Japanese flushed with failure

A decision to dump Fukushima’s radioactive waste water in the Pacific is causing outrage in Japan and beyond, says Dr Richard Dixon

The decision to dump Fukushima’s radioactive waste water in the Pacific is causing outrage in Japan and beyond. I wrote recently about the ongoing problems in and around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, ten years on from the tsunami that prompted the meltdowns and explosions that destroyed three of its reactors.

One of the issues I highlighted was the growing volume of radioactively contaminated water in the site’s emergency tanks. These are filling fast and yet more water continues to flow through the highly radioactive areas of the dead reactors.

Last week, the Japanese Government decided to discharge this waste water into the Pacific, a move strongly condemned by our sister organisation FOE Japan and many other groups, including the local fishing industry. A joint Korean-japanese initiative has delivered a 65,000-strong petition, signed by people and organisations from 86 countries.

Water pumped into the reactor buildings to cool nuclear fuel debris and groundwater become contaminated. Both go through a treatment plant before being stored in the emergency tanks built on site since the disaster.

There are almost 1,000 of these tanks and they are all expected to be full by the middle of next year. The treatment plant removes some radioactivity, but the water is still contaminated with a variety of radioactive elements, with nearly three-quarters of the stored water above legal levels for one or more.

The plan is to treat the water again and pump it into the sea over several decades, although it is still likely to be at a level of radioactivity ten times that Fukushima Daiichi was allowed to emit before the disaster.

Many people in Japan are acutely sensitive to pollution of the oceans because of the

Minimata Bay disaster in the 1950s. Large quantities of mercury were dumped into the bay from a chemical plant over more than 30 years. Almost 1,000 people died and more than 2,000 were made ill by eating contaminated seafood. Not surprisingly, the local fishing community around Fukushima are among the most vocal in opposing the ocean dumping.

Opponents of the plan point to two alternatives for dealing with the contaminated water. The most obvious is to build massive permanent water tanks, like those commonly used for storing oil. Just 20 of these tanks would be enough to handle the current water and that generated over the next 50 years.

The other option is to mix the water with cement to create a solid waste which locks in the radioactivity, a solution already used at the Savannah River

Sadly the Japanese Government has gone for the cheap and cowardly route

nuclear site in the US.

Just pumping your radioactive waste out to sea means you can forget about it – storing it on land means you have to keep looking after it for decades or centuries. Sadly the Japanese Government has gone for the cheap and cowardly route.

The days when we could simply use the oceans as a dumping ground for pollution, radioactive waste and decommissioned weapons have been coming to an end, but the new controversy around the contaminated water from Fukushima shows that the arguments have not yet been won.

Dr Richard Dixon is director of Friends of the Earth Scotland