have lots of nuclear reactors floating around (ships and submarines), some of which have been destroyed and ended up in the ocean - it's probably the best place to put this stuff.

The world's oceans are absolutely massive and already have millions of tons of radioactive material dissolved along with plenty of cooling power. Maybe the specific dumping zone would be a little radiated for a bit but that can be solved by spreading it out in the deep sea and through natural ocean currents.

coldtea• 11 years ago

That's the spirit. The earth is our dumbster, and let future technology short it out...

jessriedel• 11 years ago

FYI, There are only a handful of nuclear submarines that have sunk,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...

and I don't believe any aircraft carriers have. (Russia didn't have any, and the US hasn't lost an aircraft carrier since WW2.)

facepalm• 11 years ago

I think Fukushima is bigger than the average reactor in a submarine.

TorKlingberg2• 11 years ago

Alpha radiation is blocked by a piece of paper. Beta is harder to block, but not as bad as gamma. Beta radiation can definitely penetrate the skin.

serf2• 11 years ago

According to Mayumi Yoshida, a TEPCO communications officer

that's where I have issues. TEPCO doesn't have the best record regarding honesty.[0][1]

I fully expect that group to cook the books in any possible way that will make this look like less severe an issue.

[0] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-10/it-s-time-f...

[1] http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201506...

raverbashing• 11 years ago

This will be the time to get someone to extract energy (or just the tritium, it has a lot of uses) from that.

astrodust4• 11 years ago

There's already a lot of tritium kicking around, it's used for industrial purposes like illumination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination

Myrth• 11 years ago

Previously-Secret 1955 Government Report Concluded that Ocean May Not Adequately Dilute Radiation from Nuclear Accidents

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/06/why-the-ocean-may-not...

grecy• 11 years ago

What I learned during the Fukushima disaster and ongoing clean up is that the human race literally has no plan or technology to deal with things when nuclear plants go bad.

I'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch, but it boggles my mind that we just stood around and said "well, shit. We don't have a backup plan, and we're stuck with this for a very, very long time".

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

Same here! I argue constantly for wind and solar instead of nuclear not because nuclear is a bad technology, but we are bad as a species at managing it.

EDIT: It takes 10-20 years to get a nuclear generation plant built, starting at $1 billion USD, and I've never seen a wind turbine or solar panel need to be kept cool for days after having moderator rods dropped to prevent fuel rods from melting down and hydrogen gas destroying a pressured containment vessel.

Don't talk to me about thorium, MSRs, breeders, or whatever new fangled reactor is being pushed this year unless you're willing to guarantee with incredibly steep financial penalties that if you start building a reactor today, you will be done on time, and within your budget.

Otherwise, move out of the way while we build out solar, wind, and utility-scale battery storage, all proven to work with existing tech, needing no liability waivers from the government nor permanent spent fuel storage that doesn't (and won't ever) exist.

tdy7215• 11 years ago

Manage it, we barely understand it! The Strong and Weak fields are Klingon Poetry next to the scripture that describes Gravity and Electromagnetism.

jebblue• 11 years ago

Agreed, the Sun is a massive power we also still don't fully understand, is mostly safe and has all the energy humans will ever need (IMO); we just need to strive at understanding it and how to harness it better.

tptacek10• 11 years ago

As far as I know, nobody reasonable prefers a nuclear kwh to a solar kwh. The important question is: should we prefer nuclear kwhs to coal or oil kwhs? The answer to that question is less clear. Coal, in particular, kills thousands of people every year.

People aren't just going to turn the lights and air conditioners off.

vidarh7• 11 years ago

Despite how bad we are at dealing with it, more people die from solar (or pretty much any other alternative form of power generation) per unit of energy generated through e.g. installation and maintenance accidents.

You could grind up all the current radioactive waste into particles and pump it into the atmosphere on purpose, and nuclear would still likely cause less harm than most of the alternatives.

The problem with nuclear is fear and politics.

And most of the management "problems" with nuclear is down to exactly that too. We have plants that generate more waste than necessary because of cold war politics. We have storage "problems" because of irrational levels of fear of the risks.

Meanwhile we keep burning coal that continues to shower us in radioactivity and other nastiness sufficient to do as much damage (including deaths) as a Chernobyl sized incident every couple of year or more.

onewaystreet• 11 years ago

It takes 10-20 years to get a nuclear generation plant built, starting at $1 billion USD

This is because of draconian regulations.

mirimir4• 11 years ago

Hyman Rickover designed a very clever reactor for nuclear subs. But scaling it up 100x was naive at best. So was doing that with the graphite core design. Maybe there are inherently safe designs.

Zigurd• 11 years ago

While even some designs that were thought to be inherently safe turned out to have engineering problems when put into practice, it is probably imperative that we learn how to use new-generation reactors, and build new, safer reactors and new reactor technologies that could solve our current nuclear waste problem. Nuclear needs to be an available tool for bridging humanity out of the oil age.

selimthegrim• 11 years ago

Hyman Rickover was a power-grabbing, egocentric fool who stymied miniaturization and development of alternatives that didn't enhance his influence.

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/19...

mcv7• 11 years ago

The main thing I learned from it is that even in modern, high tech countries withe tech to handle it safely, corporations will always cut corners.

It's not just the technology itself that's unsafe, it's the fact that it's handled by profit-driven corporations.

I think nuclear energy may be unavoidable as transitional tech until we can move entirely to cleaner technology, but it very clearly needs very tight regulation, and it's not the end goal. (At least uranium fission isn't; I keep hearing positive stuff about thorium. But even then, wind and solar already works; we need a lot more of that.)

lmm• 11 years ago

It's really not very dangerous, even in the worst case, compared to the alternatives for baseline power.

Supposing we just ignored the radioactivity and did nothing, compare the number of deaths and environmental damage per kwh to what business as usual for any alternative would cause (coal mining? Oil drilling? Flooding land for hydro-electric? Mining the stuff that solar panels are made of?).

j-pb2• 11 years ago

mining the stuff that solar panels are made of

You mean silicon-oxide a.k.a. sand?

myrandomcomment• 11 years ago

Ah, the age old dumbasses that think the world nuclear is bad. At the current contamination level of the water, dump it in the ocean. No one will notice. It is water and alpha decay.

lsiebert• 11 years ago

Tritium is actually useful for luminescent devices like emergency exit signs.

Which now that I think about it, is a little ironic.

curtis• 11 years ago

Actually, you may be on to something.

According to Wikipedia, Tritium is worth $30,000 per gram [1]. I can only assume that we can separate super-heavy water (T20) from regular water since we can separate heavy water (D20) from regular water. I don't know if $30K per gram is enough to cover the separation cost, but it seems like it might...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Self-powered_lighting

mcv7• 11 years ago

If Fukushima produces Tritium at such an alarming pace, I wonder if it could tank the world Tritium market.

How much Tritium does the world really need?

sixdimensional• 11 years ago

Are there any bacteria that consume tritium? A quick google search of "tritium bacteria" shows some relationship between bacteria and tritium - in some cases it kills bacteria and in others, there are bacteria that can consume it.

For example: "Possible use of A̲l̲c̲a̲l̲i̲g̲e̲n̲e̲s̲ p̲a̲r̲a̲d̲o̲x̲u̲s̲ as a biological monitor"

j-pb2• 11 years ago

The bacteria might be able to harness some energy from radioactive decay, but it won't speed up that process. Afaik, chemical processes should have zero effect on the decay rate.

logfromblammo2• 11 years ago

Um... how about separate out the tritium? It goes for like $30k per gram, doesn't it?

Corner the self-illuminated exit sign market!

kijin• 11 years ago

According to this [1], the amount of tritium that currently exists in Fukushima is no more than 4 grams.

At first I thought that might have been a unit conversion error, but Wolfram Alpha [2] seems to confirm the tiny mass.

So if it costs more than $120k to separate it from the rest of the water, it would not be worth the effort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fukushima_Daiichi

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+1+petabecquerel...

maerF0x0• 11 years ago

It's worth the effort if (Cost of extraction -$120k) < (Next best solution)

ie, if the next best is to store it, and it would cost $1M. but filtration costs $1.1M , its actually $20k better to filter it.

savage_platypus• 11 years ago

Nuclear has a lot to learn from the oil and gas industry, especially that dilution is the solution to pollution.

astrodust4• 11 years ago

Yeah, the Gulf is going just great.

mkandes• 11 years ago

"Dilute the son of a bitch."

mcv7• 11 years ago

Isn't tritium useful for nuclear fusion? Can't they give it to some experimental fusion plants?

zamalek• 11 years ago

Instead of trying to find out what to do to dispose of it, couldn't we possibly find a use for it?

rip747• 11 years ago

maybe I'm missing something. Is there any reason why they couldn't just pop the lids off the tanks and let nature do what it does, evaporate the water. Figure it could take a couple of years or so for all the water to evaporate and at the same time rain water would dilute whatever is in there.

jkyle• 11 years ago

We could feed to lizards and moths and stuff.

That always seems to turn out well in the movies.

jbert• 11 years ago

Does it have to be an open system?

Can't the already-contaminated water be used for cooling in a mostly-closed system?

And if the expansion due to rainwater is significant, perhaps some kind of large tent arrangement?

mkesper• 11 years ago

Also, this blocks very very many resources of Japan for tens of years trying to decontaminate the land. Look here (original german, but the texts might be usable): https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...

brianwawok• 11 years ago

Does tritium evaporate? Or could we condense all the tanks from say 1 million gallons of water + 1 pound of tritium, down to say 100 gallons of water and 1 pound of tritium? Seems the volume of water is what makes it tricky, not the actual tritium.

MichaelCrawford• 11 years ago

What the US Navy actually does with its spent reactor coolant, is to make concrete out of it. The concrete as well as the mixer are buried at Hanford.

I don't see why Japan couldn't do the same. I expect it already does this, with the coolant from its other reactors.

The water used to mix cement doesn't evaporate, that is cement doesn't dry, it sets or hardens. The binder is a chemical known as "Portland Cement"; it hardens when it combines chemically with water.

csense• 11 years ago

The tanks aren't endless compared to the ocean. Just dump it in the middle of the Pacific or something.

pvaldes8• 11 years ago

Okay, maybe its time to clear some things.

1- "Even better, it does not bio-accumulate, because it's water".

Myth: First of all tritium is not water, is radioactive hydrogen. Hydrogen is a common piece in the metabolism of all living beings.

"The study showed that inorganic tritium accumulated differentially in mussel tissues in a dose-dependent manner, with the gut accumulating the highest amount of radioactivity, followed by the gill, mantle, muscle, foot and byssus thread".

-> Awadhesh, Dogra, Turner, Millward (2005) Impact of low doses of tritium on the marine mussel, Mytilus edulis: Genotoxic effects and tissue-specific bioconcentration. Mutation Research/Genetic Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis. 586, 1: 47–57

-> Inomata T (1983). Accumulation and lethal effect of tritium (tritiated water) in Rhodopseudomonas spheroides. Under light-anaerobic and dark-aerobic conditions. Radiat Environ Biophys. 21(4):281-94.

-> Inomata T, Higuchi M. (1976) Incorporation of tritium into cell materials of Rhodopseudomonas spheroides from tritiated water in the medium under aerobic conditions. J Biochem. 80(3):569-78.

2- "Tritium is safe to drink if diluted".

True. But dangerous if eaten (and marine organisms can also pick up and reconcentrate again some substances). Japanese eat marine fishes, algae and clams all the time.

"Our results demonstrated that the dose calculation based on tissue-free-water tritium alone would under-estimate the radiation exposure of the human population exposed to tritiated food"

-> Komatsu, Okumura and Sakamoto (1990) Radiation dose to mouse liver cells from ingestion of tritiated food or water. Health Phys. 58(5):625-9.

3- "Tritium radioactivity is blocked just by a sheet of paper or by the skin"

Paper's blocking properties are not relevant under the sea. Human skin is not comparable to the structure or function of fish/crab/worm gills.

4- "Hundred kilos of tritium were released and nothing happened"

The fact is that hundred kilos of tritium where released and dozen of species of corals (and all its associated fauna) are missing still 50 years later from this area. This can be related with tritium or not, but "absence of evidence" can not be granted "as evidence of absence". Is a common rule in science. It only takes to briefly loose all its zooxanthellae to kill a 1000 years coral colony.

5- "Tritium don't have any efect in the marine organisms". "Nobody will be harmed"

Myth:

"Tritiated water delivering dose rates below 500 μGy h−1 was shown to be capable of inducing genetic damage in the haemocytes of edible mussels"

"Despite growing scientific, public and regulatory concern over the discharge of radioactive substances, no serious attempts have been made to develop a rationale to evaluate the impact of environmentally relevant radionuclides in the aquatic environment." ... "The study suggests that the generic dose limits recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency for the protection of aquatic biota might not be applicable to all aquatic organisms".

New marine organisms are discovered every year. We just don't know the effect of tritium on most marine organisms, specially with critical groups like sea cucumbers (that process tons of silt and sand each year), sponges and filterer worms (millions of water liters processed), or coral zooxanthellae.

6- "Come on, its only four grams... what could be happen?"

Many things, this four grams could cause a serious damage to the credibility of the acuaculture japanese companies and to cultured shellfish, oysters and clams as source of reliable food for example. The value of total japanese aquaculture production in 2003 worth US$ 4 428 962 000 (source: FAO). Fish related economy is a 'no joke' affair for japanese employing a lot of people and moving big money each year so this would be also a political suicide probably.

The impact of tritium in fish eggs, alaskan cods, right whales or californian vaquita porpoises is totally unknown.

7- "Again, there's still no theory as to how tritium can do all this crazy stuff".

False: Tritium effects are similar to other typical carcinogenetic substances. On mice: abort of some mice embrios, increased mortality, bone marrow failure, resorbtion of gonadal tissue and developping of solid tumours. It depends on the dose.

"mice receiving a single intraperitoneal injection of tritiated water 7.4 x 10(8) Bq (20 mCi) died of bone marrow failure within 20 days".

-> Seyama, Yamamoto, Kinomura and Yokoro (1991) Carcinogenic effects of tritiated water (HTO) in mice: in comparison to those of neutrons and gamma-rays. J Radiat Res. 32 Suppl 2:132-42.

8- "The early 1960s (which saw peak tritium levels) are not known for a huge spike in inexplicable extinction events".

Myth (and not understanding how things really work in biology).

To prove extinction in marine organisms is notoriously difficult and in any case it takes 50 years to declare a species extinct. Therefore species extinct in 1960 are recognised as this by science in 2010, not in 1960.

And the fact also is that not enought research had be done. There is about 800 living hard corals providing support for 4.000 species of reef fishes, more than 50.000 species of marine molluscs, and 13.800 species only in the Class Polychaeta (a type of marine worms). Scientists estimate total number of different species inhabiting coral reefs between 2 and 9 millions. We are talking just of reef ecosystems here, there are also soft bottom ecosystems and epi/meso pelagic and abyssal plains. Most of the marine species are still undiscovered.

However, in years as recent as 2004 the World Conservation Union (IUCN) had conducted threat assessments of only 814 marine species (Baillie et al. 2004). The real situation of millions of species is unknown.

No One Knows What to Do with Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water

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