Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumSo, is there any account of the huge death toll from the tritium release at Fukushima?
Recently sales people and sales bots working here to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen" carried on about the release of slightly radioactive water containing tritium from the big boogeyman at Fukushima.
The release started about a month ago, on August 24, 2023.
In that period, air pollution, at a rate of about 19,000 people a day, killed close to 600,000 people.
Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 19902019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 1723 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).
How many people have died from the big, bad tritium release?
Any figures available?
dpibel
(2,923 posts)That's just a silly question, now isn't it?
You know better than that.
NNadir
(33,621 posts)As for what I "know better," I happen to know that the tritium isn't going to kill any one.
If anyone here "knows" better, it would be interesting for them to calculate how long it will take for all the tritium on this planet, both natural and synthetic to kill as many people as air pollution will kill in the next ten minutes.
The death toll from air pollution is about 13 people per minute.
The air pollution death toll:
Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 19902019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 1723 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.
Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:
Everyone born since 1954 has been exposed to tritium, the concentration of which peaked in 1963 as a result of open air thermonuclear testing and has been falling (dramatically) since 1963
This is shown graphically in many publications, for instance, this one on hydrology, which happens to be open sourced:
Groundwater recharge pathway according to the environmental isotope: the case of Changwu area, Yangtze River Delta Region of China Liang He; Junru Zhang; Suozhong Chen; Manqing Hou; Junyi Chen Water Supply (2022) 22 (3): 29882999.
I was personally alive in 1963, albeit a child.
Are we all dead yet?
Antinuke obsessions kill people.
stopdiggin
(11,490 posts)keep on ladling it over their heads.
moniss
(4,274 posts)scenario you cite. The air pollution deaths are cases of exposure over a period of time and the cumulative effect and also people with other underlying conditions like severe asthma etc. The same methodology would be used for looking at exposure to radiation over time. Immediate exposures to radiation causing death require very high levels whereas, like in the case of air pollutants, radiation exposure is "dosage", toxicity, duration and frequency dependent. So over time is the release an exposure risk on that basis is the right way to examine the question.
I don't think any reasonable person was expecting immediate human death from the release but most of what I've seen has been concern about ocean species and long term biological effects if any on all species. It's a reasonable concern for people to ask questions and the current science should have information, but perhaps not yet know all, to our risks going forward. People are apparently at various stages of concern all the way from indifferent to hysterical which is not atypical in environmental matters.
BlueIn_W_Pa
(842 posts)There won't be figures because we know tritium is like the baby of radioactive things we need to worry about physically, especially diluted into the Pacific Ocean