Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Wording decontamination process

The announcement of France Areva procurement to TEPCO of a water decontamination process installation in the news this morning is a typical case of technical wording confusion. You get drown into it just when you want to float. Let's try and do the cleaning by checking first whether Japanese is the culprit.

The process first, that of water decontamination, is referred to depending on your news source as the generic 水処理 that keeps the "contamination" word out of scope. The scum comes with a vengeance, and question marks, with a choice of  汚染水浄化, or a plain 汚染水処理. You can even bump into a 汚水処理 that gets rid of the dirty 染 altogether. As for plants 工場, or installations/facilities 施設 , but also process or device 装置, you now can choose among these solutions, still guessing how they are calling this stuff in-situ.

水処理施設
汚染水浄化装置
汚水処理施設

I's about cleaning dirty water, which comes down to effluent treatment 水処理 or 水浄化.

And getting rid of the scum is :

除染
浄化
or again the generic  処理

The principle or concept used is that of co-precipitation or 共沈法 defined as :

「共沈法」と呼ばれる手法で、汚染水に特定の化学物質を入れて放射性物質を沈殿させた後、沈殿物だけ除去する方法。1時間で50トンの汚染水を浄化する能力がある設備を取り付け、浄化後の水は汚染の程度が千~1万分の1になるという。

The company has "radioactive effluent treatment specialists" (a little French maybe "spécialistes du traitement des effluents radioactifs") who are probably 放射能汚染水処理専門家, but more probably  汚染水処理専門家 for the sake to forget the dreaded 放射能 also referred to and mixed with 放射線.

The competence is based on experience with soil decontamination, that is 土壌除染.

Such installation comes down to the category of RLETF, that is, Radioactive Liquid Effluent Treatment Facility. All this should facilitate the query of more technical information in the three languages with Wikipedia. I am looking for audio/video resources (technical presentations, conferences, etc.) to munch (read "shadow") on these subjects. If  any pointers, please write a comment.

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