Global Courant
In one of the remaining steps before Japan decides to dump more than a million tons of treated radioactive water from its Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean, the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday said the government’s plan met the agency’s safety standards.
The nuclear authority’s final report concluded that the treated water would have “a negligible radiological impact on humans and the environment” once released.
Japan’s plan has sparked controversy both at home and abroad, as government officials in China and many residents of South Korea have protested the release as unsafe.
Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said if Japan goes ahead with the planned release, the IAEA will also open a station in Fukushima to continue assessing the safety of the water “for decades to come”.
Japan announced its proposal to release the water from the Fukushima plant in 2019 and approved the plan two years later. Since then, an IAEA task force has conducted several assessments of the country’s progress in treating the water.
For years, Tepco, the power company that operated the plant and now oversees its decommissioning, said the treatment of the water — sending it through a powerful filtration system to remove most of the radioactive material — makes it safe to release. .
Critics say the Japanese government and Tepco have not been transparent enough about the processing process or the planned release.
Wu Jianghao, China’s ambassador to Japan, said in a press conference on Tuesday that “Japan should halt the plan to discharge the water into the sea, but should seriously consult with the international community and consider a scientific, safe, transparent and convincing response .” He added that Japan made its decision without “sufficient consultation”.
Even within Japan, opinions are divided. In a poll published over the weekend by JNN, a Japanese television network, 45 percent of respondents supported the plan, while 40 percent said they were against.
“So many good scientists believe that the data presented so far are incomplete,” said Azby Brown, principal investigator at SafeCastan independent radiation control group.
Mr Brown said the health risk from the released water will be “very low and thousands of times lower than daily exposure” to radiation. “But the whole process has not been transparent enough,” he said. “It hasn’t been inclusive and they haven’t been thorough.”
Tokyo has repeatedly assured that its water is safe enough to be released into the ocean, saying filtration has removed most of the isotopes, although it contains traces of tritium, an isotope that is difficult to separate from water, as well as small traces of carbon-14 and iodine-129, according to Mr. Brown.
Speaking with Mr Grossi, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan said the nation “would not approve a release that could have a negative impact on people in Japan and the world and the environment.” He added that the government would “continue to thoroughly explain inside and outside Japan” why the treated water would be discharged into the sea, “based on scientific grounds with high transparency”.
Mr Kishida’s chief of staff, Hirokazu Matsuno, said on Tuesday that the discharge was still on track for this summer after the government reviewed security measures and took into account “rumor damage” in other countries.
How to respond to the discharge of Fukushima water has become a highly polarizing issue in South Korea, threatening the fragile rapprochement between Seoul and Tokyo that began earlier this year.
Recent surveys showed that 80 to 85 percent of South Koreans opposed Japan’s plan to dump Fukushima’s water into the Pacific Ocean and were concerned about the impact it would have on seafood and the marine environment.
Mr Grossi will visit Seoul on Friday to discuss rising concerns in South Korea, where salt prices have risen in recent weeks after people began hoarding sea salt from salt ponds on the country’s west coast ahead of the spill.
Park Gwangon, a leader of the South Korean opposition Democratic Party, expressed fears among South Koreans that the IAEA’s security review would be “political rather than scientific” and “tailor-made for Japan”.
The South Korean government has tried to allay fears among its residents by promising to step up efforts to monitor seawater, fisheries and natural salt farms for any increase in radioactive substances.
Government officials reassured the public on Monday that South Korea’s ban on seafood from the waters off Fukushima — first imposed after the 2011 disaster — will remain in place even after Japan begins discharging the treated water.
Mr Grossi said the water release method used in Japan has a “proven track record” in many other countries, including China, South Korea and the United States. In the current plan, the water would be controlled and gradually drained over several decades.
The water that Japan wants to discharge into the Pacific Ocean was mainly used to cool damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Japan says it must release the water currently stored before the plant runs out of storage space.
Hisako Ueno contributed to this report.
