“Since the tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, technicians have had to cool the damaged reactor with water. That water is contaminated by different elements, some of which are radioactive, and has been stored in large containers. They already number more than a thousand, storing more than a million tons of water, and since there is no room for more, Japan has decided to filter it and dump it into the sea. The problem is that this system fails to remove tritium, a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen that is radioactive for 12.33 years.” This is how Sebastián Vera, one of the founding partners and current technical director of Water Challenge, explains the controversy between the country of the Rising Sun and China and South Korea, which have raised an uproar and prohibited the importation of Japanese fish.
The authorities in Fukushima and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) affirm that the spill does not pose any danger and that the tritium concentration is within safety parameters, but Vera points out that the matter has a trick: «The only thing that What they are doing to reach those levels is to dilute the polluted water with more seawater and then dump it.” The engineer points out that for this discharge to be safe and to be absorbed by nature without problem, it would have to be limited to a maximum of 50 cubic meters per week: “In other words, it would take 416 years to release all the stored water” . And Fukushima, which started the process last Thursday, will do so in seven and a half years. “Of course it will contaminate and the flora and fauna will absorb it,” says the scientist.
Vera, however, assures that her company has developed a technology that would make it possible to completely remove the radioactive tritium from pure water in just over a year. “There are two ways to decontaminate water. The first, the one that has been used for centuries, is evaporation. The problem is that it consumes a lot of energy, about a hundred kilowatts for every cubic meter. The other is filtration (osmosis). It is much cheaper because it only requires 3.5 kilowatts, but the performance only reaches 50%. We have patented the ASE&C system that merges evaporation and crystallization into a single, continuous, optimized, adiabatic and sonic process. It requires about 20 kilowatts per cubic meter and separates the pure water from the dry solids,” she explains.
Among the latter would be tritium, which is one of the most expensive substances on the planet. It is trading around $30,000 a gram and Fukushima could sell it. “We did a pilot with the CSIC and it worked,” says Vera. So why hasn’t Water Challenge submitted a proposal to clean up the polluted water from the plant? “We prepared one for the call for ideas that was made, but we had to go in consortium with a nuclear company and another water treatment company and we had disagreements because the big ones always want to take advantage of the small ones and they wanted to take over our technology,” he says. vera. The problem, therefore, was not in Japan but among the Spanish partners themselves.
Another problem could be economic. «Fukushima is going to spend about 27 million euros in the process of dumping the contaminated water. That’s nothing, “says Vera. With the Water Challenge system, the bill would amount to between 100 and 150 million euros. “Of course you have to take into account the cost of starting a conflict with neighboring countries and with the Japanese themselves, who oppose the plan,” says the technical director.
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