There are some things to know about Japan’s water release

The Fukushima tunnel problem: what’s going on with the Japanese $sqrt(s)$ plan?

There’s a couple of parts to the plan. They will etch the water with seawater so that the tritium doesn’t show up in every drop. The government claims that they will bring tritium levels well below safety limits and below levels released by some nuclear plants. Second, they’re taking that diluted water and passing it through a tunnel under the seafloor to a point off the coast of Fukushima in the Pacific Ocean. It will be further diminished by that.

Some nations are concerned but a review by the UN nuclear watchdog says the discharge will have no harmful effects on the environment or people. The Japanese government is doing some things.

Radioactive fallout in the Pacific is unacceptable: Japan’s decision to discharge the water out of the nuclear accident site at Chernobyl

They can not filters out tritium, a radioactive isotope. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, and hydrogen is part of the water itself (H20). So it is impossible to create a filter that could remove the tritium.

The Japanese government maintains that, especially when compared to some of the other radioactive material at the site, tritium isn’t all that bad. Its radioactive decay is relatively weak, and because it’s part of water, it actually moves through biological organisms rather quickly. It won’t be in the environment for all that long because its half life is only twelve years.

The plan is consistent with international standards according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Independent monitoring is planned by the IAEA to make sure the discharge is done safely.

The risk is really, really low. Jim Smith, professor of environmental science at University of Pompey, says that it is not a risk. He’s spent the past few decades studying radioactivity in waterways after nuclear accidents, including at Chernobyl.

“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.

But not everyone thinks discharging the water is the best option. The senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute thinks it would have been better if the water had been kept on land. Options could have included mixing it into concrete to immobilize 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.

The Marshall Islands and Tahiti are worried about Japan’s decision, as is the Pacific Islands Forum. 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…because of legacy contamination,” Buesseler says.

Moreover, “they’re suffering in many ways from climate change and sea level rise more than the rest of the world,” he says. Japan’s move into the Pacific is an insult to the environment and others.

In the two years since Japan announced its plan to release the wastewater into the sea, the plan has provoked serious political tensions with nearby China and South Korea, as well as anxiety at home. The Chinese government has criticized the plan as unsafe; in South Korea, the administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol supports Japan’s efforts, but opposition lawmakers have castigated the move as a potential threat to humans. Within Japan, fishermen’s unions fear that public anxiety about the safety of the water could affect their livelihoods.