The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where a triple meltdown caught Japan and the world 12 years ago, has had new residents for several months.

Hundreds of flounders and abalone live in five pools in a low-rise building.

The animals do not serve to relax the almost 4,000 workers on the power plant site every day.

Rather, the sea creature is intended to convince local residents and fishermen that it is harmless if water contaminated with radioactive tritium is released into the Pacific from spring or summer onwards.

"We want to show people that the tritium doesn't settle in the animals permanently," says Kazuo Yamanaka, who has been working at the power plant for the Tokyo Electricity Corporation (Tepco) for 33 years.

Patrick Welter

Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.

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Flounders and abalone are coastal fish specialties in Fukushima Prefecture and northeastern Japan.

On the power plant site, some of the animals swim in pools of pure seawater and others in water slightly tritiated, just as Tepco intends to discharge into the sea.

The test will run for several years.

Tepco provides information on the rearing and the first measurement results on the short message service Twitter.

The channel has only 2548 subscribers.

It is the most unusual action to date that Tepco is using to gain trust.

Every day, the damaged reactors in Fukushima Daiichi produce around 100 or more cubic meters of irradiated water for cooling and as groundwater infiltration.

The radioactive water is pumped out, passes through a purification plant that largely filters out 62 radioactive substances, and is stored in white, blue, and gray water tanks on the site.

Radioactive tritium remains in the water.

Tepco has collected more than 1.32 million cubic meters of contaminated water in 1,066 water tanks in the years since the meltdown.

The space on the power plant site is no longer sufficient.

Beginning this year, the water is to be discharged into the Pacific at a highly diluted level – with radiation levels well below national and international limits.

Draining is said to last 30 years or more.

Japan is following international customs, explains the International Atomic Energy Agency.

However, the IAEA admits that the discharge is complex because of the large amounts of water.

Fukushima water fear is widespread.

Fukushima Prefecture and the cities of Okuma and Futaba, where the power plant is located, have given their approval for the discharge with reservations.

However, fishermen and farmers from Fukushima and neighboring regions fear that the consumer confidence that one can enjoy maritime and agricultural food from the region without hesitation, which they had laboriously and only partially regained, will be lost again.

There is resistance to sanitation in China and South Korea, and increasingly loud on the islands in the South Pacific.

Greenpeace complains that decisions are made over the heads of the population.

The environmental protection organization demands that the water masses be stored longer until better technical possibilities are found,

to dispose of the water without radioactive pollution of the ocean.

"Japan's government is ignoring science in a desperate attempt to show progress in decommissioning the destroyed reactors," said Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Asia.