After much back and forth, Japan gets the green light: Around one million tons of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant can be disposed of in the Pacific over a period of several years. The water is largely freed from radioactivity and is safe, they say. Environmentalists are dismayed.
In Japan, the responsible regulatory authority has given its approval for the controversial plan to discharge more than a million tons of treated water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the government will ensure the safety of the treated water and the “reliability and transparency of the process.”
Since the core meltdown triggered by a tsunami in 2011, 1.29 million tons of treated water have already accumulated in the plant, and the storage capacity for it is almost exhausted. The operator Tepco plans to pump the water into the Pacific over several years from spring 2023. This includes water that was needed to cool the nuclear facility after the nuclear accident, but also rainwater and groundwater from the radioactive site. Most of the radioactivity is therefore filtered out of the water using a system of pumps and filters; dumping in the sea is safe, says a spokesman.
The plan was passed by the government and approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). According to them, the project corresponds to the disposal of waste water in other nuclear plants. Japan’s neighboring countries and environmental protection organizations such as Greenpeace, on the other hand, have criticized the plan for environmental and safety reasons. Japan’s fishing industry is also up in arms against the proposal, which it believes threatens to destroy consumer confidence in domestic fish, which had been painstakingly restored after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The Chinese government reiterated its criticism. The plan “concerns the global marine environment and the public health of the Pacific Rim, and is by no means a private matter of Japan,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said. He threatened that Japan would pay its price if it insisted on “putting its own interests ahead of the international public interest.”
