The situation is not as dire – nowhere near as dire, in fact – as many breathless commentators would have you believe.
To start, let’s calculate the amount of radioactive water that’s being discussed. I’ve heard estimates of “up to 300 tons per day of radioactive water” since the breach of containment in March 2011.
Okay. Fresh water weighs about 8.3 pounds per gallon. So 300 tons of water, or 600,000 pounds (per day) is around 72,300 gallons. If you multiply that by 900, which is the approximate number of days since the accident, that’s a little over 65 million gallons of water. It sounds like a lot, and it would be if you had to drink it. However, that converts to around 200 acre-feet of water, or the size of a pond that’s 200 acres in area and one foot deep. In the context of “the Pacific Ocean”, that’s not a lot of water. That’s how much water may have leaked from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific, according to the estimates.
No, that’s not at all a good thing, but again, it’s not the end of the world.
It might still be a very major disaster if the water was extremely toxic and contained extremely high and long-lived levels of radioactive contamination. Estimates of the total contamination leaked to date range from 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels, which is the current SI unit of measure of radioactive decay of such materials. To convert that to a number which is (still) more familiar to more users, especially in the USA, 1 Curie = approximately 37 billion bequerels. So by order of magnitude we’re talking roughly 1000 Curies of radioactive material.
Yes, that’s a lot of radioactive material, and I wouldn’t want to swim in that pond, for sure. It’s going to cause havoc in the local area especially (and I wouldn’t want to each much fish from Eastern Japan’s shore for a long time), but as that spreads over the entire Pacific Ocean (and yes, it will do that) the levels will drop to “just over measurable background radiation” in time. The levels will be measurable with sensitive enough equipment, which guarantees that we’ll be hearing about this disaster (in breathless prose) for the rest of our lifetimes, but it’s not a significant long term threat to human health.
Finally, the most common radioactive elements in the water are Cesium, Tritium and Strontium. To quote from the Scientific American article (link below):
Tritium represents the lowest radioactive threat to ocean life and humans compared with cesium and strontium. Cesium’s radioactive energy is greater than tritium, but both it and tritium flow in and out of human and fish bodies relatively quickly. By comparison, strontium poses a greater danger because it replaces the calcium in bones and stays for much longer in the body.
So, yes, that’s a problem, but one which will eventually dissipate.
This will not “destroy the life of the Pacific Ocean” any more than unrestricted nuclear weapons testing did in the 1950s and 60s. It’s not good, but it’s not the end of life as we know it, either.
Here are some credible and apparently factual sources for information on the problem and the conversion factors that I used:
Scientific American
BBC
Wikipedia and this
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
