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The government of Japan has reportedly decided to release more than 1 million tons of contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea, putting it on a collision course with local fishermen who say the move will destroy their industry.
Media reports said work to release the water, which is stored in more than 1,000 tanks, would begin in 2022 at the earliest and take decades to complete.
An official decision could come by the end of the month, the Kyodo news agency said, ending years of debate over what to do with the water, with other options including evaporation or building more storage tanks elsewhere.
However, the government has long indicated that it prefers the option of releasing it in the near Pacific, despite opposition from local fishermen who say it will undo years of work to rebuild the reputation of their industry since the plant was destroyed. by a huge tsunami in March 2011.
In response, the government has said it will promote Fukushima products and address concerns among fishermen that consumers will avoid their shellfish once the water is released.
Environmental groups also oppose the move, while neighboring South Korea, which still bans imports of seafood from the region, has repeatedly expressed concern, claiming that discharging the water poses a “serious threat” to the marine environment.
The pressure to decide the fate of the water has been mounting as storage space at the nuclear plant site runs out, and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), estimates that all available tanks will be full for summer 2022.
Until last month, 1.23 million tons of water, which is contaminated when mixed with the water used to prevent the three cores of the damaged reactors from melting, were stored in 1,044 tanks, and the amount of wastewater increased at 170 tons per day.
Tepco’s Advanced Liquid Processing System removes highly radioactive substances from water, but the system cannot filter out tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that nuclear power plants routinely dilute and dump along with water into the ocean.
A panel of experts advising the government said earlier this year that releasing the water was one of the “most realistic options.”
Experts say that tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, is only harmful to humans in very large doses, while the International Atomic Energy Agency says it is possible to dilute filtered sewage with seawater before it is released. in the ocean.
The Fukushima Daiichi water will be diluted inside the plant before it is released so that it is 40 times less concentrated, and the whole process will take 30 years, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.
Hiroshi Kishi, president of a national federation of fishing cooperatives, voiced his opposition to the measure in a meeting with the chief cabinet secretary, Katsunobu Kato, this week.
Kato told reporters that a decision on water “should be made quickly” to avoid further delays in decommissioning the plant, a complex and expensive operation expected to take around 40 years.
