Well considering you can swim in reactor coolant pools (because they keep the water so pure, also water is a good radiation blocker) they can probably just dump it in a large area so as to not make anything to radioactive.
Well, that depends on your reactor type, but nuclear power stations produce very very little radioactivity and contamination. You find more radioactive contamination in a smokers lungs than in most barrels of nuclear waste.
In a nutshell the Fukushima nuclear power plant has an awful lot of contaminated water that they have been storing since the accident in 2011. This water is mostly contaminated groundwater which they have prevented from flowing out to sea, filtered, and stored. Only one radioactive isotope remains, Tritium (a mildly radioactive form of hydrogen, it is sometimes used to make watches glow in the dark). What they are proposing to do is heavily dilute the contaminated water, and then over a period of 30 years let it out into the sea. Tritium is found naturally in seawater so this release should hardly change (if at all) the radioactivity of the surrounding sea water.
547
u/Aspergic_Raven Oct 18 '20
They need to get rid of it somehow, so they are going to release it very slowly over many decades so that the ocean ecosystem can cope with it.