Aug. 16, 2023 - Epoch Times
11:54
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| Good evening, and right before we dive into the nuclear water, I'll quickly mention that we here at the Epoch Times were recently given access to tens of thousands of hours of January 6 footage from Capitol Hill. | |
| Basically, we were given access to 1,700 camera angles and over 40,000 hours of video. | |
| Our team has been going through these videos over at an undisclosed location in order to answer some of the questions that have still been lingering in the air about that fateful day. | |
| And we just released an hour-long special report called the January 6th Tapes, going through and dissecting what we were able to find. | |
| If you'd like to check out that awesome report, I'll throw the link to it. | |
| It'll be right there at the very top of the description box below. | |
| Hope you check it out. | |
| And now, diving into the main story. | |
| Unbeknownst to most people, the country of Japan is currently in the process of releasing about a million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. | |
| And the reason for this stems from what happened 12 years ago, during the Fukushima nuclear disaster. | |
| If you remember, that was when a giant earthquake, as well as a subsequent tsunami, caused a near meltdown of a nuclear power plant over in Japan. | |
| The situation was a complete mess. | |
| The reactors got shut down. | |
| The backup generators, which fueled the cooling system, lost power, which then led to three nuclear meltdowns and the contamination of about a million tons of water. | |
| Now, for the past 12 years, Japan has kept this water inside of the plant, where they have been slowly treating it. | |
| But, unfortunately, they have run out of space. | |
| And so the Japanese government, they have announced that they will begin to slowly release this treated, radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. | |
| Now, the big question here is very obviously whether this is safe or not, and whether or not it will affect us here in the U.S. And so, in order to answer these two pressing questions, let's unpack the entire situation step by step, starting at the very beginning. | |
| Twelve years ago, on March 11th of 2011, there was a massive earthquake, which registered a 9.0 on the Richter scale over by Japan. | |
| That earthquake caused a 40-foot high tsunami to slam into the city of Fukushima, killing over 15,000 people and destroying much of the Fukushima nuclear power plant's cooling systems, causing, as we mentioned earlier, three of the reactors to melt down. | |
| Now, As an immediate response to this disaster 12 years ago, in order to prevent an actual nuclear explosion, the plant operators, they began to pump in seawater from the ocean in order to cool down the overheated fuel cores. | |
| Now fortunately, this plant of theirs was a success. | |
| There was no nuclear explosion on that fateful day. | |
| However, after the disaster was averted, well, the plant operators, they were left with about a ton of this contaminated seawater alongside a growing body of contaminated groundwater. | |
| Now that water, it's been collected, treated, and stored every single day for the past 12 plus years, to the point now where they have a grand total of 1,073 of these giant containers holding 1.3 million tons of treated, radiated water. | |
| Now the problem, though, is that they have run out of space. | |
| These 1,073 containers account for 97% of this nuclear power plant's total storage capacity, meaning that they quite literally have no more room. | |
| And so government officials, alongside officials from TEPCO, the utility company which operates the power plant, they came out and jointly announced that the wastewater must be removed in order to, for one, prevent any accidental leaks in case of another earthquake, and also the wastewater must be removed because this nuclear power plant is slowly being decommissioned. | |
| It'll be decommissioned by the year... | |
| And the only way to remove the 1.3 million tons of wastewater is to pour it into the Pacific Ocean. | |
| Now, for the past 12 or so years, as we just mentioned, this wastewater was being treated at this facility in order to remove the harmful contaminants. | |
| The decontamination process worked something like this. | |
| The contaminated water was first treated with cesium and strontium filtering equipment in order to remove most of the contamination before they even put it in a tank. | |
| Then, the water was treated in a multi-nuclide removal facility that Japan called ALPS, which stands for Advanced Liquid Processing System. | |
| This process of theirs works on 62 of the 64 known radioactive isotopes, and it removes enough of these 62 different radionuclides, as they're called, to bring the concentration levels below Japan's regulatory limits. | |
| Then, once this whole ALPS treatment process is complete, the water was then put into a storage tank while the concentrated slurry byproduct Which contains all the different contaminants, was sent to a separate storage facility. | |
| However, it's worth noting that as good as this ALPS process appears to be, it does not remove two of the known radioactive isotopes, namely carbon-14 as well as tritium. | |
| And for your reference, tritium, also known as hydrogen-3, is chemically identical to normal water. | |
| Which is exactly why separating it from wastewater is, for one, expensive, secondly, it's very energy intensive, and also, generally, it's very time consuming. | |
| But as far as radioactive elements go, tritium is kind of a mixed bag. | |
| It's, on one hand, relatively benign. | |
| From the research, it's been shown to pass through living organisms in a similar way to water, and it doesn't appear to strongly accumulate in the bodies of living things. | |
| The problem, though, is that as tritium decays, it gives off a beta particle that can damage DNA if it's actually ingested. | |
| But then the positive side to that is that this beta particle is not very energetic, meaning that a person would need to ingest a lot of it to get a significant dose of radiation. | |
| And so, taken as a whole, high doses of tritium is dangerous, but extremely microscopic doses might not be. | |
| At least, that's the theory that the Japanese are going with. | |
| Because what they did is that they diluted this treated water so that it's less than one part per 100 parts seawater. | |
| This dilution process, theoretically at least, makes the relative level of carbon-14 and tritium in the wastewater to be acceptable. | |
| Specifically, the Tokyo Energy Production Company, otherwise known as TEPCO, they're the ones who actually operate this nuclear facility over in the city of Fukushima, and their officials came out and said that the resulting concentration of tritium in the wastewater is around 1500 becquerels per liter. | |
| Now, becquerels per liter, by the way, is a measure of the amount of radioactivity in a given substance. | |
| And the level that they claim to have achieved is actually significantly lower than the guidelines for tritium in drinking water that were put out by the WHO, the World Health Organization. | |
| Specifically, in a recent report that's titled Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality, the World Health Organization wrote that in terms of tritium, 10,000 baccaratums per liter is acceptable. | |
| And so the 1,500 becquerels per liter that the Japanese were able to achieve is well below that range, meaning that as long as you trust the guidelines that were issued by the WHO, this water is well within the limits that are safe for humans and animals. | |
| However, it appears that not everyone trusts that the water is safe. | |
| Specifically, the people and the countries closest to the site of the dump. | |
| For instance, once this plan was made public, you had the Japanese National Fishermen Association come out and strongly oppose it. | |
| And then, you also had the governments of the countries in the local vicinity, Russia, South Korea, and China, all come out and express quote-unquote serious concerns about the release of this water into their oceanic backyard. | |
| Also, interestingly, while America's climate envoy, Mr. | |
| John Kerry, was visiting South Korea, he was met by these creative protesters. | |
| And the reason that they were there protesting his visit was because John Kerry was in South Korea advocating for the release of this water. | |
| Here is specifically what John Kerry said in regards to this plan by the Japanese to release the wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. | |
| The United States is confident that the government of Japan is in very full consultations with the International Atomic Energy Agency. | |
| The agency has set up a very rigorous process, and I know that Japan has weighed all the options and the effects, and they've been very transparent about the decision and the process. | |
| Now, the organization that he mentioned here in this statement, the International Atomic Energy Agency, it's a global organization that deals with the peaceful use of nuclear technology. | |
| And indeed, just as John Kerry mentioned in his statement, on the very same day that Japan announced this plan to dump this water, The director of this organization released their own statement, affirming Japan's decision, while at the same time assuring the world that the release of this water is perfectly fine. | |
| He was part of what he said, quote, "The water disposal method Japan has chosen is both technically feasible and in line with international practice, even though the large amounts of water makes it a unique and complex case." Furthermore, this director went on to mention that while this case in Japan is very high profile, in reality, releasing lightly radiated water back into the environment is a common practice for nuclear reactors around the entire world. | |
| Here's what he said, quote, "Controlled water discharges into the sea are routinely used by operational nuclear power plants in the world And to that point of his... | |
| The Japan Forward newspaper made a point to publish an article detailing how both China and South Korea released nuclear wastewater into the oceans. | |
| And then interestingly, as a part of that article, they also included an infographic showing the amounts of tritium that different power plants across the whole world are releasing into the oceans and the seas every single year. | |
| And that, I believe, is really the heart of the matter. | |
| Because while this case in Japan is unique, and maybe because of its uniqueness it has garnered a lot of attention, the reality is that nuclear power plants around the world are releasing the same, if not more, nuclear wastewater into the environment every single year. | |
| And so here's the irony. | |
| While a lot of people here in America are looking at the water that's being released into the Pacific Ocean by the Japanese and being worried about it, most people are completely unaware that over in Massachusetts you have pretty much the exact same situation playing itself out. | |
| Over there, the recently closed Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant is working to get authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in order to dump over 1.1 million gallons of water that they use to cool the nuclear fuel rods into the Cape Cod Bay. | |
| And even further than that, there was a recent article published in a local Massachusetts news outlet, which quoted an anonymous official within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who said that even before they needed to dump this 1.1 million gallons of water, the Pilgrim Nuclear Facility regularly discharged wastewater into Cape Cod Bay for decades. | |
| And furthermore, that admission was not even a scandal, because according to the FAQ page on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website, it very well confirms that federal regulations allow for wastewater discharge as long as it falls within the safety limits of existing regulations. | |
| And so what all this means in practice is that the wastewater that's being released over in Japan will probably dissipate a million times over before reaching the shores of the U.S. However, if you were genuinely worried about this nuclear wastewater over in Japan, Well, you should know that the same nuclear wastewater is being released right now, | |
| right at this moment, all over the world, including right here in the good old US of A. But everything's okay, because according to the officials who are in charge of it all, the levels of radiation in this particular wastewater is safe for both humans, animals, as well as the environment. | |
| If you'd like to go deeper into anything that we discussed in today's episode, I'll throw all my research notes down into the description box below this video for you to peruse at your own leisure. | |
| And also, I'd love to give a big shout-out to Mr. | |
| Eric Schumacher, our intrepid researcher. | |
| He helped put a lot of this research together and make sense of it all. | |
| And in fact, he dug so deep into this particular story that he now actually glows in the dark. | |
| And I'm sure that if he could, Eric would remind you to smash those like and subscribe buttons so this video, as well as this content, can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And now lastly, as I mentioned at the very top of the episode as well, we here at the Epoch Times were recently given access to tens of thousands of hours of footage from Capitol Hill related to January 6th. | |
| Basically, we were given access to over 1,700 camera angles and over 40,000 hours of video. | |
| Our team has been able to go through these videos over at an undisclosed location in order to answer some of the pressing questions which still remain unanswered about that fateful day. | |
| And just two days ago, we released our findings in an hour-long special report called the January 6th Tapes. | |
| If you'd like to check out that awesome report, I'll throw the link to it. | |
| It'll be right there at the very top of the description box below. | |
| Just click on that link and you can head on over to Epic TV and watch it right away. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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