On April 13, Japan’s government said it would millions of tons of treated radioactive water from the disabled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean.
Fisherman, environmentalists and neighboring states reacted strongly to the decision. China also expressed its opposition.
On April 13, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson “grave concern” about the plan, arguing Japan should “refrain from wantonly discharging the wastewater before reaching consensus with all stakeholders and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) through full consultations.”
Deng Xijun, China’s Ambassador to the Association of South East Asian Nations, (ASEAN), also criticized the move, citing a study by Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research (GEOMAR).
“The German Institute GEOMAR predicts that Japan Fukushima contaminated nuclear waste water dumped will pollute half of the Pacific Ocean in 57 days, adding that 3 yrs later, Canada & the U.S. will be affected by the nuclear radiation pollution,” he tweeted.
Deng also attacked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had thanked Japan “for its transparent efforts.”
Although others also have raised concerns about the water disposal plan, Beijing’s framing of the potential effects is misleading.
The GEOMAR animation shared by Deng is from 2012. It depicts the spread of radioactive material that leaked at the time of the disaster in 2011 and is not a projection of Japan’s current wastewater disposal plan.
China’s claim also lacks context.
Andreas Villwock, head of communications at GEOMAR, told Polygraph.info that the animation only shows the “transport of material into the Pacific basin.” However, he said the material would “rapidly dilute” because of the volume of water. “Locally the impact can be high but by no means over the entire Pacific basin,” Villwock said.
The effects of ocean-wide mixing over time have been demonstrated by comparing the Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima disaster to the Baltic Sea, which by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in Soviet-era Ukraine.
The head of the GEOMAR research team behind the study, Claus Boning, said at least three times as much radioactive material flowed into the Pacific Ocean in March and April of 2011 than fell into the Baltic Sea in 1986.
"Nevertheless, the radiation levels we simulated in the Pacific (in 2012) are already lower than the levels still found in the Baltic Sea today, 26 years after Chernobyl,” Boning said.
Still, Villwock stressed that such radioactive materials pose a very real danger to the marine ecosystem.
On March 13, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the , welcomed Japan’s disposal plan.
“Controlled water discharges into the sea are routinely used by operational nuclear power plants around the world and in the region under strict safety and environmental standards and regulations,” he said in statement.
Zhao and others have challenged that view, arguing the Fukushima wastewater “is entirely different from the wastewater produced from the normal operation of nuclear power plants.”
It is true that the wastewater filtration process at the Fukushima facility removes some radioactive isotopes.
The GEOMAR study notes that some of the radioactive isotopes released during the Fukushima incident (like cesium-137) are “highly soluble in seawater.”
Others, like tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that naturally occurs in trace amounts, “cannot be removed from the water like dissolved radionuclides (e.g. cesium),” the Thunen Institute of Fisheries Ecology said in .
The study found that, due to the relatively small level of discharges from the tanks in the 2011 meltdown, it is “very unlikely that direct or indirect radiation effects (from tritium) will be detectable in marine organisms.”
“A risk to consumers is also considered to be very low from a radiation protection point of view,” the study also stated.
the Health Physics Society (HPS), a U.S.-based nonprofit, “tritium is considered one of the least harmful radionuclides” on account of “its chemical properties and weak radioactive emissions.”
HPS noted that tritium is generally released and distributed into the environment “by the same process that transports water.”
This leads to the dilution of tritium, “largely preventing any accumulation in the environment,” HPS said.
Japan’s government said the tritium in the treated Fukushima wastewater is being diluted to 1,500 becquerels per liter — 1/40 of Japanese safety standard limits and well below World Health Organization guidelines.
Others argue that is misleading.