East Asia News & Politics Thread: China, South Korea, Japan...

I don't know much about radioactive materials or waste, but how much Sv or waste are we talking about? I think the crux of the issue is the "how much". If the content of it is so small and can be ignored, it shouldn't be an issue unless it could cause long term disease or something.

Since I don't know enough about radioactivity and pull out relevant sources, I'm going to stay out of that topic.

In another topic, S. Korea has been hit with a really long session of monsoon. I can't say for sure, but I have a feeling that this too is a worrying symptom of climate change.

Basically, there are two kinds of radioactive contaminant we might talk about:

The first is heavy radionuclides, like caesium-137 and strontium-90. These are the byproducts produced by the fission of the plant's fuel, and are the kind of stuff you'd think of when you hear "radioactive materials". Because they're big, they're simple enough to filter out, and the water that's due to be released to the ocean is supposed to be 100% clean of these contaminants.

YMMV on whether to trust the Japanese government and TEPCO on that; but both the IAEA and the ROK government have approved the final Japanese report, and the treatment of radionuclide-contaminated water via reverse osmosis is generally a pretty mature process that we've developed over decades.

The second is tritium. So, we all know hydrogen, right? Smallest, most abundant element in the universe; the building block of water? Well, tritium is kind of hydrogen's unstable weirdo cousin. It's produced through a bunch of processes, including by having the regular hydrogen atoms in water zapped by neutron radiation from a decaying or fissioning radioactive material — something that happened quite a bit during the Fukushima disaster.

Tritium is an unstable isotope, so over time, it decays into helium-3. This reaction emits weakly ionising beta radiation (in other words, an electron). The electron isn't powerful enough to penetrate the human skin, so tritium is generally harmless outside your body — which is why we can use it for things like glow-in-the-dark watch faces.

What about inside your body? We're not completely sure. There are studies that argue that the weak beta radiation does very little damage to the cells, as well as ones that argue the opposite (because the weak electron gets to expend all its energy on ionising the cells it does hit). But we don't really have the data to say how much tritium you'd need to ingest to start doing real damage to your body — because, well, we haven't really had a large number of people ingest harmful amounts of tritium (which is probably a lot).

There's another important thing, though: because tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, it bonds right back with oxygen to create, well, water. Weird water, but water nonetheless. Water is notoriously difficult to separate from water, which makes removing the tritium from Fukushima water a non-starter. But it also means that it doesn't stay in your body for very long before you sweat it out or go to the bathroom (drinking more regular water helps). It's not really going to build up in your body the way, say, mercury builds up in fish via bioaccumulation.

Basically every nuclear power plant in the world (including South Korean ones!) produce and release tritiated water as part of their normal operations. Once in the ocean, the water mixes with regular water and dilutes off to every corner of the globe. If you don't trust the Japanese government's claims on the content, if you think that the Yoon admin is bending over backwards for this, then sure, feel free to do so — but the processes involved are fairly mature and well-understood, at least in principle.

There is also the fact that water that has tritium in it is heavier then normal water, very slightly so but still heavier.

While we cant industrially seperate it... it does a decent enough job separating itself once it hits the ocean.

...

By slowly working it's way to the bottom and staying there until it decays.

It's why when we do want tritium or deuterium filled water for various reasons (we mostly want deuterium filled, but the property applies to both)... we have to go pump it out of the deep parts.

Which generaly speaking are not parts of the ocean we interact with.

Edited by Imca on Jul 10th 2023 at 7:56:01 AM

From what I know, one important limiting thing about tritium is that it doesn't stay in the body for long - unlike strontium-90 which tends to build in bones and caesium-137 which doesn't need to enter in the first place to be a threat.

Granted, my issue with all these complaints is that I don't think we have much evidence that the quantities released and diluted here have any medical significance beyond "people are afraid of it".

Well, that or build stupid powerful centrifuges.

Two very excellent videos regarding China and its failure in soft power compare to its neighbor Japan and SK. One of them talk about how Chinese censorship significantly hamper what little culture products people like from China, and one delve into the sheer amount of human rights atrocities China committed that led to the lack of effectiveness of the soft power in the first place.

They don't need to grow all their talent in-house, to be fair. A fair few of China's top pop stars were minted by the K-Pop industry (Jackson GOT7 and Victoria f(x) come to mind), and the sheer size of the Chinese market is enough to attract artists from elsewhere in the Sinosphere (like Pan Mei-chen and Stefanie Sun) or even outside of it (like Dimash). Not to mention the size of the domestic market means you could make it big and crank out multiple Gangnam Style-tier memetic Ear Worm megahits without ever penetrating the Anglosphere.

The first video is excellent; the second I feel is too anchored to traditional big boi hard-power geopolitics talking points to handle the subject of culture/soft power with the care it deserves. There are other countries like India and Turkey whose media and diplomatic projects have huge followings outside the Anglosphere — if you really want to assess whether these soft-power outreaches are doing their job, you gotta at least talk to the people who actually consume them.

The only thing China seems to making headway in terms of soft power as of late is Webtoons and Manhua, and even that tends to get mocked for being the same Spirit Cultivation Genre stories over and over (While technically true, its kinda hard to really deviate from the power structure of such stories and all about the execution. Shidai Man Wang's I Am An Evil God/Way to be an Evil Emperor is probably my favorite webtoon ever, even above Korean ones like Solo Leveling and has some of the best Comic art I've ever seen.)

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Jul 11th 2023 at 9:05:11 AM

In my perception it seems Hoyoverse (Genshin, Honkai etc) and the Arknights developer are the only Chinese creators that have managed to penetrate and get any attention in Western nerdy pop culture circles. I commend their success and outreach, but deep down I do not like the idea of gacha games piggybacking on pre-existing anime subcultures being largely the only Chinese media young Westerners can name - it would honestly be suffocating as hell.

The winds are changing though, at least in terms of AAA video games, as a lot of Recent games announced from Chinese studios are very promising to break out into the mainstream (Black Myth: Wukong being the most well known one, with Lost Soul Aside being another).

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Jul 11th 2023 at 9:26:31 AM

Well, before gacha games there was Dynasty Warriors, but that's more of a property that gets people interested in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Isn't the Dynasty Warriors series made by a Japanese company, though?

Yeah, it may be based on a Chinese story, but its not made in China itself.

It is an interesting question when talking about such nebulous things as soft power. Did Metro 2033 games further Russian or Ukrainian soft power?

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jul 12th 2023 at 10:31:58 PM

I don't think individual works really do much. Even the media juggernaut that's BTS takes advantage of decades of previously released Korean Wave works.

Of course, but I mean this: when Ridley Scott directs Napoleon, does he add to French soft power, or only English and American one?

Depends on the angle I guess. I don’t think an American-directed biopic on, say, Mao Zedong would do much to paint modern China in a positive light.

The Three Kindgdoms are far enough in the past that they have an air of romanticism and epicness to them at least.

Edited by Lyendith on Jul 13th 2023 at 6:59:32 PM

So Dynasty Warriors are more like War and Peace (1956) in this way.

(But I would also say, when someone claims Hollywood grants the USA soft power, they usually are not reffering only to the films that depict America in a good light).

Edited by Smeagol17 on Jul 13th 2023 at 8:08:22 PM

In the Republic of Korea, heavy rains have caused a lot of damage. 33 people have died, and 10 people are missing. In Cheongju, 10 vehicles including a bus got trapped in a flooded underpass, where 7 people were found dead and 5 more are still missing. Also in Cheongju city, the rains caused a small landslide which caused a ''Mugunghwa-ho'' passenger train to derail. Thankfully, the train was returning to the depot with only the driver on board, and so the driver was the only one injured.]] All trains except the high-speed KTX are stopped because of the weather.

Divers find an oarfish off the coast of Taiwan, with Japanese folklore considering them a harbinger of earthquakes.

A really excellent article about sexism and gender friction between Korean men and women lead to the decline of birth rate and the Korean government complete failure to address these issues. This really tract with another article I read that said some Korean elementary schools in rural areas are struggle to fill them with children, leading to some school only has 1 student opening day.

Edited by shatterstar on Jul 20th 2023 at 11:11:53 AM

Wow. I know I shouldn't be amazed, but the examples of sexism in the first article were ... oy.

You know it is bad when Incel ideology catapulted the president into office while radical feminism ideology is very popular among Korean women. As well as fertilization offices refused go give sperm to single women.