The Japanese government has announced that contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant will be released into the ocean “in about two years”
The announcement came on Tuesday despite calls from China, South Korea and environmental activists who urging against the move.
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Japan said the Fukushima plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), will treat and dilute the water before pumping it out into the Pacific Ocean. There are more than a million metric tons of radioactive water from the wrecked plant.
RT reports: Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced the move in Tokyo on Tuesday morning local time. He had previously called the release “unavoidable,” given the amount of accumulated water over the past decade.
The Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in the Fukushima prefecture suffered a meltdown after being struck by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a 15-meter tsunami in March 2011. It was the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the USSR.
The wastewater contaminated with tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen – that has since accumulated inside the complex will be diluted and released into the ocean, the Japanese national broadcaster NHK reported on Tuesday, citing government officials.
Earlier this week, China warned Japan that “the international community is watching” and called on Tokyo to “fulfil [its] international responsibilities” when it came to the environment.
A spokesman for the South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Monday that releasing the water would “directly and indirectly affect the safety of the people and the neighboring environment” and that it would be “difficult to accept” if Japan makes the decision without “sufficient consultation” with its neighbors.
The accumulated tritiated water is a byproduct of the authorities attempting to cool the melted nuclear fuel of the plant’s reactor core over the past 10 years. A 2013 Japanese government study concluded that there is no “no practical separation technology on an industrial scale” to treat the wastewater, and recommended “controlled environmental release” as the solution.
There are more than 1.25 million tons of the tritiated water in the storage tanks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. Its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Holdings, expects to run out of storage space as early as fall 2022. The tritiated water has already been treated in a process that removes other radioactive materials, including the highly toxic strontium and cesium, TEPCO said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not objected to Japan’s plan to release the wastewater, saying it “meets global standards” of nuclear industry practices. During a video conference with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi last month, Japanese Industry Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama asked the agency to conduct “a scientific and objective review” of the water disposal and “openly convey its view to the international community,” according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
Niamh Harris
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So they all want some hush money to say its ” ok ” And what people forget is that America MADE Japan go nuclear as part of their occupation operation KNOWING Japan is a hot spot for earth quakes and tidal waves They,the scientists, dont even call them tidal waves anymore but tsunamis now so it sounds like an asian invention. The fact is scientists using weather weaponry can cause them and floods and droughts all secretly and deep exploration mining can trigger them by upsetting fault lines and electromagnetic ley lines and polarities .Its very technical and very secret .
Howdy Annonymous. If you are going to come up with conspiracies, try limiting them to just one at a time. Otherwise your writing becomes nothing more than an example of Disorganized thinking. Also, the difference between a Delusion and a Theory is being able to link the theory to mankind’s knowledge of physics, human behavior, or some type of repeatable event. Disorganized thinking and Delusions are two very important “dots” that you should pay attention to. Look in the mirror and connect those two dots and speculate on a theory about yourself. But I suspect you have family members who have already raised this issue with you before. Please do not interpret this post as either sarcasm or some means of denigrating you. Intelligence, creativity, and out of the box thinking requires the mind to place flexible but disciplined limits on itself based on knowledge, experience, and facts. For decades the Russians thought the world might come to an end because of the Dzhanibekov effect (The Tennis racquet theory).
I agree, anonymous is a bit special and goes too deep into cross conspiracies, and I wonder if he is a troll to bait the mentally unstable.
“there is no “no practical separation technology on an industrial scale” to treat the wastewater, and recommended “controlled environmental release” as the solution.”
That’s not true. Nuclear powers have been extracting tritium from coolant water for years. You just super cool the water and the tritium precipitates out of the frozen coolant water. Pakistan developed the process years and years ago.
Waiting on Godzilla to stop them. #onebiglizard
Why not send it to the middle of Antarctica? It won’t get back into the oceans for millions of years. By then it will have lost the vast majority of its radioactivity.