...Japan plans to Dump 11,500 tons of Radioactive Water at Sea... (page 3)

bohm

snoozy, it was a privately owned plant and i doubt they performed any research...

asides, covering up a dumping of toxic waste in the ocean is not an obvious way to get money for future research.

First off, I agree with OUTLAW that it's not a good idea. Dilution is a very poor solution for pollution. It's not something you would plan to do ahead of time and say, "Hey, no biggie, it's a great big ocean out there."

But to help show just how big the numbers are, visualize it this way. (If I've messed up on my conversions or calcs, someone will surely jump in.)

Think of the 11,500 tons of slightly (sure wish we knew what "slightly" meant) radioactive water as a cube. How big? 71 feet per side. Now dump it in the ocean and assume it gets fairly well mixed within a short period of time. How big of a cube of ocean water would it take to dilute the 71 foot cube down to one part per million (ppm)? 2.7 cubic miles. That's not a very big piece of the Pacific Ocean. BTW, I'm not saying that there's anything magical about 1 ppm. It's just a fairly common reference point when looking at environmental pollution.

Please don't take what I say lightly either.

I've read the Awake! magazine for decades.

(Insert OUTLAW's dog here.)

om

glenster

Japan's ocean radiation iodine hits 7.5 million times legal limit
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-nuclear-20110406,0,2697428.story

By Kenji Hall and Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times
April 5, 2011, 4:39 a.m.
Reporting from Tokyo— The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant
said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal
limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials
imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal
limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1
million times the legal limit.

On Monday, officials detected more than 4,000 bequerels of iodine-131 per
kilogram in a type of fish called a sand lance caught less than three miles
offshore of the town of Kita-Ibaraki. The young fish also contained 447 bequerels
of cesium-137, which is considered more problematic than iodine-131 because it
has a much longer half-life.