Japan’s fishing industry in trouble as govt plans to release contaminated Fukushima water into sea

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

Japan government has announced that it will release more than one million tonnes of contaminated water from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power station back into the sea.

The decision has drawn swift condemnation from China, South Korea and environmental groups and is likely to destroy the fishing industry.

The work to release the water will begin in about two years, the government said, and is expected to take decades.

Tokyo Electric Power, which operates the plant, will handle the process.

“On the premise of strict compliance with regulatory standards that have been established, we select oceanic release,” the government said in a statement after relevant ministers formalised the decision.

The water, equivalent to about 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools, has been treated but needs to be filtered again to remove harmful isotopes. It will also be diluted to meet international standards before any release into the ocean.

“The treated water is an unavoidable task to decommission the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant and reconstruct the Fukushima area,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said of the process.

In a statement, China’s foreign ministry called the move “extremely irresponsible” and said it reserved the right to take further action.

South Korea’s government said the plan was “totally unacceptable” and that it would lodge a formal complaint with Japan.

At a demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride said some protesters considered the move “nuclear terrorism”.

The water currently contains significant amounts of harmful isotopes despite years of treatment, according to TEPCO. The company plans further filtration to leave only tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is hard to separate from water.

A Scientific American article reported in 2014 that when ingested tritium can raise cancer risks, while some experts are worried about other contaminants.
“The Japanese government has once again failed the people of Fukushima,” Kazue Suzuki, a climate change and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, said in a statement. “The government has taken the wholly unjustified decision to deliberately contaminate the Pacific Ocean with radioactive wastes. Rather than using the best available technology to minimize radiation hazards by storing and processing the water over the longer term, they have opted for the cheapest option.”

On Monday, the environmental group said it had gathered 183,754 signatures from Japan and South Korea in a petition against the plan.

Greenpeace International’s Executive Director Jennifer Morgan said the planned discharge would also be a violation of Japan’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and that the move would be “strongly resisted” in the months ahead.