Source: Svetlana Ekimenko, Sputnik Global
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.
The tritium contained in filtered cooling water from the Fukushima nuclear site is very dangerous, renowned nuclear expert Dr. Christopher Busby told Sputnik.
“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.
Japan begins the release of over a million metric tons of treated radioactive water from Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) into the Pacific Ocean today regardless of a torrent of criticism from the local population and neighboring countries. The plan to release the water had been in the wind for years.
“The water has 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.
‘Regulators Are Wrong’
While the Japanese (also the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a long list of self-identified experts) collectively say: “no problems, the quantities are very small and pose no risk to health, neither to people nor marine life,” this is not the case, according to Christopher Busby.
“Tritium is interesting stuff. Its radioactivity is extremely weak: it emits a very short-range beta electron and itself then changes into nitrogen… In terms of radioactivity, because the decay electron is so weak, the method that the risk agencies use to quantify radiation effects has classed Tritium as almost a non-event, in terms of health effects. This is most convenient for the nuclear industry, as it means that the exposure limits for Tritium (in terms of Becquerels per litre) are truly enormous, when compared with other radioactive waste,” clarified the nuclear expert.
“The low beta energy of Tritium allows the regulators to argue that the releases of huge amounts to the sea and rivers is safe. But the regulators are wrong. The system of analysis using the concept of “Absorbed Dose” is unscientific, dishonest and at the origin of a huge historic public health scandal that has caused hundreds of millions of deaths from cancer due to badly regulated releases of certain specific contaminants, and this includes Tritium, Carbon-14, Uranium (as particles) and certain other substances produced by nuclear processes,” explained Dr. Busby.
The expert reminded that years ago, the regulator BEIR committee in USA led by Prof Karl Z Morgan made an unsuccessful attempt to change the limits for Tritium, which he was convinced was a serious hazard. He was overruled because it would have made the operation of nuclear power very difficult.
“The water in the tanks contains about 1500Bq/litre. A Becquerel is one decay per second. A litre of this water would produce 1500 clicks on a suitable measuring instrument… Would you drink this water? Even if the IAEA say it’s OK?” queried the scientist.
While a plethora of experts have been rounded up to say that “this stuff has never shown any health effects in places where it is poured into the sea,” pointed out Busby, they are wrong. The expert who spent years of research looking at the effects of releasing radionuclides including Tritium to the sea, and cited his studies in the late 1990s looking at cancer and child leukemia near the Irish Sea.
Similar studies, from 1999 to 2006, showed a close to 30 percent increase in cancer near the Bristol Channel, where there are also significant quantities of Tritium, the expert stated, also citing research by Professor Awadhesh Jha showing that very small amounts of Tritium have “profound effects on chromosomes and on development” of marine invertebrates.
Featured Photo Credit: IAEA Imagebank, Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) – cropped.