Oliver Stone's 'Nuclear now' documentary.

[PlainName]

Fukushima

That's a bit different to the norm, isn't it? They are not disposing of waste from the reactor, but contaminated cooling water. They wouldn't've needed to do that without the earthquake, but once that disaster hit they had to keep pumping in water that they couldn't then pump out and had to store on-site. There is a finite limit to how long they can keep doing that, hence why it is now being turfed out.

Of course, the proper solution to all this is to concentrate on fission, and then many billions and decades later we will either be totally renewables or back in caves

[Kleinstein]

The water from Fukishima is more like a small detail from the accident recovery.  Much of the water came in and at a smaller rate still comes in from ground water the is leaking from the outside in the reactor building and from there take up some contamination. They cleaned the water from most contraminations, but not from the relatively low level of tritium. The water they want to release is only slightly contaminated with tritium - somewhat comparable what some CADU reactors in Canada releases in normal operation.

My option on this is that it would be good to add enough salt to the water to make it slightly heavier than the normal see water and than release it to the deep ocean (there is plenty of depth near Japan). Trtium has a relatively short half life (13 years from memory) and chances are most of the water would stay in the deep see for long enough to largely decay before coming up again. The deep see has relatively little life that would be harmed from the relatively small release.

The mess and costs from the cleanup still shows some of the problems with nuclear energy. The accidents happened so far the rate is not that much higher than what is expected from the safty concepts and the risks they are willing to take. With Fukushima they were still lucky that most of the release went to the ocean and not densely populated areas.

[tatel]

Do not forget that burning coal releases more radioactive particles ("radiation") than nuclear power plants, tests, bombs, and accidents combined.

For a layman article about radioactivity in coal ash, see this (Scientific American; by a science journalist, not a nuclear energy proponent).

If we compare coal power plants to nuclear power plants producing the same amount of electricity, the coal power plant produces about ten times as much radioactive waste as the nuclear power plant.

I for one prefer solar and wind energy, but for industry and stability, we need bulk energy production for which currently nuclear is the safest and least polluting option.  At least here in Finland, we're doing something about the spent fuel.  The permanent storage facility, Onkalo, is almost ready for use.  It is designed to last 100,000 years and an ice age.

I don't buy that thing about carbon power plants being more radioactive than NPPs. I lived for 50 years next to a carbon power plant. For sure it was a dirty thing until compelled to put filters on. That waste got into the water instead . That did go unnoticed because the river, and the sea port water, was already saturated with wasted pulp and chemicals from a paper factory and other industries, while used as sewer for about 75.000 people.

That carbon power plant was finally dismantled about 2010 IIRC

But, after all that exposition, I don't see any more bald, sick, throwing guys with burns in the skin, than usual in other places where there has never been a TPP. And nothing like the kids from Chernobyl that used to come here each summer.

Be careful about what you read. That guy needs his work to be funded. The editor need his paper having some support. Remember how many studies were published by "independent" scientist, saying the relation tobacco-cancer couldn't be demonstrated? Yeah, what has been demonstrated is they weren't independent, but funded by the tobacco industry.

IMO, that guy can perfectly go to hell.

[tatel]

My option on this is that it would be good to add enough salt to the water to make it slightly heavier than the normal see water and than release it to the deep ocean (there is plenty of depth near Japan). Trtium has a relatively short half life (13 years from memory) and chances are most of the water would stay in the deep see for long enough to largely decay before coming up again. The deep see has relatively little life that would be harmed from the relatively small release.

While I agree with most of the post I can't see why a private company should be allowed to dump any radioactive waste into the ocean. Of course China, Vietnam, Russia, etc, all disagree also. They have banned japanese fish imports.

Not that governments should be allowed to do that either.  But a pure capitalist venture like Tepco shouldn't be allowed to become a commie thing when business go South. Technology to get that water 100% clean was and still is available on the US. It was just deemed "expensive". 

[nctnico]

The problem is that the public has been brainwashed by anti-nuclear protest groups that any radioactivity is bad.

You can see a similar effect in the US. In the 1950's the population has been brainwashed to be against communism to a point where people Pavlov into socialism = communism = bad . While most Americans are in favour of laws that help establish more equality, as soon as somebody comes around and labels such laws as 'socialist law' everybody is dead set against it. This takes any form of reasoning away from a discussion. It also hampers the US from improving the living conditions of many people.

BTW: Oliver Stone's documentary shows there is a money trail coming from the oil companies towards anti-nuclear protest groups.

[Nominal Animal]

I don't buy that thing about carbon power plants being more radioactive than NPPs.

What you buy or do not is irrelevant; this it is a well-known, well-researched fact.  It is not up to debate.
If you look it up, even governments do openly admit this.
Edited: Here is the relevant data for USA, from epa.gov.

The reason is that to generate the same amount of electricity, you need to burn a huge amount of coal, and all coal deposits have radioactive materials in them; and we do know the range of amounts.

Similarly, when you ingest uranium, it is not the radiation that will kill you, it is the heavy metal toxicity.  (The LD50, or dose that kills at least 50% of subjects, is four times as high for the radiation dose as it is for the chemical toxicity.  The worst kind is aerosolized uranium, for example that generated by depleted uranium projectiles on impact.)

[tatel]

Again I don't buy that, and I laugh at those "stablished facts". I know for sure that's bullshit, because, after 50 years living next to a carbon power plant, I still have to see any radioactive poisoning or even an increase in, say, thyroid cancer or leukemia. Incidence is about the same here that in some little town 100 km south, where never has been any carbon power plant. So calling out that bullshit.

Of course I'm not speaking about lung sicknesses, etc, but about "typical" affections from radiation.

If I understand it correctly, in the 60 years that TPP worked, we could have produced the same energy from nuclear, and even if that nuclear waste would have been in the loose, it would be less than the radiation that got loose from that carbon? No way.

Not the first time I see a so huge whopper. Here in Spain quite a few thousand people got very sick in the 80s.  Symptoms were similar to nervous agent exposition. Many died, most other got impaired for life. Officially the cause was some denatured rapeseed oil and that was sanctioned as "scientific fact" for the WHO. But all the people in the mass media knew the real cause was a pesticide that was, first stored in just a shed under Almeria's summer sun, where it of course got over 40ºC, becoming a nervous agent, then used to kill the worms affecting a plantation of tomatoes, less than 15 days before the harvest. Oil guys were scapegoated anyway, and that remains the "scientific fact" until today.

So, again, that guy from scientific american can go to hell. I don't know how he manipulates the data, but I'm sure he does somehow.

[Nominal Animal]

Again I don't buy that, and I laugh at those "stablished facts".

"I take my belief as the proof of the whole truth, and laugh at your statistics."  Are you sure you're not a politician?

You're not laughing at just one science writer, you're also laughing at the US Environmental Protection Agency and European Environment Agency, plus about half a century of geoscience.  Pretty idiotic, in my opinion.

[nctnico]

Again I don't buy that, and I laugh at those "stablished facts". I know for sure that's bullshit, because, after 50 years living next to a carbon power plant, I still have to see any radioactive poisoning or even an increase in, say, thyroid cancer or leukemia. Incidence is about the same here that in some little town 100 km south, where never has been any carbon power plant. So calling out that bullshit.

Well, there you have your proof that particles with low radioactivity levels have no measurable negative effect on health.

[Nominal Animal]

Well, there you have your proof that particles with low radioactivity levels have no measurable negative effect on health.

Yep.  A good general overview of typical radiation dose sources is in the Wikipedia background radiation article.

People don't seem to understand what the actual risks are, which is why I keep harping about radioactive byproducts of coal use, uranium chemical toxicity, and so on.  For example, radon, a natural radioactive gas, is estimated to be the second most frequent cause of lung cancer in the USA, the most frequent being smoking.  Radon itself is not toxic, as it's basically a very heavy, radioactive noble gas, but its decay products are (as is the ionizing radiation released by the nuclear decay).  As it is much heavier than air, the solution is a simple "radon pump" at the lowest point in the building, slowly pumping air there (and thus any radon gas seeping in) outside.

[Nominal Animal]

Interestingly, if one bothers to check the EPA link, the current way of getting rid of the (slightly) radioactive waste from burning coal is exactly analogous to what is done at Fukushima: it is distributed in various products, including building materials (concrete and roofing), so that the concentration is kept low enough to not pose significant risks.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

On one hand, it is better than nothing, or letting stuff concentrate somewhere.  On the other hand, Onkalo spent nuclear fuel deep geological repository shows there is a better way.  All nuclear waste generated in Finland must be disposed in Finland by law, and this is the (first) site.  Its costs are paid from a fund collected from nuclear energy production, not taxpayers. (I.e., nuclear energy users have paid for the site already.)

[pcprogrammer]

Again I don't buy that, and I laugh at those "stablished facts". I know for sure that's bullshit, because, after 50 years living next to a carbon power plant, I still have to see any radioactive poisoning or even an increase in, say, thyroid cancer or leukemia. Incidence is about the same here that in some little town 100 km south, where never has been any carbon power plant. So calling out that bullshit.

If you had bothered to go through the article and used a bit of common sense you would have concluded that there is no risk of radiation contamination living near a coal fired electricity or any other plant.

To me I feel you are dismissing this information a bit to easily.

According to USGS calculations, buying a house in a stack shadow—in this case within 0.6 mile [one kilometer] of a coal plant—increases the annual amount of radiation you're exposed to by a maximum of 5 percent. But that's still less than the radiation encountered in normal yearly exposure to X-rays.

Going to hospital for an X-ray is worse, according to this and does not harm you if it is not to often. Doctors and nurses on the other hand don't stay in the room and wear lead shields to minimize the radiation. Long term exposure of more elevated radiation will bring harm.

And indeed the normal background radiation everybody is getting every day does not turn us into mutants either.

I would worry more about other forms of pollution in exhausts like heavy metals, fine particals or toxic gasses.

[pcprogrammer]

Another thing in this topic is the talk about costs of nuclear power plants and availability of the raw uranium to feed them. While both may be true, the same goes for al the other solutions that are available at this moment.

Solar takes a lot of resources and costs money. Wind the same. Electric cars the same.

And in its bases as it is now, money is the only resource that will never run out. Since it it no longer bound to gold it just grows with the economy. Unfortunately that is not true for a lot of the other things needed to keep our power and wealth hunger fulfilled.

At some point in time the earth will have be plundered of all its available resources that we desperately need for sustaining the foreseen and wished for growth. If humankind will be around long enough to get that far who knows. Other problems like diminishing crops due to drought or war might wipe us out way before it.

The one sane thing would be to strive for real sustainability, but I don't see humankind capable of that.

So much for my rant.

[Someone]

Getting down to the Uranium ore equivalent is by far not saying that the material is safe after this. Uranium ores can also be quite different - not all are the same and they are also considered prolematic material, that should be keept in a safe place (geologic barrier) and not spread around.
The horizontal line is just in a sweep spot where it looks like the time is not too long to blow the mind. Shift that line lower by 1 or 2 decades and it takes 100s of thouthands or millions of years.

Yes that's the problem with these "comparisons" which look like some scientific and irrefutable thing but only people with significant experience in the domain can cut through and point out the smoke and mirrors. I agree 2x decades further is a pretty reasonable adjustment factor for the biological/human risks I discussed above, and would then put it in the "ballpark" of comparable risk.

[Someone]

I am yet to come across just the wind, solar and battery capacity required to run a normal run of the mill country fully on renewables.

Because that information is so hard to find and definitely not shared widely by our public researchers....
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

[jbb]

Edit: deleted comment because I didn’t see there’s a second page…

[Someone]

Interestingly, if one bothers to check the EPA link, the current way of getting rid of the (slightly) radioactive waste from burning coal is exactly analogous to what is done at Fukushima: it is distributed in various products, including building materials (concrete and roofing), so that the concentration is kept low enough to not pose significant risks.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

On one hand, it is better than nothing, or letting stuff concentrate somewhere.  On the other hand, Onkalo spent nuclear fuel deep geological repository shows there is a better way.  All nuclear waste generated in Finland must be disposed in Finland by law, and this is the (first) site.  Its costs are paid from a fund collected from nuclear energy production, not taxpayers. (I.e., nuclear energy users have paid for the site already.)

Ensuring the nuclear industry accounts for and takes responsibility for the full lifecycle is most important, no fair trying to compare a "light" scoped nuclear operation with a heavy scoped renewable (pushes to price wind/solar only with backing storage).

As an attempt at looking at the lifecycle you get things like this:
https://cna.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Comparative-Life-Cycle-Analysis-of-Base-Load-Electricity-in-Ontario.pdf
Which puts the radiological output intensity (per unit of energy delivered) from coal as much smaller than nuclear

Radiological pollution is concerning as the cleanup/countermeasures are still poorly developed (chicken and egg) where as the control and containment of known human risks from coal are relatively easier and less uncertain.

[tatel]

Again I don't buy that, and I laugh at those "stablished facts".

"I take my belief as the proof of the whole truth, and laugh at your statistics."  Are you sure you're not a politician?

You're not laughing at just one science writer, you're also laughing at the US Environmental Protection Agency and European Environment Agency, plus about half a century of geoscience.  Pretty idiotic, in my opinion.

Just rebuffing your assertion, which I very much doubt. You just gave a link to "Scientific American". Well, I know for sure that "Scientific American" got clad with something that isn't precisely glory when publishing, say, about the first motor flights in the 1900s. And not only then. They are not like "Nature" o "Science", but more like "Muy interesante" (very interesting) that one can buy in Spain weekly for a few bucks. Somewhat nerdy. AFAIK, Scientific American isn't even a peer-reviewed publication.

So you can't link any article from Scientific American and say it demonstrates the real generally accepted scientific knowledge. That's what fanboys do. You should give quite a few links to publications like "Nature" or "Science". If that knowledge is so widely accepted, you should be able to easily give a whole lot of links, easily. That way, I could perhaps stand corrected.

But, even "Nature" and "Science" published works demonstrating a relation between smoking and lung cancer couldn't be established (and apologized for that not many years ago). So, even then, some scrutiny would be in order, I think.

Please note that even the Smithsonian Institution had for decades a plane  exhibited as the first one that did fly under his own power. It wasn't Wright brothers' Flyer, however. It was Langley's aerodrone. You have seen it in old films: it's the one that lost its wings instantaneously at the very same moment it was catapulted from a barge. But, both "Scientific American" and the Smithsonian were good friends of Samuel Langley and Glenn Curtiss. That aerodrone effectively did a short fly, after being extensively modified by Glenn Curtiss, quite a few years after Flyer I first flight, when Curtiss was desperately trying to steal Wrigth brothers' intellectual property. I call that "fraud" and even the Smithsonian accepted publicly it was so, when, at last, the Flyer I got into aerodrone's place.

So, be careful about what you take as "established facts". Excuse me if I don't take your word at face value. I could easily do, should we were speaking about electronics. But we aren't.

Of course environment agencies are against carbon. It has many harmful effects that become clear much faster than any radioactivity. We are happy here having that TPP dismantled. That doesn't mean we want any NPP at that place.

I find your affirmations about radon particularly laughable. We discussed that extensively on the speleos-fr mailing list, in the 1990s. Do you think a basement is a deep place that lacks ventilation?   

That link from EPA is also laughable. First, I never take anything coming from US government at face value. You know, for decades they said it was perfectly demonstrated we broke their battleship in 1898. Particularly about environment, US as a government is literally nuts. Think about fracking, etc. These are the guys saying climatic change is a scam. EPA is almost always politically motivated, so chrematistically managed. But the really laughable thing isn't what the link says, but the use you try to do from it:

CCRs can contain concentrations of TENORM that are 3-5 times higher than background levels in average soil in the United States.

Well, I'm pretty sure that background level is much higher than 3-5 times the US average background in, say, Niger, where the french got the uranium they needed.

We already had people speaking about uranium ore as something "natural" not to be afraid of. That uranium ore is instead many times more radioactive than "3-5 times average soil in the US". It's outright dangerous. Now you are trying to scare us into thinking that 3-5 times the background radiation is worse than Chernobyl. You should try to agree with each other before try and sell to us any old donkey.

Do you know how many times higher than average background is radioactivity in Chernobyl/Fukushima? You can bet it's more like 3000-5000 times. Even robots break under that radiation. So, your reasoning doesn't hold any water.

there you have your proof that particles with low radioactivity levels have no measurable negative effect on health

If you really think that, please feel free to drink half a liter of iodine-131. In about three months, it will be decayed and you won't need even a leaded coffin.

[Nominal Animal]

Ensuring the nuclear industry accounts for and takes responsibility for the full lifecycle is most important, no fair trying to compare a "light" scoped nuclear operation with a heavy scoped renewable (pushes to price wind/solar only with backing storage).

What?  What does 'a "light" scoped nuclear operation' and 'a heavy scoped renewable' mean?

In Finland, solar and wind power are heavily subsidized.  Nuclear power generation cost has included the cost of long term storage (designed to handle a new ice age with storage time of 100,000 years) for over three decades here.  So yeah, the nuclear industry here is forced to take responsibility for the full lifecycle.

If you want to complain about how somewhere else the industry doesn't have to pay all it's costs, that's wrong and I do agree with you there; but it does not mean all nuclear power everywhere is like that.

As an attempt at looking at the lifecycle you get things like this:

And my point is that the amount of radionuclides released by coal power is higher than that released by nuclear power, accidents, bombs, and tests combined.
The fact that nuclear fuel rods are in most places sitting in storage pools does not mean they're released.

This was also mentioned just below your screenshot, from page 132:

As for criteria air contaminants (CAC), 92 per cent of them came from coal-fired power generation and nuclear’s share was just
0.5 per cent. Nuclear’s share of radionuclide emissions, at 99.8 per cent, was much more than proportional to its generation share. Nevertheless, comparative information from the United States as summarized in Appendix F leads to the conclusion that on a per TWh basis the collective radiation dose from the nuclear life cycle is much lower than the collective radiation dose from the coal-fired life cycle.

Did you intentionally omit the part that repeated my point just so it would look like your reference disagreed with my post, or was it simple ineptitude and not understanding what you read?

[Nominal Animal]

Just rebuffing your assertion, which I very much doubt. You just gave a link to "Scientific American".

Just because I didn't bother to collate a list of sources does not mean I cannot.

Even the Appendix F of the PDF Someone linked to repeats what I claimed.

Here is a question posed in the European Parliament, repeating the "To generate the same amount of electricity, a coal power plant gives off at least ten times more radiation than a nuclear power plant." statement.

Here is a short Science magazine article repeating the same.

The Wikipedia article on radioactive waste puts the exposure to radiation due to coal power plants at 100 times that from nuclear power (but note that this does not include weapons tests, accidents, nor the two nuclear bombs) based on Oak Ridge National Review vol. 26, Nos. 3 & 4, 1993 article Coal combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger by Alex Gabbard.

Feel free to do your own literature search, though.  Just don't do what Someone did, and cut off the paragraph just before the sentence that repeats my own point.

So, be careful about what you take as "established facts". Excuse me if I don't take your word at face value. I could easily do, should we were speaking about electronics. But we aren't.

I'm a physicist, actually, and only a hobbyist in electronics.  My specialization is computational materials physics, and development of (non-QM) molecular dynamic simulations; particularly parallel and distributed simulations.  I ran an IT company and provided custom full-stack solutions for a few years, too.

[Kleinstein]

Comparing the emissions of coal and nuclear power is tricky. Not all nuclear is equal (e.g. CANDU emits quite a lot of tritium, that is hard to compare to other sources). The mining of Uranium is also quite different between mines - some are OK or even good (removing the uranium from phosphate fertilizer), but other can be very dirty, spreading dust and unused low grade ore. Another variable is the waste from fuel reprocessing - this has be traditional rather dirty, e.g. releasing the technetium.

The coal is also quite different and in newer plants the filters catch much of the particles. With the emissions it is also questionalble which natural radioactivity from the dust should count. E.g. Potassium should not, as it is a natural part of soil and even a disired one.

[Someone]

Ensuring the nuclear industry accounts for and takes responsibility for the full lifecycle is most important, no fair trying to compare a "light" scoped nuclear operation with a heavy scoped renewable (pushes to price wind/solar only with backing storage).

What?  What does 'a "light" scoped nuclear operation' and 'a heavy scoped renewable' mean?

In Finland, solar and wind power are heavily subsidized.  Nuclear power generation cost has included the cost of long term storage (designed to handle a new ice age with storage time of 100,000 years) for over three decades here.  So yeah, the nuclear industry here is forced to take responsibility for the full lifecycle.

If you want to complain about how somewhere else the industry doesn't have to pay all it's costs, that's wrong and I do agree with you there; but it does not mean all nuclear power everywhere is like that.

Much of the nuclear debate is around hiding externalities/costs one way or another. I'm pointing to the ways in which the "costs" can be manipulated to suit politics. Like only looking at the effects of generation plant (light/superficial/inadequate), vs looking lifecycle including mining/refining. That extends to comparisons of renewables where people trying to make them look unattractive add external costs like battery storage to provide 7 days of holdover (heavy/excessive/onerous).

Nuclear power isn't economic, it requires market intervention such as government underwriting and financing, and even with all that help doesn't compare well on cost with renewables in most countries. CSIRO GenCost provides that analysis for Australia in an open and well thought out methodology.

As an attempt at looking at the lifecycle you get things like this:

And my point is that the amount of radionuclides released by coal power is higher than that released by nuclear power, accidents, bombs, and tests combined.
The fact that nuclear fuel rods are in most places sitting in storage pools does not mean they're released.

So now you're playing that game of putting some things "in scope" and others "out of scope" just to suit a narrative. Nuclear wastes (such as spent fuel) has to be accounted for in the lifecycle, just because it can be stockpiled on site in the short term doesn't mean its no longer a side effect/cost. It will be released at some point and has to be accounted for.

This was also mentioned just below your screenshot, from page 132:

As for criteria air contaminants (CAC), 92 per cent of them came from coal-fired power generation and nuclear’s share was just
0.5 per cent. Nuclear’s share of radionuclide emissions, at 99.8 per cent, was much more than proportional to its generation share. Nevertheless, comparative information from the United States as summarized in Appendix F leads to the conclusion that on a per TWh basis the collective radiation dose from the nuclear life cycle is much lower than the collective radiation dose from the coal-fired life cycle.

Did you intentionally omit the part that repeated my point just so it would look like your reference disagreed with my post, or was it simple ineptitude and not understanding what you read?

That refers out to a different analysis which used different population impact measures, and comes up with a radically different balance. There is very little available on such an important topic. If Nuclear was so clean and happy it would be in that industries interest to publish and promote that, yet there is a suspicious gap in the literature.

Interestingly that US example estimated the publics exposure from nuclear power mining:refining:generation to have a ratio of 11:21:4. 80-90% of the exposure (in that methodology) would have been missed if the generating plant was taken alone.

[Someone]

The Wikipedia article on radioactive waste puts the exposure to radiation due to coal power plants at 100 times that from nuclear power (but note that this does not include weapons tests, accidents, nor the two nuclear bombs) based on Oak Ridge National Review vol. 26, Nos. 3 & 4, 1993 article Coal combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger by Alex Gabbard.

Feel free to do your own literature search, though.  Just don't do what Someone did, and cut off the paragraph just before the sentence that repeats my own point.

That's all quoting back to the same (1980's) source, which on its mixture of exposure measures for that specific situation makes a number you like. Where as the much more recent Canadian report with their mix of exposure and different situation paints a different picture.

To be more accurate the 100x figure is the obnoxious "let's just exclude all that messy bit of the nuclear cycle and only count the generating plant" thing, lifecycle they came up with 4x which is less sensational.

They may well both be correct. The results can be very geography/technology specific.

[nctnico]

Comparing the emissions of coal and nuclear power is tricky. Not all nuclear is equal (e.g. CANDU emits quite a lot of tritium, that is hard to compare to other sources). The mining of Uranium is also quite different between mines - some are OK or even good (removing the uranium from phosphate fertilizer), but other can be very dirty, spreading dust and unused low grade ore. Another variable is the waste from fuel reprocessing - this has be traditional rather dirty, e.g. releasing the technetium.

Actually, the comparison by itself is not very interesting. The bottom line is that there are many sources of human induced radiation 'emissions' into the environment at harmless levels and nuclear power (including the associated mining + waste processing) is just one of those sources. And yet some people set different standards for reasons for which no supporting data exists. On top of that, there are many other (non radioactive) emissions which are much more harmfull. And no, I'm not saying to just open the floodgates with nuclear waste because the environment is already polluted. I'm only saying more common sense needs to be applied to look past the mis-information and prejudice in order to get a picture of the actual problems at hand and take an unbiased look at the solutions that are available.

[nctnico]

My option on this is that it would be good to add enough salt to the water to make it slightly heavier than the normal see water and than release it to the deep ocean (there is plenty of depth near Japan). Trtium has a relatively short half life (13 years from memory) and chances are most of the water would stay in the deep see for long enough to largely decay before coming up again. The deep see has relatively little life that would be harmed from the relatively small release.

I'd like to see some data on this claim  In the end all life in the sea forms a food chain. If dumping the waste water in a deep area results in the water not being dilluted down by currents, the sea life there can accumulate larger portions of radiation in a local area. Which can then accumulate further higher up the food chain. So to me it seems the best solution is to dump the contaminated water where its gets dilluted down the fastest so local accumulation in sea life is less likely to happen. Overall I'm not a fan of stuffing waste as far away as possible without a very good reason to do so.