TOKYO: Japan will begin draining cooling water from the devastated Fukushima plant on Thursday, 12 years after one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
The fishermen and protests from China are also there after the announcement, and China has already banned food shipments from several Japanese prefectures.
Japan insists it is safe to gradually release water from more than 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools that have accumulated at the stricken nuclear power plant into the sea, a view supported by the UN atomic agency.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced the start date on Tuesday, a day after meeting with fishing industry representatives who are opposed “unless weather and sea conditions prevent it”.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was shut down by a massive earthquake and tsunami that killed about 18,000 people in March 2011, with three of its reactors collapsing.
Since then, operator TEPCO has collected 1.34 million tons of water used to cool the remains of the still highly radioactive reactors, mixed with groundwater and rain that seeped in.
TEPCO says the water has been diluted and filtered to remove all radioactive substances except tritium, whose levels are well below dangerous levels.
“Tritium has been released (by nuclear power plants) for decades with no apparent harmful effects on the environment or health,” Tony Hooker, a nuclear expert at the University of Adelaide, told the agency.
This water will now be released into the ocean off Japan’s northeastern coast at a maximum rate of 500,000 liters (132,000 US gallons) per day.
Environmental pressure group Greenpeace said the filtration process was flawed and that “immense” amounts of radioactive material would be dispersed into the sea in the coming decades.
Japan has “opted for a false solution – a decade of deliberate radioactive pollution of the marine environment – at a time when the world’s oceans are already facing enormous stress and pressure,” Greenpeace said on Tuesday.
The UN nuclear watchdog said in July that the leak would have a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment”.
Many South Koreans are alarmed at the prospect of the release, holding demonstrations and even stocking up on sea salt over contamination fears.
But President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government, which is taking political risks at home, has sought to improve long-frosty relations with Japan and has not objected to the plan.
Yoon held the first-ever trilateral summit with Kishida and US President Joe Biden at Camp David last week, a trio united by concerns about China and North Korea.
China has accused Japan of treating the ocean like a “sewer”, banning food imports from 10 Japanese prefectures before the release and imposing strict radiation controls.
Hong Kong, which holds a major chunk in the import of Japanese seafood has also threatened restrictions alarming people associated with the fishing trade.
“Nothing from releasing the water is beneficial to us,” third-generation fisherman Haruo Ono, 71, whose brother was killed in 2011, told a news agency in Shinchimachi, 60 kilometers (40 miles) north of the nuclear plant.
James Brady of risk consultancy Teneo stated that while China’s security concerns may be genuine, in view of geopolitics and economic rivalry it is a harsh response.
“The multifaceted nature of the Fukushima effluent issue is a pretty useful issue for Beijing,” Brady told the news agency.
Beijing can “exercise some degree of economic pressure on the trade axis, exacerbate internal domestic political conflicts on this issue in Japan … and even potentially exert pressure to improve diplomatic relations between Seoul and Tokyo.”
Naoya Sekiya of the University of Tokyo conducted a survey last year that found 90 per cent of people in China and South Korea thought food from Fukushima was “very dangerous” or “somewhat dangerous.”
“I think it is because Japan did not properly diffuse such concerns,” Sekiya told the news agency.
“(We must) give a proper and sufficient explanation.”
