The treatment of the water at the nuclear site in Japan has begun

Trade-offs for fish in Japan after the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Flows into the Ocean: “The U.S. government didn’t leave Japan”

Workers in Japan are releasing radioactive water from the reactor into the ocean. The plant was destroyed in an earthquake and a massive wave in 2011.

Japan’s plan to release wastewater into the sea has provoked political tensions in nearby China and South Korea, as well as anxiety at home. The Chinese government thinks the plan is unsafe and opposition legislators in South Korea say the move is a potential threat to humans. Fishermen in Japan are worried about public concern about the safety of the water affecting their livelihoods.

Fishermen in the port of Tsurushihama, about 40 miles north of the Plant, auctioned off their catch after some of the 1 million tons of water began to flow into the ocean.

There are good prices for seafood in Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. The price of local fish has been at its highest level since the Tohoku disaster, according to a fisherman.

Ono now worries that prices will tumble. He blames the Japanese government for abandoning Fukushima’s fishermen, and he and his colleagues are suing the government to stop the release of the treated radioactive water.

He commented on the fact that Fukushima folks didn’t do anything wrong. “It was the government that came here and built the nuclear plant,” he adds. “Who uses the electricity? Tokyo!

Before announcing the water discharge, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida tried to show he had won over the country’s fishermen. The government will spend money on seafood they cannot sell, as well as rebutting misinformation about their products.

“We’ll continue taking necessary measures,” Kishida told fisheries fisheries representatives, “to ensure fisherfolk can continue their activities with peace of mind, and we pledge to continue doing so even if the water release takes a long time.”

Fukushima residents are concerned about safety in Japan’s release of water into the Pacific: The frustrated seafood consumer frustrated by the lack of information

Since the Fukushima nuclear plant was built in 1967, Hayashi says the local economy became reliant on it and on the government subsidies it brought. He is hopeful that Fukushima residents will reconsider their choices and raise their voices.

The government has made some efforts to remake Fukushima’s landscape and guard against future quakes and tsunamis. Buildings have been moved from the shore because of the seawalls.

“For the first time, we were forced to think that the life we’ve lived since the time of our ancestors could easily be destroyed or changed. It makes us feel a kind of impermanence,” he says. Our trust in our hometown has been destroyed.

Nakajima and thousands of other people sued the government, accusing them of being involved in the nuclear disaster. A local court ruled in 2020 that scientists had warned the government that a major tsunami could strike the nuclear plant, but the government took no action. It was the government who won the appeal to the supreme court.

Nakajima says that despite the government’s assurances, locals don’t really have enough information to decide whether the water discharge is safe or not.

A recent survey by the News Agency found that a lot of Japanese people aren’t sure if they’ll support or oppose the release. Eighty-two percent say the government hasn’t done enough to explain it.

Source: Worries over seafood safety mount as Japan releases Fukushima water into the Pacific

How dangerous is the discharge of radioactive contaminants into the ocean, and what do they tell us about nuclear power plants? A conversation with Mieko Orikasa and Edwin Lyman

In the sashimi section of Nakajima’s store, Housewife Mieko Orikasa passes on plates of bonito and tuna. She said that she has no way to know if she trusts the government’s assurances about the safety of seafood.

A second grandchild, due to be born in December, is a three-year-old grandchild that I have in Tokyo. I need to reconsider if I can let them eat fish when they come to visit.

“The idea of deliberately discharging hazardous substances into the environment, into the ocean is repugnant,” Lyman says. “But unfortunately, if you do look at it from the technical perspective, it’s hard to argue that the impacts of this discharge would be worse than those that are occurring at nuclear power plants that are operating worldwide.”

The government has been working on a complex filtration system that removes most of the radioactive isotopes from the water. It can remove radioactive contaminants from the water with the Advanced Liquid Processing System.

There are some parts to the plan. They will use water with a lot of water in it, so that there’s less tritium in it. The government says they will bring tritium levels well below all safety limits, and below the level released by some operating nuclear plants. They are taking that water and passing it through a tunnel to a point on the coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean. That will dilute it further.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has peer-reviewed this plan and believe it is consistent with international safety standards. Independent monitoring will be done by the IAEA to make sure that the discharge is done safely.

The risk is really, really low. And I would call it not a risk at all,” says Jim Smith, a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth. He’s spent a lot of time studying radioactivity in waterways after nuclear accidents.

“We’ve got to put radiation in perspective, and the plant release — if it’s done properly — then the doses that people get and the doses that the ecosystem get just won’t be significant, in my opinion,” Smith says.

Edwin Lyman is the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. He says that out of the limited options Japan has, none of them are good and the plan they have is the least bad.

But not everyone agrees that discharging the water is the best option. Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, thinks it would have been better to keep the contaminated water on land “where it’s much easier to monitor.” It might have been possible to mix it into concrete to stymilise it.

“Nearshore in Japan could be affected in the long term because of accumulation of non-tritium forms of radioactivity,” he says. That could ultimately hurt fisheries in the area.

Beussler consults for the Pacific Islands Forum, a coalition of nations including the Marshall Islands and Tahiti that are also apprehensive about Japan’s decision. He notes that many of these countries were subjected to high levels of radioactive fallout as a result of atmospheric nuclear tests during the Cold War. There are islands they can’t return to due to legacyContamination, says Buesseler.

Climate Change and sea level rise are causing more suffering for them than any other part of the world. Japan’s release into the Pacific is only one insult among many other things.

First Release of a Large Scale Heavy Ion Collision from the Narrow-Field Reactor at the Yamabe Space Telescope

The first release of 7,800 tons of treated water is expected to last about 17 days. Tepco and Japan’s fisheries agency have said that they will be watching the ocean for radioactive levels, and the IAEA will supervise the process which is expected to last decades.