The "information black holes" behind Japan's nuclear contaminated water
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, April 21 (International Observation) The "information black holes" behind Japan's nuclear contaminated water
Xinhua News Agency reporter
The Japanese government recently decided to discharge millions of tons of nuclear polluted water from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the sea.
This "unprecedented" move caused widespread concern in the world.
The Japanese authorities have repeatedly claimed that the treated nuclear-contaminated water is "safe", but the existence of many "information black holes" makes people have to question this.
1. What are the radioactive substances in the nuclear contaminated water after treatment?
To cool down the melted core after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) continuously injected water into the core. In addition to rainwater, groundwater contacting or flowing through the nuclear reactor, this water inevitably contains a lot of radioactivity. substance.
The Multi-Nuclide Processing System (ALPS) developed by TEPCO claims to be able to filter most of the nuclides in nuclear contaminated water except for tritium.
As of January this year, about 1.24 million tons of nuclear contaminated water has been processed and stored by ALPS.
In fact, the nuclear contaminated water stored after one treatment still contains more than 60 nuclides such as cesium, strontium, and tritium.
Among them, tritium is difficult to remove from water because it is an isotope of hydrogen.
The problem is that in the nuclear contaminated water discharged into the sea after the second treatment according to the Tepco plan, the nuclide is not only tritium left.
A data released by TEPCO in December last year showed that after the secondary treatment of nuclear contaminated water, in addition to tritium, it still contains 12 nuclides such as iodine-129, cesium-135, and carbon-14, and most of them have extremely long half-lives. Of nuclides.
The American "Science" magazine published an article on April 13 that in the purification process of ALPS, from time to time, ruthenium, cobalt, strontium, plutonium and other radioactive isotopes with longer radioactive life and more dangerous are missed.
Therefore, Japanese Liberal Democratic Party member Taku Yamamoto emphasized that the issue of nuclear-contaminated water's marine discharge cannot be limited to discussing the safety of tritium.
2. Is ALPS running reliably?
A few days ago, the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxic Substances and Human Rights Marcos Orellana, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fahri, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd issued a joint statement stating that: The performance of ALPS so far shows that it cannot completely eliminate radioactive substances in nuclear contaminated water, and the secondary treatment cannot guarantee complete elimination.
ALPS is a key link in the treatment of nuclear contaminated water in Fukushima. It was developed by TEPCO and put into use in 2013.
However, in addition to the questionable decontamination effect, there are also doubts about whether its operation is in compliance.
According to a report on the Japanese "Nikkan Hyundai" website in April, since TEPCO started ALPS in 2013, ALPS has always been in the "trial operation" stage.
At the Japanese Senate Resource and Energy Survey on April 14, Japanese Communist Party Senator Yamazoe Taku pointed out that ALPS has not even completed the inspections before the "formal operation".
In response to this question, the chairman of Japan’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Commission, Toyoshi Satata, admitted that due to the eagerness to deal with nuclear contaminated water, some of the inspection procedures before the operation of ALPS were omitted.
Kenichi Oshima, a professor of environmental economics at Ryukoku University in Japan, said in an interview with Japanese media that the chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Commission personally admitted that the formal inspection procedures of ALPS have not been completed. This is no trivial matter. It means "either the government or TEPCO , Are not qualified to treat (nuclear-contaminated water).”
3. How long is the processing cycle of the Fukushima nuclear accident?
According to the plan made by TEPCO and the Japanese government, the waste pile operation of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is expected to take 30 to 40 years.
However, many experts believe that the actual time may be far more than expected.
Matsuoka Shunji, a professor at Waseda University in Japan and representative of the "1F (Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant) Waste Reactor Research Association", told Japanese media that according to TEPCO’s plan, the four units of the Fukushima Second Nuclear Power Plant were undamaged in the 2011 tsunami. The operation required 44 years, and the cores of 3 units in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were melted down, and the difficulty of the waste reactors was extremely different.
Matsuoka Shunji believes that the biggest difficulty in the waste reactor operation of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is to take out the melted nuclear fuel of the three units.
However, due to the lethal high dose of radiation hampering the waste reactor operation, TEPCO does not even know the distribution of these melted nuclear fuels, and the method of taking it out has not been determined.
"At present, it will take more than 100 years to take out the melted nuclear fuel."
Therefore, once a precedent is set for the discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the sea, the Pacific Ocean ecology and the safety of related aquatic products will always be shrouded in the shadow of Japan's pollution discharge in the long process of waste disposal.
4. What is the relationship between TEPCO and the Japanese government?
In the various disputes surrounding the discharge of nuclear contaminated water from Fukushima, transparency and credibility of information are one of the keys.
Including international institutions, the outside world basically can only rely on the information and data provided by TEPCO, and the Japanese government's decision-making claims are also based on these information and data.
The problem is that TEPCO has repeatedly had bad records in the safe operation of nuclear power. Before and after the Fukushima nuclear accident, it had a history of concealing, false reporting and tampering with information, including the treatment of nuclear contaminated water.
For example, in August 2013, under public suspicion, Tepco admitted that about 300 tons of highly concentrated nuclear-contaminated water had leaked from the steel tank, and part of it might have flowed into the Pacific Ocean.
Before the Fukushima nuclear accident, TEPCO was a private company, and it had a regulatory and regulated relationship with the Japanese government.
After the nuclear accident, TEPCO faced huge costs such as waste reactors and compensation. In order to avoid the bankruptcy of this power giant, the Japanese government established the "Japan Atomic Energy Damage Compensation and Reactor Decommissioning Support Agency". This official agency owns 50.1% of TEPCO’s shares. The right to vote actually put TEPCO under the control of the Japanese government.
According to the relevant regulations, the agency's tasks also include providing extensive information on waste dumps at home and abroad.
This also means that the Japanese government cannot shirk its blame for the various "information black holes" that Tepco has in the process of handling nuclear accidents and disposing of nuclear contaminated water.