Japan: Fukushima water will be discharged into the ocean via an underwater tunnel
Japanese people find themselves in the exclusion zone due to the Fukushima disaster on August 2, 2021, in the city of Okuma.
© Yasuyoshi Chiba, AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
The operator of the damaged Fukushima plant, Tepco, announced on Wednesday August 25 that it wanted to discharge into the ocean more than a million tons of contaminated water, resulting from the cooling operations of reactors damaged by the earthquake and the giant tsunami. in Japan in 2011. While Tokyo had already decided in April to gradually discharge these waters into the sea from 2023, this new announcement angered fishermen in Fukushima and neighboring countries.
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With our correspondent in Tokyo, Frédéric Charles
The
water from the Fukushima power station will be discharged into the Pacific Ocean
through a 2.5m-wide underwater pipe, a sort of tunnel about a kilometer in length: enough to prevent contaminated water. does not come back to the coast.
The
fishermen of Fukushima oppose
this rejection.
They
are already suffering damage to the reputation
of their fish, which are sold 30% cheaper than those from other regions in the Tokyo markets.
In addition, China and Russia criticize the Japanese decision and South Korea is considering filing a complaint with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
Fukushima's water storage capacities, in a thousand reservoirs, are due to reach their limits by the summer of 2022. Under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the discharge of water several times filtered power plant is scheduled to begin in 2023 and last for at least 30 years.
Water treatment systems remove all radionuclides, except tritium, which cannot be removed with current techniques.
But according to American scientist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the waters of Fukushima also contain carbon-14, other radioactive isotopes that become incorporated in the sediments of the seabed.
Across the world, nuclear industries also release tritium-laden water into the sea.
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To read also: Fukushima: 10 years later, a disaster still in progress
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