At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, officials dump more than 100 tons of water every day through its corroded reactors to keep them cool after the 2011 nuclear accident. The highly radioactive water is then pumped into hundreds of tanks. storage.
But with more than 1.3 million tons in the tanks, Japan is running out of space. So this year, it plans to start releasing the water into the Pacific after treatment to remove most radioactive particles.
The Government of Japan has promised to carry out the release with attention to security standards. The plan has been endorsed by the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
But the approach is alarming Japan’s neighbors. Those in the South Pacific, who have suffered for decades from a US nuclear test in the Marshall Islands, are particularly skeptical of the security promises. In November, a group representing more than 12 Pacific countries, including Australia, urged Tokyo to postpone sewage discharges.
Much of the mistrust is rooted in the most unlikely events. In 1954, snow fell on Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The residents had never seen anything like it. The children played in it; some ate it. Two days later US soldiers arrived to tell them the “snow” was radioactive fallout from the US’s largest nuclear test, which was conducted on nearby Bikini Atoll and radiated Rongelap after a shift in wind direction.
After the test, hundreds of people suffered intense radiation exposure, causing skin burns and pregnancy complications.
Decades later, the people of the Marshall Islands are still feeling its impact thanks to forced relocations, loss of land and increases in cancer rates. “You feel this deep pain,” said Bedi Racule, an anti-nuclear activist from the Marshall Islands. “Why weren’t we good enough to be treated as human beings?”
When asked about the concerns of Pacific nations, a representative of Japan’s Foreign Ministry said that as the only country to experience atomic bombing in war and in view of its link to the 1954 test, Japan sympathized with your fears about radiation exposure.
In a 2021 statement, Youngsolwara Pacific, an environmental advocacy group, asked: “How can the Japanese government, which has experienced the same brutal experiences with nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, want to further contaminate our Pacific with nuclear waste? For us, this irresponsible act of cross-border harm is the same as waging nuclear war against us as the peoples of the Pacific and our islands.”
To assuage Pacific concerns, Japanese authorities emphasize that their analysis shows that the wastewater plan does not present any danger. Almost all radioactive particles will be removed from the wastewater, except for an isotope of hydrogen called tritium, which Japanese experts and others say poses a relatively low health risk.
“By diluting the tritium/water mixture with regular seawater, the level of radioactivity can be reduced to safe levels,” Nigel Marks, a nuclear materials researcher and associate professor at Curtin University, said in an Australian Science Media statement. Center.
Storage is becoming difficult around the Fukushima plant, whose reactors have been out of commission since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which caused a power outage and collapse.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said that the plan “is in line with practice worldwide.” The representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan indicated that the Government hopes to proceed with the planned releases.
In 2021, Yoshihide Suga, the Prime Minister of Japan at the time, said that sewage disposal was “a problem that cannot be avoided.”
By: Pete McKenzie
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6517672, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-04 22:50:08
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