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A member of a science group for the Pacific Islands said that fish swimming in treated wastewater from the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant would be safe to eat. But the group is worried about Japan’s plan to let water out into the ocean.
The plan to send water from Fukushima into the Pacific over the next 40 years has caused South Korea, China, and the Pacific island countries to worry about possible health and environmental risks. Some experts say that these worries are based on false information. After hearing what Japanese officials had to say about how to deal with radioactivity, some leaders in the Pacific have now said they back Japan’s plan.
During an online panel held by New Zealand’s Science Media Centre, Tony Hooker, who runs the Centre for Radiation Research at Australia’s University of Adelaide, said that the amount of radiation in the treated water is much lower than what is allowed in drinking water around the world. He said he was willing to eat the fish.
At the Fukushima plant on the coast, big tanks hold water that will be used to cool the broken nuclear reactors. The company in charge, Tokyo Electric Power Company, has stressed how important it is to find a solution for this water as soon as possible. One step in the long-term plan to shut down the plant is to clean and release the water.
Hooker, who was part of a group of experts brought together by the Pacific Islands Forum to look at Japan’s plan, said that Japan is likely to release wastewater for the first time this summer. This month, Tokyo Electric has been using clean water to test the equipment that will dilute the cleaned water and send it into the sea.
Hooker said that he wouldn’t drink the water that had been cleaned, not because it was dangerous, but because it was salty. It’s important to remember that what he said during the briefing is not the official opinion of the group.
Japan’s plan to clean up the water is to use the Advanced Liquid Processing System, which will get rid of all radioactive elements except tritium and bring their amounts down below the legal limits. The nuclear garbage that is made will be put away. The treated water will then be diluted more than 100 times to lower its tritium. Tritium is a slightly radioactive form of hydrogen that is used to make glow-in-the-dark lights.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that the process at Fukushima is technically possible and meets international norms. But some experts, like David Krofcheck, a nuclear scientist at the University of Auckland, say that it is more important to get rid of dangerous byproducts of nuclear fission, like strontium and cesium, than to get rid of tritium that occurs naturally.
Even though labs in other countries can check Japan’s work, Krofcheck thinks closer cooperation with nearby countries would benefit international relations. He says that working together with countries like Korea, Taiwan, and China on an international level would help improve the situation and rebuild trust, since the Fukushima accident has made people question how well Japan does science.
During the online briefing, Chau-Ron Wu, a North Pacific ocean currents expert at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, showed models that showed tritium from Fukushima would take about a year to reach Taiwan’s coastal seas and two to three years to reach the west coast of North America.
Tritium is found in the environment because of how the sun affects the Earth’s surface. It is also given off by nuclear power plants all over the world. Some of the leftovers come from nuclear tests that were done in the air in the 1950s and 1960s. There are already about 8.4 kilograms of tritium in the Pacific Ocean. Nigel Marks, a nuclear materials scientist at Australia’s Curtin University, said Japan’s plan would add less than 0.1 gram of tritium annually. He mentioned that a banana has more radiation than the water from Fukushima that has been cleaned up.
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