![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “For decades, nuclear power plants worldwide – including in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, China and South Korea – have been releasing waste contaminated with tritium, each under its own national quota,” said Tim Mousseau, an environmental scientist at the University of South Carolina.īut Mousseau argues tritium is overlooked because many countries are invested in nuclear energy, and “there’s no way to produce it without also generating vast amounts of tritium.” They reasoned that other nuclear facilities around the world had done this and it would be easier to monitor.Ĭonstruction workers assemble an undersea tunnel through which TEPCO plans to release treated wastewater into the sea, in Fukushima prefecture on April 12, 2023. As decommissioning work approaches a critical stage, it says it needs to free up space to store the fuel debris from the stricken plant.Ī Trade Ministry official told CNN the government considered five options, including hydrogen release, underground burial and vapor release, which would have seen wastewater boiled and released into the atmosphere, but in April 2021, officials approved the controlled release of the water into the sea. TEPCO has built over 1,000 massive tanks on the site to store what is now 1.32 million metric tons of wastewater – enough to fill more than 500 Olympic pools.īut space is running out and the company says building more tanks isn’t an option. At the same time, ground and rainwater have leaked in, creating more radioactive wastewater that now needs to be stored and treated. Since then, new water has been pumped in to cool fuel debris in the reactors. This caused the reactor cores to overheat and contaminate water within the plant with highly radioactive material. In 2011, the earthquake and tsunami cut off the power supply to the Fukushima plant, disabling its cooling systems. “I know that the government has decided to go ahead with the policy of releasing treated wastewater into the sea, but for us fishers, it really feels like they made this decision without our full consent,” said Shiga, adding that it made his “blood boil.” By 2022, while it had recovered somewhat to around $26 million, it was still just a fraction of what it once was. ![]() By 2018, that figure had dwindled to little more than $17 million. The Japanese government and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations body promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy, say the controlled release, which is expected to take decades, will meet international safety regulations and not harm the environment, as the water will be treated to remove radioactive elements – with the exception of tritium – and diluted more than 100 times.īut with the deadline for the planned water release looming this summer, Fukushima’s fishermen fear that – whether the release is safe or not – the move will undermine consumer confidence in their catches and once again threaten the way of life they have fought so hard to recover.Ī year before the 2011 disaster, government data shows Fukushima’s coastal fishing industry landed catches worth around $69 million. So when Japan followed through on plans to gradually release more than 1 million metric tons of filtered wastewater into the Pacific Ocean from the summer of 2023 – an action the government says is necessary to decommission the plant safely – the industry reeled. Shiga and others in the industry thought they’d put the nightmare of the past years behind them. Japan lifted its last remaining restrictions on fish from the area in 2021, and most countries have eased import restrictions. Ocean currents have since dispersed the contaminated water enough that radioactive cesium is nearly undetectable in fish from Fukushima prefecture. That ban lasted over a year, and even after it was lifted, Fukushima-based fishermen like Shiga were for years mostly limited to collecting samples for radioactivity tests on behalf of the state-owned electricity firm Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, rather than taking their catches to market. Radiation from the damaged nuclear plant leaked into the sea, prompting authorities to suspend fishing operations off the coast of three prefectures that had previously provided Japan with half of its catch. It’s a ritual he’s repeated for more than a decade since a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, spewing deadly radioactive particles into the surrounding area. First, he’ll test his catch for radiation. It is still morning when Kinzaburo Shiga, 77, returns to Onahama port after catching a trawler full of fish off Japan’s eastern coast.īut the third-generation fisherman won’t head straight to market. ![]()
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