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NNadir

(38,529 posts)
10. Um, do you drink seawater?
Sun Feb 19, 2023, 09:35 PM
Feb 2023

It's fucking tritium in seawater. If the water were desalinated, I would drink it if asked, mostly because I'm educated. Of course I would do it only to demonstrate the silliness of people who worry day and night about radiation without giving a rat's ass about how much coal based mercury is their water.

You do realize that people buy tritium watches.

People do drink tritiated water. They drank high concentrations during the 1950's and 1960's during the era of nuclear weapons testing, but tritium naturally forms in the upper atmosphere from spallation reactions:

http://www-naweb.iaea.org/napc/ih/documents/global_cycle/vol%20ii/cht_ii_05.pdf

The water on this planet has always been tritiated. The link I gave, gives a scientific reference for the volume of the ocean. To what do you imagine the concentration of tritium will climb if the water is released into the Pacific ocean? Into the Hudson River?

You say it's not 'safe." Compared to what? Exactly how many people and fish do you imagine will be killed by tritiated water released into the Hudson River? As many people as died from the PBC's accumulating in fish from the same River?

How do you know it's dangerous? Is it based on some level of radiation, in units of Beq/liter? Some special knowledge of toxicology?

How about opening and reading this paper by people called "scientists" on the subject of addressing tritium hysteria in the general public? Human Health and the Biological Effects of Tritium in Drinking Water: Prudent Policy Through Science – Addressing the ODWAC New Recommendation

How much money exactly should we spend to satiate the fears of people who don't take science seriously?

I can't be any clearer on this than I am. Fear of low level radiation kills people, because conversations like this one are seen as having a modicum of rationality, because it is utilized with zero rational information to attack nuclear energy.

The world is radioactive. It always has been. It always will be. To save human lives, and indeed to save the entire planet we have to use radioactive materials and understand relative risks.

The linear no-threshold hypothesis in the opinion of a growing array of health physicists is purely a bit of 1940's mysticism, not supported by molecular biology, a science that did not even exist when the sloppy studies that led to the LNT were conducted.

I'm sorry, but there's nothing "green," about carrying on about this. The carbon released to make the steel for the tanks to contain the tritiated water in service to public fear and ignorance has surely killed more people than the tritium in them will when released.

In fact the carbon burned to produce electricity for people to whine about these tank releases on the internet will kill more people than the tritium will.

I deplore this kind of nonsense. Again, it kills.

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