Fukushima water to be released to ocean contains ‘naturally occurring’ nuclear byproduct

The water to be released from a Fukushima nuclear plant contains the already “naturally occurring” byproduct tritium, according to Centre for Radiation Research Director Tony Hooker. “First of all, the Japanese have been collecting the water … and it does contain a lot of radio-nuclides as we call them,” he told Sky News Australia. “The Japanese are cleaning up that water they’re diluting it and then sending it out to sea. “So we’re left with tritium, tritium is the byproduct of a nuclear reaction, we can actually see tritium naturally occurring in our sea and also in the atmosphere, it’s a weak beta emitter, it has a very short biological half-life of around ten days.”