• Japan: Japan's former Environment Minister says that Fukushima's radioactive water will have to be discharged into the sea

More than eight years after the Fukushima nuclear accident, the Japanese authorities do not know what to do with the huge amounts of contaminated water generated by the plant. The government that directs Shinzo Abe claims not to have made any decision in this regard and awaits the final recommendations of the experts, but the announcement of the public operator that manages the plant that in 2022 will run out of storage space starts a countdown to find a solution. Two options are outlined as the most plausible: controlled dumping into the sea, as recommended by Environment Minister Yoshiaki Harada , or the search for a new storage strategy.

The magnitude 9 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011 caused the cores of the three reactors of the Fukushima plant to suffer fusions in their nuclei. To cool them and avoid further damage, fresh water has been used since then, but the tanks and retaining walls around the reactors are no longer airtight; so that the 140 m3 that are poured every day are contaminated , loaded with radioactive elements. Tepco has to pump that water, treat it to extract 62 dangerous radioelements (such as cesium, strontium or antimony) and store it. There is, however, no treatment for tritium: this hydrogen isotope is difficult to separate and is considered relatively harmless.

A part of this water is recycled for the same cooling system, another is deposited in large tanks, which have been multiplying. The plant accumulates more than one million tons of water in a thousand of these containers , whose cylindrical silhouettes have replaced those of the sakuras - the Japanese cherry trees - around the plant. The problem is that Tepco has indicated that it can only store up to 1.37 million tons of water, a figure that will be reached in the summer of 2022.

Controlled discharge

Some experts have pointed out that other coastal nuclear plants control water with tritium in the ocean. In the case of Fukushima, the Kuroshio current , which moves away from the Japanese coast, should quickly remove offshore pollution, "where the concentration would decrease as you travel across the ocean," says Ken Buesseler , a geochemist at the Woods Oceanographic Institute Hole that has studied the catastrophe of Fukushima.

On the other hand, accumulating contaminated liquid could entail its own risks. "At some point it will be necessary to stop storing the water in the tanks, because there is also the risk of a new earthquake," Buesseler warns, "it is not at all desirable that all these containers can be opened at the same time; it would be better to do so controlled way over several decades. "

Along the same lines, a recent study by Japanese researcher Hiroshi Miyano , who chairs one of the commissions that studies the dismantling of Fukushima, provides a more precise figure: 17 years . According to this scientist, it would be the period necessary to treat contaminated water so that radioactive substances are reduced to levels that comply with safety standards and that is, therefore, suitable for dumping into the sea.

Expand storage

Local communities - especially fishermen - and environmentalists oppose this idea frontally. Greenpeace has demanded that the Japanese government discard the idea of ​​the spill and increase storage efforts. He also points out that the current treatment is not effective, so that option would not even be viable. "It is important to understand that currently 80% of stored water contains radionuclides above the regulatory limit for discharge, such as strontium-90, cesium-137 and iodine-129," explains Shaun Burnie , nuclear energy specialist at the NGO "Tepco has been forced to admit it this year. So before considering even a tritium-only discharge, they would have to reprocess all that water."

Greenpeace also questions the storage limits used by the public company for three years. "Tepco has stated that it will run out of storage capacity by 2022, but it is not correct," says Burnie. "Fukushima may have limited capacity, but adjacent facilities such as Futaba and Okuma have room for additional storage. There is a clear alternative to the discharge of water into the environment," he adds.

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