The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific.
A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Whiel I agree with your statements, it should be noted that sometimes scuba-diving in nuclear reactor's pools isn't as safe and fun as originally intended.
[A diver not briefed on avoiding unknown objects picked up a highly activated bolt laying on the pool floor and received a substantial amount of radioactive dose.]
This just verifies that water is a good shield against radiation. The slides explained that any proximity to, not to mention physical contact, with the object would be highly dangerous but having a mere 1.4 meters of water in between the human and the object the dosage would be negligible.
The Fukushima accident was a rare event, dumped a small amount of waste compared to ongoing industrial operations, and the most worrying part of the waste that it dumped decays on the timescale of decades, and not millenia.
I don't have stats about what gets directly into the oceans, but when we mine gold, copper, and other ores, we create entire ponds called "tailings ponds" full of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and all sorts of other nasty substances. These ponds leak into the environment on a regular basis. Short of seeping into the environment, many of these substances NEVER GO AWAY. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM.
Nuclear waste comes in small quantities, in neat, easy to handle packages, and the most dangerous elements in it will decay relatively quickly. Over the entire lifetime of the nuclear industry, less than 80,000 tons of radioactive waste have been produced. Meanwhile, one mine alone produced 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide over its lifetime. This substance is just sitting in the abandoned mine now.
The most worrying part of the nuclear waste story, to me, is that NIMBYism and fear has blocked attempts to produce permanent, safe facilities for permanent sequestration, so it's stored almost as poorly as our super toxic tailings. At least there's less of it, and efforts are made to clean it up when it gets into the environment.
like gold and copper, nuclear fuel is also mined. the nuclear industry produces large volumes of finely pulverised long lived low-level radioactive wastes in the form of uranium tailings. Unlike arsenic and cynaide, the hazard posed by uranium is not onyl checmical, but also radioactive. Whereas these chemical pollutants can be neutralised by the right chemical reaction, the radioactive hazard of uranium mining wastes cannot be neutralised, only contained.
And yet, the tailings for uranium are much less in volume than the tailings (and eventual processed waste products) from the fuels that would replace it, like coal and oil.
Uranium itself is only weakly radioactive anyways (the kind of uranium you mine has a half life measured in billions of years). You'd be at more danger from radiation from walking out of the mine into the UV-filled sunlight, or from smoking cigarettes (which contain radioactive Po-210) than from working under the earth in a uranium mine (though you would admittedly want to wear a face mask).
In fact Congressional staffers receive more exposure to radiation than U.S. naval nuclear plant operators, because the nice granite-based buildings they work in contain pitchblende impurities (containing uranium), and yet those Congressional staffers are allowed to work in those buildings.
Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Uranium tailings are one of the biggest environmental issues with nuclear power, and one of the ones I never hear anyone mention.
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.
The statement that nowadays reactor engines can be designed that are "far safer" always riles me up a little bit because, of course, a few decades ago the OLD designs were already sold to the general public with the promise that they were "perfectly" safe. And if you had the temerity to question this, you were of course a Luddite.
Even the old Western designs are/were safe within the parameters of their design. Many are running even today because it has proven politically impossible to replace them.
The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one of the oldest BWR designs), and even Fukushima Dai-Ichi has not killed anyone from radiation directly.
But just to contrast, the nearby set of operating reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ni (which also used an old BWR design with a minor containment upgrade) both managed to safely achieve cold shutdown even despite getting hit by the exact same tsunami that hit their sister site just a few kilometers up the coast.
Obviously you should always question the safety of a new technology instead of blindly trusting it. The modern reliance on computers and the magic of the Internet seems to come to mind for me as an example of where blind trust leads to problems. But questioning nuclear just because it's nuclear may well have made one a Luddite. The basics of nuclear engineering are not actually as difficult to understand as it's portrayed to be, but people object to the technology without even the slightest attempt to understand it, which may well make one a Luddite as well.
Enjoy your fish! I for one am taking heed of the warning signs from the thousands of dead animals washing up on the shores of the west coast - not to mention the alarming drop in the number of sea-urchins, starfish, shellfish, and other species who simply cannot be found.
"A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
...compared to the mind-boggling amount of commercial waste we dump into the environment in a completely unmonitored, uncontrolled, unlimited way the radioactive contamination of the Pacific is absolutely insignificant.
Maybe it will even help the ecological systems there a tiny little bit because (even if only few...) people might back down on seafood from the over-fished areas there.
The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific.
A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.