Japan started releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, a polarising move that prompted China to announce an immediate blanket ban on all aquatic products from Japan.
China is “highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by… Japan’s food and agricultural products,” the customs bureau said in a statement.
The Japanese government signed off on the plan two years ago and it was given a green light by the U.N. nuclear watchdog last month. The discharge is a key step in decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant after it was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.
Ah yes, because the only danger of nuclear meltdown industrial wastewater is tritium.
One big concern is that the ALPS system is imperfect: it supposedly removes other radioactive contaminants to within legal limits, but those legal limits ARE higher than that of seawater. The ALPS has also been custom-designed for this project: it is a bespoke system that hasn’t been tested in production.
Plus, this is coming from the same private entity that mismanaged the Fukushima plant enough to cause the disaster… How much faith do you have in them to not fuck up again? Tepco’s optimizing for their bottom line, not for what’s best for society.
Everything is imperfect. The ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium and that only contributes a small fraction of the natural radioactivity of the ocean. This is not a public health concern and insisting on some stupid demand for perfection when the water you’re exhausting is less radioactive than the water you’re putting it into is fucking idiocy