A sad story is happening these days, there have been a number of gray whale carcasses washed ashore by the waves in San Francisco, from March 31, Chrisfield found the first gray whale carcass, in just 8 days in a row found 4 gray whale carcasses, in addition to a gray whale by the Marine Mammal Investigation Center confirmed that the ship hit the cause of death, the cause of death of several other gray whales is unknown!
Is the death of the gray whale related to Japan's discharge of nuclear wastewater?
The mysterious death of the gray whale but the cause of death is unknown, and the NOAA expert investigation has been delayed in the results, a large number of netizens left a message on the Internet, and the Japanese authorities discharged nuclear wastewater, because friends familiar with the migration of gray whales know that there is a small group of about 300 gray whales migrating route between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Coast of Japan, just close to the location of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.
How toxic is the nuclear wastewater discharged by Japan?
On April 13, 2021, the Japanese government announced that 1.25 million tons of nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant will be discharged into the Pacific Ocean, and Japanese authorities said that these nuclear wastewaters have been treated as harmlessly as possible, a large amount of radioactive material has been removed, and the details of the discharge will be formulated and approved, and it is expected to officially begin in 2 years and be discharged after 40 years.
What is the difference between nuclear wastewater and cooling water from nuclear power plants?
After Japan announced the discharge of nuclear wastewater, there are many people who wash the ground for the Japanese government, saying that it is not the cooling water of the reactor core, and the global nuclear power plants are not directly discharged cooling water? But in fact, the difference between the two can be large, because the cooling water is the cooling water that re-enters the circuit after the steam in the steam in the steam turbine is worked in the second or third circuit, and the cooling water that re-enters the circuit is isolated from the inside of the nuclear power plant, and there is no nuclear radiation inside the nuclear reactor at all.
The nuclear wastewater problem of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was serious, and when the 311 earthquake of that year, the cooling pump power supply was cut off, and the emergency diesel unit power supply set up underground was started, and the result was flooded by a tsunami, and the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which lost the cooling circulating water, exploded, and the problem was very serious (second only to the severity of Chernobyl). After that, due to the lack of timely treatment, the core melted and fell into the containment shell, and then the cement cladding was dropped, which required a large amount of cooling water to take away the heat, otherwise it would melt and fall underground again, which would be a disaster!
Fukushima nuclear power plant is a light water reactor, its fuel concentration is relatively high, so the future will have a high decay power (nuclear battery is decay heat or provide decay electrons), the other is equivalent to becoming a boiling water reactor, cooling water directly in contact with the core, and the core has been melted, a large number of core materials and decay materials into the water body, so this "cooling water" must not be compared with the other cooling water, the cooling water of the nuclear power plant Fish can be caught directly under the pot, but who dares to eat the fish in this "cooling water"?
The Japanese government claims that nuclear wastewater will be finely filtered
Tokyo Electric Power Company TEPCO) said that nuclear wastewater will be treated through a complex filter chain (ALPS), which can capture 62 kinds of radioactive substances such as ruthenium, iodine, cobalt, strontium isotopes, etc., but can not capture tritium, because the isotopic properties of this hydrogen are almost the same, it is very difficult to remove tritium, so it will be diluted with water and discharged.
Of course this is the process you see, but in fact TEPCO also admits that the isotopes such as ruthenium, cobalt, and strontium, which are more dangerous than tritium, are difficult to handle, and alps treatment systems still cannot be fully filtered, but there is a large leakage ratio, and about 71 of them contain these substances in storage tanks. (But in addition to tritium, more dangerous isotopes with longer radioactive lifetimes, such as ruthenium, cobalt, strontium, and plutonium, sometimes slip through the ALPS process, something TEPCO only acknowledged in 2018.）
Ken Bussler, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography, said that "these radioactive isotopes behave differently in the ocean than tritium, they are more likely to be incorporated into the marine biological chain or seabed sediments, and will harm the ocean in the long term." ”
So wash friends, this is a report on Science, the author does not create rumors, nor do you spread rumors, you have time to see.
However, I would like to say that this nuclear wastewater has not been discharged, and it has nothing to do with the death of gray whales! Of course, the author also learned of a situation, there is gossip that the Japanese government has already discharged thousands of tons of nuclear wastewater in the Japanese sea through ships, but this matter is only rumored to have no source, and the discharge of nuclear wastewater is unlikely to cause the immediate death of marine organisms, especially the gray whales of large marine mammals, which have a strong ability to withstand radiation, but may accumulate in the body and have an impact on the next generation.
What exactly do gray whales die for?
The Associated Press reported the death of gray whales on January 21, 2019, when the total number of gray whale deaths from Mexico to Alaska's Pacific coast in January exceeded 160, and this 16-meter-long baleen whale weighing nearly 40 tons was more adaptable to the environment.
Historically, only human mass captures of gray whales have affected their numbers, so NOAA has called the gray whale deaths the UME event, while an investigation by Dr Fredrik Christiansen of Aarhus University in Denmark has shed the light on the death case.
His team tracked the migration of gray whales for a long time from 2017 to 2019, using data taken by drones to assess the health of gray whales, and found that the size of gray whales has changed greatly over the years, getting thinner and thinner year by year, and the gray whales that died off the coast of San Francisco in 20201 are also very emaciated!
Christiansen cites the Bering Sea's food supply as the culprit, with climate patterns near the Arctic Circle changing dramatically due to global warming, and upwelling in the ocean altering the range of traditional predatory areas for gray whales, which require large quantities of krill as well as other crustaceans and crustaceans as food sources.
With global warming, ecological tipping points are emerging
On January 13, 2021, the Woodwell Climate Research Center at the University of Northern Arizona published a paper in Science Advances arguing that at the current rate of warming, the Earth will reach a climatic tipping point in the next 20-30 years!
The research team conducted surveys and statistics on the world's major forests, and found that as the temperature rises, the proportion of 1/3 of the current global carbon dioxide emissions that are absorbed may fall off a cliff, because the plant's carbon dioxide absorption capacity at higher temperatures will decline sharply.
The tropical rainforests of the Amazon and Southeast Asia, which have the highest carbon content in the world, and the taigarin (northern leaf forest) in Siberia and Canada in Russia will be one of the first regions to reach this tipping point, and it is difficult to imagine the consequences of a sudden doubling of global carbon emissions, it may be the first domino, but where is the second, the third?