In a process that will take decades to complete, Japan has started releasing treated water from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, raising concerns about introducing residual tritium into the environment.
Other nuclear contaminants have been removed from the water, but there is no process for purging one contaminant—tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen—and so Japan is relying on a strategy of diluting the water to theoretically safe levels. Tests in the waters near the site following release did not indicate radioactivity, and tested fish showed no tritium contamination.
But as the BBC reports, the action has been controversial, with nuclear activists and some countries—notably China—criticizing the strategy and demanding further studies.
“The challenge with radionuclides (like tritium) is that they present a question that science cannot fully answer, which is: at very low levels of exposure, what can be counted as ‘safe’?” said American professor Emily Hammond, an expert in energy and environmental law at George Washington University.
“One can have a lot of faith in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) work while still recognizing that compliance with standards does not mean there are ‘zero’ environmental or human consequences attributed to the decision,” Hammond said.
The release is an outcome of efforts to contain radioactive waste following the meltdown of the Fukushima power plant 12 years ago, when an earthquake and tsunami destroyed its cooling system and caused reactor cores to overheat. Water within the facility was contaminated with highly radioactive material. A Japanese high court later ruled the disaster preventable, and a group of six Japanese youth have since sued over their post-meltdown cancer diagnoses.
Since the meltdown, the plant’s owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been pumping in water to cool down the fuel rods. The contaminated water from this process is stored in more than 1,000 tanks, enough to fill more than 500 Olympic swimming pools. But Japan now says it needs the land occupied by the tanks to build new facilities to safely decommission the plant, and has raised concerns about threats to the tanks in the event of a natural disaster.
The IAEA okayed Japan’s plan following an independent, onsite analysis, concluding that the discharged water’s tritium concentration was “far below the operational limit of 1,500 becquerels per litre (Bq/L),” , a measure of radioactivity. That threshold is also six times less than the World Health Organization’s limit for drinking water, which is at 10,000 Bq/L.
Many scientists agree the process is safe if tritium levels are low enough. But others have raised concerns about how it could affect the ocean bed, marine life, and humans, saying more studies are needed.
China vocally criticized the release and banned seafood imports from Japan, but has also been accused of hypocrisy on this front, with critics alleging that China’s nuclear plants release wastewater with higher tritium levels than those from Fukushima.
A similar plan to dump tritium-contaminated water into the Hudson River was recently blocked by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, noted Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. He said the “nuclear establishment” downplays, ignores, or even denies some of the risks of tritium.
“A larger population exposed to the same small dose of atomic radiation will show a correspondingly larger number of radiation-induced cancers proportional to the number of individuals exposed,” he said, citing an “important and poorly understood role of organically-bound tritium (tritium as a constituent of organic molecules) in bioaccumulation and biomagnification phenomena.”
Instead of dumping contaminated water, Edwards suggests nuclear plants follow the processes used in Canada and other countries, where tritium-contaminated water is stored for years at a time in stainless steel drums that are carefully sealed to prevent evaporation.
A river “is not a radioactive waste facility, nor should it be treated as a radioactive sewer,” he warned. “Carelessness and/or callousness regarding nuclear waste leads to an increasingly radioactive world.”
Nuclear energy has long been a flashpoint for climate advocates, with tension between proponents citing its potential to produce clean energy, and opponents raising alarm over health and safety risks that may arise, in part from insufficient policies for dealing with radioactive waste. Also at issue is the high price tag of nuclear energy and a protracted timeline for project development which is almost always extended by costly delays.
But recently, 18-year-old climate activist Ia Aanstoot called for Greenpeace to drop its “old-fashioned and unscientific” campaign against nuclear power, saying the organization’s legal challenge in the European Union serves fossil fuel interests instead of climate action, writes the Guardian.
