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Page added on July 16, 2017
Fukushima’s Nuclear Waste Will Be Dumped Into the Ocean, Japanese Plant Owner Says
Toxic waste produced by one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters will be dumped into the sea, according to the head of the Japanese company tasked with cleaning up the radioactive mess, despite protests from local fishermen.
Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), told foreign media that nearly 777,000 tons of water tainted with tritium, a byproduct of the nuclear process that is notoriously difficult to filter out of water, will be dumped into the Pacific Ocean as part of a multibillion-dollar recovery effort following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. That year, an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing more than 15,000 people and leading to a series of meltdowns at the TEPCO-owned Fukushima No. 1, or Daiichi, nuclear power plant, causing it to spew radiation that has plagued the region ever since.
While much progress has been made to clean the area, the company has yet to deal with the water that was used to cool the plant’s damaged reactors, causing it to become tainted with tritium.
“The decision has already been made,” Kawamura claimed, according to The Japan Times.
Tepco wants to release the contaminated water that is being stored in hundreds of tanks at the plant into the ocean. According to Reuters, this is a common practice at functioning nuclear plants.
Kawamura said that he would urge a government task force responsible for the cleanup of the Fukushima site to disclose when its decision on what to do with the water will be made.
“We could have decided much earlier, and that is TEPCO’s responsibility,” he added, according to Reuters.
Despite his claim that the issue has already been decided, Kawamura suggested that TEPCO will wait for the government panel’s final verdict before going ahead and dumping the water.
“We cannot keep going if we do not have the support of the state,” he said, according to The Japan Times.
Tritium is relatively harmless to humans in small doses, and Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Agency Chairman Shunichi Tanaka told The Guardian last year that the tritium in Fukushima’s tanks was “so weak in its radioactivity it won’t penetrate plastic wrapping.” The plan to dump tritium-contaminated water into the sea was met with opposition by local fishermen, who say their industry has suffered enough in the aftermath of the environmental crisis.
While TEPCO and Tokyo say that the low concentration of tritium would do little damage to the ecosystem and could prevent a more serious accident from occurring at the site, where around 580 tanks are stored, fishermen argue that the negative publicity would be devastating to their livelihoods. Dozens of countries and the European Union now ban certain fish imports from Japan following the disaster, and up to 33 continue to do so as of March. TEPCO’s decision also has been met with outrage by anti-nuclear activists such as Aileen Mioko-Smith of Kyoto-based Green Action Japan, a group created in 1991 that is “working to create a nuclear-power-free Japan,” according to its official website.
“This accident happened more than six years ago, and the authorities should have been able to devise a way to remove the tritium instead of simply announcing that they are going to dump it into the ocean,” Mioko-Smith told The Telegraph.
“They say that it will be safe because the ocean is large so it will be diluted, but that sets a precedent that can be copied, essentially permitting anyone to dump nuclear waste into our seas,” she continued.
TEPCO’s over-budget, oft-delayed effort to recover its former plant has been the subject of controversy for a number of reasons. Due to residual nuclear fuel, parts of the plant are so radioactive that they have even destroyed the robots specifically designed to survive in the deadly environment. Last month, Japanese company Toshiba announced it would send a new robot dubbed “little sunfish” to survey the flooded area of the plant from which no device has returned, BBC News reported. A number of TEPCO officials have also stood trial for negligence over the nuclear disaster.
As for the rest of the Fukushima prefecture, life has started to resume, albeit slowly. Of the estimated 150,000 who fled, only around 13 percent have come back. The Japanese government has increasingly pressured the rest to return by pledging greater investment in Fukushima’s infrastructure and by withdrawing subsidies provided to the refugees and their families.
13 Comments on "Fukushima’s Nuclear Waste Will Be Dumped Into the Ocean, Japanese Plant Owner Says"
bobinget on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 3:06 pm
Heck, in 20,000 years all radioactivity will have decayed.
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 5:17 pm
Hell ya ! Dump it in the ocean !
Everybody knows,
The Solution
To Pollution
Is Dilution.
Suppose you had a great big backyard
‘fun for the whole family’ garbage
fire complete with burning sofa’s
tires and black bags of trash, and
mattresses and blocks of styrofoam
and great big clouds of black smoke.
Cause Trump is makin’ America great again.
But whatcha gonna do with all that yucky
glow in the dark slimy poisonous ashes
from your sofa fire ???
Easy, dump it in the ocean!
Even just ask the Russians, ya got an ole
extra nuclear reactor from a ship?
Dump it in the ocean !
Only the liberals are opposed, to dumping
everything in the ocean. Thats why we
voted them out !
____________________________________________ on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 5:26 pm
We have another libfag ass-racer on the site. Trump is also a zio-libfag like you. But I didn’t know he is dumping nuke waste. You have no idea what a conservative is. Conservatives conserve. If it were up to me humans would go back to the caves and live happily ever after.
Makati1 on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 6:10 pm
bobinget, the half life of plutonium is about 24,000 years, so it will be hundreds of thousands of years until it is safe.
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/JaniceChing.shtml
BTW: That Granite counter top in your kitchen is radioactive. lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite
Most rocks have some radioactivity, even limestone.
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 6:22 pm
Conservatives believe in sofa fires
in their backyards. On Sunday afternoons,
after prayin’ and singin’ to the Lord,
in their small town churches. Drive home in
their monster truck, throwing beer bottles at
stop signs all the way home.
drwater on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 10:56 pm
Tritium has a half life of 12 years.
deadlykillerbeaz on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 11:18 pm
Aren’t there many new feral hogs at the Fukushima disaster area?
The marine life is in overshoot, too many fish and crustaceans in the ocean. All that Pollock is inedible, it can be halved.
A little radioactivity will help the needed die-off, no sense in letting trash fish survive. Coral reefs grow too big, irradiating some of it with radioactive water will help control the size of those reefs.
Mankind will help solve the overshoot of fish and kelp. Blue fin tuna grow too large and whales take up too much room.
About time the oceans become nutrient rich from dead sea life.
Always a good feeling to lend a helping hand to Mother Nature.
A rescue mission to save the oceans is badly needed.
Don’t want the Pacific to metastasize into a malignant neoplasm.
Humans can solve the problem.
I’m serious.
a on Sun, 16th Jul 2017 11:27 pm
I don’t know why they need to dump it in the ocean when they can just sell it to the Happy Fun Ball!(r) Company. Or is the Earth just one big Happy Fun Ball.
Antius on Mon, 17th Jul 2017 7:16 am
Not really a big issue as tritiated water is chemically identical to ordinary water and tritium will not concentrate in living organisms.
The oceans contain such a huge volume of water that the tritium will dilute to miniscule concentrations.
The contaminants that could be more problematic are those with the potential to sit in sediments in coastal waters and enter the marine food chain through crustaceans. Fission products like caesium.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Jul 2017 7:27 am
i always thought that Fukushima’s radioactive water would end in the ocean. It was either dumping it in the ocean where it will dilute and spread all over the world or pumping it underground in Japan. Which one did you think the Japanese would do? We would have done the same. We are fucked anyway so what difference does it make. We have hundreds of Fukushimas coming our way so buckle up and enjoy the ride!
Antius on Mon, 17th Jul 2017 8:24 am
Air pollution causes something like 467,000 fatalities each year in Europe and over 2 million per year in India and China.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38078488
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/14/around-22-million-deaths-in-india-and-china-from-air-pollution-study.html
We would need to have a severe nuclear accident somewhere in the world every single day before radioactive pollution would even begin to rival the death rates from fossil fuel air pollution. As it is, we have had two in the past 30 years.
Nuclear safety is not a non-issue, but unless we are very careless about it in the future, it is unlikely to be as big a risk for us as pollution from fossil fuels.
Kenz300 on Mon, 17th Jul 2017 12:25 pm
Japan will poison the world with its nuclear waste.
It is time for Japan to dismantle all their nuclear reactors and replace them with safer, cleaner and cheaper wind and solar power.
Fukishima and Chernobyl have shown us how costly and dangerous nuclear power really is.
Go Speed Racer on Mon, 17th Jul 2017 2:33 pm
Solar and windmills, won’t give any power
if it’s nighttime and no wind?