No detectable amount of tritium has been found in fish samples taken from waters near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the discharge of treated radioactive water into the sea began a month ago, the government said Monday.
Tritium was not detected in the latest sample of two olive flounders caught Sunday, the Fisheries Agency said on its website. The agency has provided almost daily updates since the start of the water release, in a bid to dispel harmful rumors both domestically and internationally about its environmental impact.
The results of the first collected samples were published Aug. 9, before the discharge of treated water from the complex commenced on Aug. 24. The water had been used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the plant but has undergone a treatment process that removes most radionuclides except tritium.
If you have 100x emissions, but 1000x the efficiency of the fuel (numbers may be overblown), then it’s still better for the environment.
Nuclear waste is probably the biggest issue, as we have to take care of the storage site.
However, we could always either repurpose it or yeet it into space, away from any other close planet collision course.
Newer reactor designs are able to consume nuclear waste and use it as fuel. Look up breeder reactors. If we want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build more reactors ironically.
While yeeting things into space sounds cool, I am sceptical of the viability of that strategy.
Putting things into space is very expensive and putting them in a solar orbit is even more expensive.
Isn’t nuclear waste also really heavy? And guess what that means, it’s getting more expensive.
It also isn’t very environmentally friendly to send shit into space and of course even less friendly considering how heavy nuclear waste is.
In my opinion, they should find a nice, stable continental plate and in the middle of that, drill some relatively small diameter boreholes. Drill them ten or twenty kilometres apart to a depth that exercises our current technology, drop sealed waste into the bottom of said holes, top them off to 200m below the surface with concrete, and then backfill the rest with dirt.
After that, remove all evidence of anything ever being there on the surface.
If you have the technology to drill a hole 3-4km deep then you have also the tech to detect radioactive material.
Small diameter boreholes that kind of distance apart are basically undetectable by geophysical survey with our current technology so nothing in particular would ever be seen.
The quantity of worldwide high level radioactive waste that can’t be reprocessed could easy be disposed of in this manner.
The high tech equivalent of a cat burying their shit. While I like the idea of yeeting stuff into space, this is also beautifully simple.
I remember talks of building places with the use of symbols or other non-linguistic messaging to keep future populations at bay, I think that was in Finland or something.
As usual with this sort of calculation you want to not factor the magnitude of risk wich is also significantly higher.
And as for yeeting into space, nuclear is already expensive, add in launch costs etc… now you’re incuring much larger risk at much greater cost.
Also… ever seen a rocket blow up? Wonder what happens to a dedicated shipment of nuclear waste when that happens?