More than 18,000 people were killed by the huge earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast and the ensuing tsunami that struck on 11 March 2011.
But nowadays the cataclysm is mainly remembered for the way it wrecked the Fukushima nuclear plant and caused “the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl”, said Stephen Stapczynski on Bloomberg (New York). And ever since that terrible accident, plant operator Tepco has been pumping water into the site to cool the reactors’ fuel rods, contaminating some 130,000 litres every day in doing so.
‘Difficult to justify’
Over the past 12 years, that water has been processed and stored in about 1,000 huge tanks. Those tanks are now almost full, and the Japanese government’s plan for the next step to take is a profoundly controversial one: to the fury of neighbouring countries, it wants to release a million metric tons of this treated radioactive water – “enough to fill 500 Olympic-size swimming pools” – into the Pacific Ocean.
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Tokyo insists that the filtration process the water has undergone means it’s free of most radionuclides – elements that emit radiation, said Sara Hussein in The Jakarta Post. It insists the water is no different to that regularly released by nuclear plants elsewhere, a conclusion endorsed by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Even so, this plan is “difficult to justify”, said The Kyunghyang Shinmun (Seoul). The processing of the water doesn’t remove tritium, a form of hydrogen that can be carcinogenic at high levels, and there have been no signs of the IAEA pushing for less risky alternatives.
‘Beijing has some nerve’
No wonder countries such as China and many Pacific islands are fiercely opposed to the plan, as are 41% of the Japanese people and almost everyone in the fishing industry. China has even banned food imports from affected Japanese regions on safety grounds.
Beijing has some nerve, said Philipp Mattheis in Der Standard (Vienna). China itself already dumps far more “radioactive water” into the sea than Fukushima is scheduled to do – Chinese reactors are releasing up to 6.5 times the annual amount of tritium forecast – and it’s working flat out to build another 150 reactors over the next 15 years.
It is also the case that the amount of tritium destined for discharge into the sea under the proposal has been judged to be well beneath the safety level required by regulators for nuclear waste discharge, or by the World Health Organisation for drinking water, said Mainichi Shimbun (Tokyo). But be that as it may, with Fukushima’s water tanks about to reach capacity early next year, Tokyo will have its work cut out selling its plan and winning over its many enraged and vocal critics.
