Nuclear Expert: Tritium in Fukushima Wastewater 'Very Dangerous, Causes 'Genetic Damage'Sputnik
As Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant operator the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has reportedly begun dumping wastewater from the plant into the Pacific Ocean, physical chemist Dr. Christopher Busby has taken a look at the legitimate concerns of other countries in the region, as well as the arguments being wielded to assuage these fears.
"It gets inside you easily. It exchanges with normal hydrogen, sometimes it becomes organically (covalently) bound. It causes genetic damage at tiny conventional doses (calculated using the energy per unit mass, joule/kg formula of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, employed by the IAEA)," said Busby.
After months of controversy, Japan earlier announced that it would begin the release of over a million metric tons of treated, highly-diluted radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) into the Pacific Ocean on August 24. The decision was made regardless of a torrent of criticism from the local population, the international humanitarian community, as well as vehement objections from China and other neighbors in the region. The plan to release the water had been in the wind for years. Back in 2019, Japan's authorities had warned that they were running out of space to store the material.
“The water has apparently been treated to remove the radioisotopes that the regulators believe pose the greatest risk, strontium-90, caesium-137, and carbon-14. But to take out the tritium is too expensive, and so the radioactive water is largely contaminated with large amounts of tritium oxide, in the form of tritiated water HTO.
Tritium is the largest contaminant in terms of radioactivity, disintegrations per second, clicks on a counter, from the operation of all nuclear energy processes. The neutrons, which are central to nuclear energy, produce tritium by various processes in reactors, and even outside reactors, where the nuclide, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is formed by adding neutrons to nitrogen in the air, and oxygen in the water, various other processes,” Christopher Busby, physical chemist and scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, explained.
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. While it is produced naturally from interactions of cosmic rays with gases in the upper atmosphere, it is also a by-product of nuclear reactors. Tritium possesses the same number of protons and electrons as hydrogen, but unlike regular hydrogen, which does not have any neutrons, tritium has two. Thus, it is both unstable and radioactive.
According to Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the released wastewater will be heavily diluted with clean water, leaving it containing only very low concentrations of radioactive material. The dumped water will ostensibly travel through an undersea tunnel about one kilometer (0.62 miles) off the coast, until it reaches the Pacific Ocean. Both during the discharge and afterwards, the entire process is reported to be monitored by third parties, including the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for years to come.
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Inert Cobalt-59 placed in a neutron flux becomes radioavtive Cobalt-60 which generates two high energy gamma rays.
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