Global Courant
BEIJING — China will ban food imports from about one-fifth of Japan’s prefectures for security reasons, China’s customs authorities said Friday, citing Japan’s moves to dump treated radioactive water into the sea.
China, the largest buyer of Japan’s seafood exports, said it will also strictly review documents for food, particularly aquatic products, from other parts of Japan, the customs authorities said in a statement.
China’s Customs Service said it would continuously strengthen detection and monitoring of radioactive substances to ensure the safety of food imported from Japan by banning food from 10 prefectures.
The move was designed to prevent the export of radioactively contaminated Japanese food to China and protect the food safety of imports from Chinese consumers, China said.
South Korea, where consumers have been buying sea salt and other products before the water is released, had previously said it would also step up monitoring of ocean and marine products from Japan. But it has not threatened a similar ban.
For weeks, China had publicly publicly opposed Japan’s decision to discharge treated water from its crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima into the sea.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, this week gave Japan the green light to begin discharging more than a million tons of water used to cool the plant’s fuel rods after it was destroyed by a 2011 tsunami.
The Chinese Customs Service said the report does not fully reflect the views of all experts involved in the assessment process, and the conclusions were not unanimously endorsed by the experts.
Japan says the water has been filtered to remove most of the radioactive elements, except for tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is difficult to separate from water. The treated water will be diluted to well below internationally approved levels of tritium before being released into the Pacific Ocean. REUTERS
China bans food imports from Japan for security reasons
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