If you read the reports of damaged Japanese nuclear reactors leaking contaminated water in the Pacific and felt uneasy, then you're going to feel even more uneasy after reading this: in an effort to stop the leak at Fukushima Daiichi, Japanese workers have dumped "thousands of tons" of radioactive water into the sea.
"Officials with Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, proposed the release of excess water that has pooled in and around the Nos. 5 and 6 reactors into the sea," reports a CNN.com article. "But most of the dumped water -- 10,000 tons -- will come from the plant's central waste treatment facility, which will then be used to store highly radioactive water from the No. 2 unit, an official with the power company said."
Japanese officials call the dumping "unavoidable," and several experts interviewed by CNN claim that even though about 3 million gallons of this contaminated water will be poured into the sea, the risk of anything bad happening (such as three-eyed fish or the destruction of eco-systems) is pretty minimal.
"...Hopefully the churning of the ocean and the currents will quickly disperse this so that it gets to very dilute concentrations relatively quickly," Timothy Jorgensen, chair of the radiation safety committee at Georgetown University Medical Center, told the news website.
Did anyone else catch the word hopefully in that sentence?
The fact is that even though experts predict nothing horrible will happen because of this radioactive water dumping, they don't completely know that to be true. And maybe they'll turn out to be correct and no one has to worry – but based on the under-reported destruction caused by the BP disaster (destruction that's becoming more obvious as time goes on), one can't help but be very skeptical of this hypothesis.
Guess we'll just have to wait and see - whether we like it or not.
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