1,000 Tons Of Polluted Fukushima Water Dumped In Sea

[PamW]

4. Why not do the calculation for yourself?

madokie,

Why not do the calculation for yourself? You can use your own sources to find out the area of the oceans, and the average depth in miles; so you can calculate the volume, and hence the mass of the ocean water.

TEPCO dumped 1,000 tons. Calculate what fraction that is compared with the mass of the water already in the ocean.

Also consider that the water in the ocean isn't radioactivity free. The water itself contains Tritium produced by Mother Nature high in the atmosphere. The water also contains salts of Uranium and Thorium

A colleague of mine has a collection of "fossils"; things like shark's teeth. He takes them around to the science classes at area schools, along with a radiation detector. Sure enough; those shark's teeth are radioactive, and the children and teachers want to know why.

When the shark was alive, it was swimming in the seawater, and ingesting the seawater. Its body was extracting the minerals in that seawater in order to make teeth. Some of the minerals in seawater are salts of Uranium and Thorium which are naturally radioactive. So the shark's teeth are radioactive.

If people really did the calculations and found out just how much radioactivity is in the environment already, courtesy of Mother Nature; they'd wonder why people are concerned about the relatively trivial amount of radioactivity represented by 1,000 tons of slightly radioactive water.

PamW