Japan began discharging water from its damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea on Thursday, despite concerns from its fishermen and strong opposition from Beijing, which immediately tightened its trade restrictions vis-à-vis Tokyo.
Beijing on Thursday denounced Tokyo’s “selfish and irresponsible” action and suspended all imports of Japanese seafood, citing “food safety”. Japan immediately demanded an immediate end to this suspension.
In July, China had already banned the import of food from ten Japanese counties, including Fukushima, and Hong Kong and Macau took similar measures earlier this week. China was last year the first export market for Japanese fishing.
The discharge into the Pacific Ocean of water from Fukushima was initiated shortly after 1:00 p.m. Japanese time (04:00 GMT) by Tepco, the operator of the plant.
This first spill is expected to last about 17 days and involve some 7,800 m3 of water containing tritium, a radioactive substance that is only dangerous in highly concentrated doses.
Tepco plans three other spills by the end of March, for equivalent volumes.
In total, Japan plans to evacuate more than 1.3 million m3 of wastewater stored so far at the Fukushima Daiichi plant site, from rainwater, groundwater and necessary injections to cool the reactor cores that went into meltdown after the March 2011 tsunami that devastated the northeast coast of the country.
This process will be very gradual — it should last until the 2050s — and the tritiated water content in daily sea discharges will not exceed 500 m3.
The water has been filtered beforehand to remove most of its radioactive substances, with the exception of tritium.
Japan plans to discharge this water with a significant dilution beforehand, so that its level of radioactivity does not exceed 1,500 becquerels (Bq) per liter.
This level is 40 times lower than the Japanese national standard for tritiated water aligned with the international standard (60,000 Bq/litre), and it is also approximately seven times lower than the ceiling established by the World Health Organization (WHO ) for drinking water (10,000 Bq/litre).
The concentration of tritium in the water that Japan has started to discharge is “well below the operational limit of 1,500 becquerels per litre”, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement on Thursday. who oversees the operation.
IAEA experts present in Fukushima took samples of the water prepared for the first spill and analyzed them independently, said the UN body.
The IAEA gave the green light to the Japanese project in July, judging its radiological impact “negligible on the population and the environment”.
But many see things differently. Japanese fishermen in particular fear an impact on the image and sales of their products, which is already being felt with the Chinese restrictions adopted in July.
Discharging tritiated water into the sea is, however, a common practice in the nuclear industry worldwide, and the annual level of radioactivity from such releases from Chinese nuclear power plants is far higher than expected at Fukushima Daiichi, Tokyo noted. .
Analysts say Beijing’s hardline stance on Fukushima water is most likely also linked to already strained Sino-Japanese relations over many economic and geopolitical issues.
Unsurprisingly, North Korea also demanded on Thursday the immediate cessation of releases from Japan, “dangerous” according to it.
Other governments of Asia-Pacific countries with better relations with Japan, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Australia, have expressed confidence in the safety of the IAEA-controlled release process.
Protests against the rejection are taking place in South Korea, however. More than 10 people were arrested in Seoul on Thursday for trying to enter the Japanese embassy, local police told AFP.
In Japan, a sign of a certain resignation of the population on the subject, a protest rally Thursday morning near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant brought together only nine people, AFP noted on the spot.
“A good policy would be not to do anything that is potentially dangerous, under the precautionary principle,” protester Ruiko Muto, 70, who lives in Fukushima prefecture, told AFP.
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24/08/2023 17:15:29 – Namie (Japanese) (AFP) © 2023 AFP