Your waste bad; my waste good

 

Not the clean-up's mascot,
but it made a good story

Recently the BBC reported 

Japan has begun releasing treated radioactive water from its damaged Fukushima power plant into the Pacific Ocean - 12 years after a nuclear meltdown.

This kicked up a stink in the usual places (notably social media). China rushed to  ban Japanese seafood (carefully avoiding the admission that it has several reactors discharging 3 or 4 times as much as the planned 30-year Fukushima discharge ...

<parenthesis>
(about 22  tera-becquerels per year over 30 years, as opposed to the 60-80 tera-becquerels discharged by China's plants. Sellafield discharges 150 tera-becquerels per year into the Irish Sea. A huge plant in France discharges many  times that into the North Sea)

<source>
These figures...

<background>
A tera- becquerel is 1,0[oops]000,000,000,000 becquerels, and More or Less asked its usual question: 'Is this a big number?'
</background>~

... come from the BBC World Service's More or Less, which concludes with the interesting view that anxiety about nuclear accidents does more damage (in terms of real harms to public health) than the accidents themselves. It's only 9 minutes long and is well worth a listen.

</source>

 That BBC report says

Traditional female divers in South Korea, known as "haenyeo", tell the BBC they are anxious.

"Now I feel it's unsafe to dive in," says Kim Eun-ah, who has been doing the job off Jeju Island for six years. "We consider ourselves as part of the sea because we immerse ourselves in the water with our own bodies," she explains.

Strangely, those divers don't seem to be concerned about the much higher radioactive discharges made by Chinese power stations  – another example  of the point made at the end of that programme: people are useless at comparing risks. (What the programme doesn't add is that politicians know this, and exploit the weakness as far as they can.) 

</parenthesis>

...). 

Is that the time?

b

Update: 2023.08.31.14:40 – Added PS

PS

But the fact that almost all scientific analysis accepts this discharge as 'safe' ...

<parenthesis>
(one observer pointed out that the risk incurred by a Japanese fish diet was vastly outweighed by the radiation dose experienced in an inter-continental flight, because of exposure to cosmic rfays and other scary stuff in the ionosphere)
</parenthesis>

... doesn't mean that everyone gives it their blessing. The discharge may be safe, but it is not an example of best practice. Look at the dates in articles such as this; the earliest is ten years old, and most were published in the last five years. The safety standards are much older than that. International safety standards are hammered out over decades:

The Convention on Nuclear Safety was adopted on 17 June 1994 by a Diplomatic Conference convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency at its Headquarters from 14 to 17 June 1994 [HD:my emphasis].

In fairness....

<tangent subj-"self-editing">

The cliché that came to mind was 'to be fair'; but I didn't want to sound like something out of a football interview.
</tangent>

..it has been updated 4 times since then. But the latest update pre-dates the original Fukushima Daiishi accident by more than 8 years. We're making a mess of the planet, and the prospects won't get any better if polluters insist on toeing lines drawn decades ago.