Contaminated water heading for sea
TOKYO — Nearly a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese government has decided to release contaminated water from the destroyed plant into the sea, local media reports said on Friday, with a formal announcement expected to be made later this month.
The decision is expected to irritate neighboring countries like South Korea, which has already stepped up radiation tests of food from Japan, and further devastate the fishing industry in Fukushima that has battled against such a move for years.
The disposal of contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been a long- standing problem for Japan as it proceeds with a decades- long decommissioning project. More than one million tons of contaminated water is currently stored in huge tanks at the facility.
The plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, suffered several nuclear meltdowns after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck in 2011.
Japan’s Industry Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said on Friday no decision had been made on the disposal of the water yet. “To prevent any delays in the decommissioning process, we need to make a decision quickly,” he told a news conference without providing further details, including a time- frame.
The Asahi newspaper reported that any such release is expected to take around two years to prepare, as the site’s irradiated water first needs to pass through a filtration process before it can be further diluted with seawater and finally released into the ocean.
In 2018, Tokyo Electric apologized after admitting its filtration systems had not removed all dangerous materials from the water, which were collected from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting when the plant was crippled by the earthquake.
Last week, Japanese fish industry representatives urged the government to not allow the release of contaminated water from the Fukushima plant into the sea, saying it would undo years of work to restore the area’s waters.
South Korea has retained a ban on imports of seafood from the Fukushima region that was imposed after the nuclear disaster and summoned a senior Japanese embassy official last year to explain how Tokyo planned to deal with the Fukushima water problem.