News that Japan will begin releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear accident into the Pacific Ocean from Thursday have caught few by surprise. The plan, which will see 1.3 million tons of wastewater discharged over the next 30-40 years, was first floated a decade ago. A government advisory panel said in 2020 that it was the only practical solution to a monumental environmental headache. The plan has been approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Yet opponents, led by Japan’s embattled fishing communities, have reacted with impotent fury. “It’s an outrage,” said Hirokazu Ito, a fisherman in the port of Soma, a few miles up the coast from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Greenpeace Japan says the discharge ignores “science, environmental protection and international law”. China has urged the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), to stop treating the ocean like a “private sewer”.
The water is a byproduct of the complex clean-up and decommissioning from the March 2011 accident, when a tsunami overwhelmed the Daiichi plant, triggering a triple meltdown. Tepco engineers have since created an improvised cooling system to prevent roughly 880 tons of molten fuel from overheating and releasing more radioactivity. The system creates toxic water, however, which is filtered and stored in tanks around the Daiichi site.
Tepco insists that its filtering systems remove the most toxic chemicals from this water, except for traces of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen and a common byproduct of nuclear plants. The company’s failure to convince some the dumped water is harmless, or that it is running out of viable options, is partly a result of corroded public trust.
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Tepco, and Japan’s official nuclear regulator, had ignored repeated scientific warnings before 2011 about the dangers of earthquakes and tsunamis along the northeast coast. After the accident, the company, and most of the Japanese media, avoided using the term “core meltdown”. In 2018, Tepco was forced to apologise after admitting the filtering system was faulty and left behind some harmful substances.
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Critics have repeatedly attacked Tepco and the government for a lack of transparency and for ploughing ahead with the discharge plan without considering alternatives. Environmentalists want more testing and more time to develop better filtering technology, which would “allow the threat from tritium to diminish naturally”, says Greenpeace.
“The government just makes up its mind and asks us afterwards if we agree – but what choice do we have?” said fisherman Ito.
This week, prime minister Fumio Kishida met Japan’s National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations in an attempt to deflect such attacks. Mr Kishida has announced an 80 billion yen (€506 million) package to help the fishing industry deal with the inevitable reputational backlash from the discharge.
Mr Kishida will be hoping that once the water dump fades from the news cycle, criticism will ebb. The government can point to some successes. Many countries (China remains a notable outlier) have dropped opposition to the discharge and lifted import restrictions on Japanese food imposed after 2011. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan appears to have faded and the government has joined France, UK and other countries in again promoting nuclear power as a solution to the climate crisis.
Yet, concern lingers that the discharge is dangerous, less because of the environmental than the political impact in Asia, home to 140 nuclear reactors with many more planned in China and India. “Japan is setting a precedent for other governments that might be even less transparent,” Azby Brown, lead researcher for environmental monitoring group Safecast, wrote this week. Whatever happens, the toxic fallout from the disaster will continue for decades.