The environmental group claims that the 1.23 million metric tons of water stored at the plant – in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster – contained “dangerous” levels of radioactive isotopes carbon-14 and other “dangerous” radionuclides. There will be “serious long-term consequences for communities and the environment.”
Thousands of tons of water have been flooded over the years to cool the fuel cores of the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant operator operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Once used, the water is put into storage.
But nine years after Japan’s worst nuclear disaster, storage space is running out, and the government is still deciding what to do with the water.
On Friday, the Japanese government postponed a decision on what to do with the water. At the task force meeting, Industry Minister Hiroshi Kaziyama said: “To avoid delays in the Fukushima Daiichi banknote ban process, we need to decide how to deal with the increasingly processed water every day,” but acknowledged that officials need to address “voices of concern”.
In a report released Friday, Greenpeace said that in addition to the radioactive isotope tritium in water, the radioactive isotope contains carbon-14, which “contributes greatly to the amount of mass human radiation and has the potential to damage human DNA.”
Shaun Bernie, author of the report and a senior nuclear expert with Greenpeace Germany, told CNN that the tank could hold as much as 63.6GBq (gigabytes) of carbon-14.
“With this, the potential for genetic damage will be dangerous along with other radionuclides that have been in the water for thousands of years. There is one more reason to abandon these plans,” Bernie said in a statement.
The concentration of carbon-14 contained in the water measured in the water tank is about 2 to 220 barrels, as measured in the water tank, TEPCO spokesman Rayunosuke Takanori told CNN in a statement.
“Even if 2 liters of water is drunk continuously every day, the annual exposure is about 0.001 to 0.11 millisevarts, which is not a level that affects health,” Technori said.
It is believed that the safety of health, environment and fisheries products in the surrounding area will be ensured by taking steps to strictly comply with the legal requirements.
Ternipoco will perform secondary treatments to “meet regulatory standards for discharges other than tritium,” Technori said, and the radioactive material, including carbon-14, will be minimized as much as possible.
Claire Corkill, a nuclear materials reader at the University of Sheffield in the UK who was not involved in the study, told CNN that tritium has been released into the sea in countries around the world and on numerous occasions, and that the process has had “little effect” on organisms. ”
She told CNN that a recent TAPCO analysis of the water showed that the radiation in the tank was “higher than expected” and indicated the presence of carbon-14 or a beta-emitting radioisotope, technetium-99 – but the results did not yet show how much carbon-14 was in the water. Is.
“Any radioactive discharge poses some environmental and health hazard,” Francis Lawns, a professor of radiochemistry at the University of Manchester, told CNN. “A horrible lot really depends on how much will be released.”
“If it’s (Carbon-14) there and it’s relatively there, yes, there’s probably a risk,” said Levins, who is not involved with the Greenpeace study. “People have been dissolving carbon-14 into the ocean for many years. Does it all come down to how much is there, how much is dispersed, does it enter the seafood chains and find a way for people to go back?”
Korkhil said that while the Japanese government should be sure of how much carbon-14 is in the tank before releasing water into the sea, scientific mingling suggests that isotope levels are within the limits the government considers safe.
“They have a very accurate estimate of how much carbon-14 it is, which puts it below Japanese legal limits for radioactive emissions into the ocean.”
Disposing of contaminated water will not be an easy task – although in principle water can be transferred to a different location in the prefecture, or converted to cement, both options come with their own environmental concerns, Korchel added. “There’s really no better solution for this kind of stuff,” he said.
However, Korkhil told CNN that contaminated water is becoming a matter of concern: if the Japanese government does not deal with contaminated water, it will contain “millions of cubic meters of water or radioactive all sitting at the Fukushima site,” she said.
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