https://fortune.com/2023/08/24/japan-radioactive-water-release-pacific-ocean-us-ambassador-rahm-emanuel-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-fish-china-ban-protests/
He said it was intended to be a “show of solidarity.”
This is literally an episode of the Simpsons.
And as long as the water is not actively radioactive, I am more worried about temperature and pH than anything else
I mean, you can't top George H. W. Bush vomiting into the lap of the Japanese PM. Japan can take it.
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It is actively radioactive, but it dilutes fast and decays in a reasonable time. Some of the hydrogen in the water is tritium because of neutron activation. It doesn't really bioaccumulate.
If the radiation levels are truly negligible then the media shares blame for getting people upset over it.
Oil companies are ultimately to blame. After all, it was the Rockefeller Foundation who did the early radiation studies in the 50s, and then blatantly lied about the results to make radiation sound super scary. They claimed that there was no safe dose of radiation, and that any exposure, no matter how small, led to a direct, linear, increase in cancer risk.
And then the oil companies funded politicians who declared education to be the enemy, so now Americans don't know enough physics to know that every day, they are swimming in safe doses of ionizing radiation. That ocean water has millions of tons of natural uranium oxide dissolved in it.
US nuclear policy has been based off of these lies, it's part of why nuclear power is so expensive.
Those same oil companies actually paid to found Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to specifically advocate against nuclear power, by spreading fear and lies about how nuclear physics work.
The Rockefeller foundation still funds Greenpeace, and still requires that Greenpeace be anti-nuclear to receive that funding. All while being heavily invested in oil.
Because those are Military. They need to work and not be dependent on a few multi-national companies for fuel.
Besides, those things are designed by people who actually know nuclear physics, and are not hamstrung by review boards and astroturf protest movements.
Greenpeace has been boycotting oil companies before you were even born. Nuclear isn't green and neither is oil. Don't spread misinformation
And also accepting oil money to fight against nuclear power. They were literally founded to spread the lie that nuclear isn't green.
Hell, you can look it up for yourself, they still take money from the Rockefeller Foundation.
They have never been as blatantly owned by oil money as Friends of the Earth, which was founded by a man who hated nuclear much more than he hated oil company money.
The current Rockefeller Foundation pretends to care about the environment. They even (partially) divested from oil company stocks a couple years ago.
Nuclear is not green, stop spreading misinformation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_energy#Nuclear_power
Seems to be listed, It's just that Oil money has paid for a lot of lies. Spoiler, it's because nuclear is the only true threat to fossil fuels.
Nuclear energy is the closest thing we've got to green energy that we're going to get for the foreseeable future. Anyone opposing it is an idiot.
Instead of just getting closer to green energy you can use green energy
It is. And it’s maddening that people just say the word Fukushima as evidence against the viability of nuclear power. Radiation is such a boogeyman to people. Not well understood. And I don’t even think people know that there was a tsunami that killed 2000 people. 1 death from radiation - a plant worker.
Sure, let’s discard a high capacity, carbon-neutral, baseline-capable form of energy over this.
People don’t even know that smokestacks on coal fired power plants spew radiation into the atmosphere. The fact that nuclear deposits it in barrels is actually a plus.
Also, no news piece ever mentioned how far from the coast Japan is planning to release that water
Why would that matter, do living things cease to exist once you get farther from the coast?
It's reasonable to be concerned about the long term health effects of tritiated water. It's very unlikely this will have any effects though. It's only like a few grams. I bet fusion power would produce a whole lot more, even through the blanket. That could have considerable local health effects.
Yes, the ignorance is mainly caused by governments and lobbies keeping quiet about what actually happened and washing down data
More like, ignorance caused by my local news deciding to run a story telling people there is a controversy, without making a simple statement like the water is less radioactive than a banana. There's a controversy in part because the media encourages it, at almost every opportunity.
If you believe it's safer than a banana why don't you go living in Futaba? I heard the houses are pretty cheap there
Most folks, including nuclear advocates, have little understanding of either fission products or neutron activation. They really have no need to. I don't think the data isn't there if you look for it though. It's just not simple to understand.
Holy crap. This is how I find out that Rahm Emanuel is the US Ambassador to Japan? How is he possibly qualified for that job?
Similarly, the former mayor of Milwaukee is now the ambassador to Luxembourg. He didn't get that because he was qualified, he got it because he did favors for people in high places and it gets him paid to do literally nothing.
I didn't read the article, just saw the picture in the post and thought "that dude looks a lot like Rahm Emanuel. " TIL.
Lol yup! I only read the article because I saw his face and was like “what is Rahm Emanuel doing as the thumbnail for a story about Japan??”
He’s a former Chief of Staff to Obama and the former mayor of Chicago. From what I know about him, which granted isn’t a ton, he has zero experience in international diplomacy aside from whatever he might have seen second-hand as Chief of Staff.
True, it’s one of the most powerful positions in American government, but I guess I’m still a naive idealist when it comes to global diplomacy. I just really wish there was an expert on Japan in the job. East Asia is only getting more complicated for the US, and Rahm Emanuel is famous for his extreme temper and lack of poise in high pressure situations.
It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees
Yikes. Being famous for not being able to operate under pressure doesn’t seem good for a job under which you have to deal with high pressure…
He's not ambassador to China. An ambassadorship to Japan is relatively low pressure, mostly revolving around organizing and attending social events.
American embassies are usually underfunded and ambassadors often have to pay for social events out-of-pocket, which is one reason why the job often goes to wealthy people.
There’s two types of ambassadors: for countries you have tense relationships with, you send the professional diplomats who are really good at negotiating for things without starting wars.
For countries who are friends and you aren’t going to have tough negotiations with them, you send somebody who has good connections to the president. The ambassador gets a cushy job for 4 years that’s basically a reward, and the foreign country gets the message that an ambassadorship there is treated as a reward for the president’s friends, which strengthens the relationship
He was recently interviewed by Steven Dubner on Freakanomics. He said he was offered the choice of China or Japan and that he chose Japan.
is Biden trying to get rid of Obama's pals?
find out from your nearest kookie-conspiracy channel.
This will be fine for him but I am reminded of Thomas Midgely Jr who popularized using lead as an additive. He showed how safe it was by breathing in leaded exhaust fumes. He very shortly after took a vacation which was really just him recovering from lead poisoning.
Fuck that guy. His death was pretty hilarious though. He got polio and was largely bed ridden. He made a serious of pulleys to help himself work. He got tangled in it and accidentally hung himself.
I know too little about radioactive water and what the acceptable amount is for a person to eat through a fish that has been swimming in it
But holy shit can these stupid politicians who also don't know shit about it stop insulting everyone's intelligence with Simpsons (was literally an episode) like ways of convincing people.
I only trust well regarded scientists and experts, not some slimy politician. Literally kindergarten tier persuasion tactics.
In fairness there have been hundreds (750+) of Simpsons episodes so they're bound to have done some that line up with reality. I'm really sick of people saying the Simpsons predicted something considering those numbers.
That strikes me as more sad than funny. I don't understand why you would screw yourself over so thoroughly just to try and convince the world that you didn't screw them over. Everyone loses.
Your understating how destructive that man was. He'll probably end up killing more people than anyone in history.
You can't blame global warming on one person, but he was a huge and significant factor in it.
Not really global warming but he was the main contributor to the hole in the ozone layer we are still fixing since he popularized CFCs as a refrigerant.
Mostly increased radiation. There is some extra warming but it is very minor.
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/15/is-the-ozone-hole-causing-climate-change/
You are still correct that his inventions have killed a fuck ton of people. Skin cancer is definitely deadly and lead causes a whole host of problems including death.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321203#Even-low-levels-of-lead-are-harmful
Bummer that my wild stab was wrong. Even bigger bummer about all the dead. I don't like being wrong like this.
Just tritium. Nothing too major about it and it doesn't stick around compared to fission products. Good candidate for dumping into the ocean.
Still believing TEPCO ? They lie since the beginning. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/24/fukushima-fish-with-180-times-legal-limit-of-radioactive-cesium-fuels-water-release-fears
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Japan began releasing more than 1 million metric tons of radioactive water from a wrecked nuclear power plant on Thursday, prompting widespread concerns over contamination and safety.
The decision to release the wastewater has been a controversial one, sparking protests in Japan and further afield in South Korean capital Seoul from antinuclear activists and those concerned about contamination.
The UN has backed Japan’s assessment of the situation, with the organization’s nuclear regulator saying it is safe to release the water, and that doing so will have a negligible impact on environmental health.
Protesters gathered in Japan and South Korea this week to push back against the release of the radioactive water, with much of the concern centering around possible contamination, particularly of seafood.
In July, a public survey found that 62% of South Koreans would cut back or stop eating seafood after the water was discharged, according to news agency Reuters—despite Seoul pledging to closely monitor the release.
In recent weeks, some consumers in China—Japan’s biggest export market for seafood—also questioned whether it would be safe to eat the country’s seafood products after the water was released into the ocean.
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Reminds me of that guy who launched himself against a window to demonstrate how unbreakable they were
At least that would prove/disprove something.
You could eat an unsafely irradiated fish and it’s not like you would drop dead before the last bite.
Still. Anxiety about Fukushima radiation has always been massively overblown.
Quick: without googling, someone tell me how many people died at Fukushima, and how many of those where from radiation.
"This fish I'm about to eat is totally from the area where the radioactive water was dumped and not something we imported from a clean environment."
Good. We're going to feed him a bunch of Plymouth oysters if they ever dump the nuclear water from the pilgrim power plant in Cape cod Bay too.
Regular fish are already getting too contaminated for my liking just from what we normally do to the sea, Obama Flint water moment incoming.
In 1990, as the BSE ('mad cow disease') crisis in the UK was unfolding and shortly after scientists had found proof that the disease could indeed cross species, the Agriculture Secretary John Gummer went on national TV to try to force his four-year-old daughter to eat a beef burger for the cameras, to convince the public to keep eating British beef.
Several hundred people ended up dying from CJD (the human variant caused by eating infected beef). It remains one of the most widely derided photo ops in British political history.
Right but that isn't really comparable. Radiation has been studied for over a century while prions were a total unknown at the time.
Just because one person does one dumb thing on camera doesn't mean that everyone facing a camera does dumb things.
Right, I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm just observing that, for someone who remembers that time, seeing a politician eating for the cameras to prove some food is safe brings to mind this very specific unfortunate example.
For me it brought to mind Thomas Midgley, who did a public stunt where he poured petrol lead additive over his hands and gave himself lead poisoning twice.
