Controversy over Japan’s plans to release treated wastewater in the Pacific

CONTROVERSY is growing over an “unjust” plan to release more than a million tonnes of treated wastewater on Australia’s doorstep — within months.

In 2011, Japan was rocked by the Fukushima nuclear disaster – the worst of its kind since Chernobyl in 1986.

Responders scrambled to stop damaged reactors at Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear plant from overheating by pumping massive amounts of water through them, with the contaminated water then being stored in massive tanks at the site.

But now, Japan has run out of space, and in 2021, announced plans to release 1.3 million tonnes of the wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.

The water would be treated before being released over a period of several decades, with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga saying at the time it was “a realistic solution”.

“We will do our utmost to keep the water far above safety standards,” he vowed.

In the almost two years since, Japan has been working out the finer details of the release, which is now due to begin as soon as the northern hemisphere’s spring or summer — Australia’s autumn or winter.

And some countries across the Pacific are furious.

Writing for

The Guardian

soon after the plan was first announced, youth advocates from the region Joey Tau and Talei Luscia Mangioni described it as an “unjust act”.

“To Pacific peoples, who have carried the disproportionate human cost of nuclearism in our region, this is yet another act of catastrophic and irreversible trans-boundary harm that our region has not consented to,” they wrote.

They were referring to the long history of the Pacific being used as the world’s nuclear waste dumping ground, with hundreds of nuclear tests being carried out across the region in the decades since the World War II.