The contaminated water storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are nearly full.Philip Fong/AFP vía Getty Images hide title
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Philip Fong/AFP vía Getty Images
The contaminated water storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are nearly full.
Philip Fong/AFP vía Getty Images
Workers in Japan have begun dumping treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The facility was destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and water has been building up ever since.
On Thursday, the Chinese government announced that it would immediately stop imports of aquatic products, such as seafood, from Japan.
A review ofThe United Nations Nuclear Guardiansays the discharge will have negligible radiological impacts on humans and the environment, but some nations remain concerned. This is what the Japanese government is doing and why.
Why is there water in the Fukushima power station?
After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, several reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melted down. To prevent another catastrophe, workers flooded the reactors with water that quickly became highly contaminated. The plant is now out of commission and the reactors have been shut down but still need to be cooled down, which means wastewater is still being produced. In the years since the accident, groundwater has also entered the plant and has also been partially contaminated.
Dealing with all this radioactive water was a major technical challenge for the Japanese government. According to Japanese authorities, around 350 million gallons are currently stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the site. According to the government, the tanks are almost full and there is no more space on site. Therefore, part of the water must be drained.
Japan has created an ingenious system to filter radioactive contaminants from water. However, some forms of radiation cannot be filtered.Philip Fong /AFP vía Getty Images hide title
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Philip Fong /AFP vía Getty Images
Japan has created an ingenious system to filter radioactive contaminants from water. However, some forms of radiation cannot be filtered.
Philip Fong /AFP vía Getty Images
Can't you just filter the radioactive particles out of the water?
The government has been working on a complex filtration system that removes most radioactive isotopes from the water. Known as an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), it can remove several different radioactive contaminants from water.
Authorities have used ALPS and other systems to remove some of the most dangerous isotopes, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90.
But there's one radioactive isotope they can't filter: tritium. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, and hydrogen is part of water itself (H20). Therefore, it is impossible to design a filter that can remove tritium.
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How does the Japanese government intend to drain this water safely?
The plan consists of several parts. First, the water is diluted with seawater, so there is much less tritium in each drop. The government says they will reduce tritium levels well below any safe limits and below the level released by some operating nuclear power plants. Second, they take the diluted water and funnel it through a tunnel under the sea floor to a point off the coast of Fukushima in the Pacific Ocean. That will dilute it even more.
In the end they will do it little by little. It will take decades to empty all these tanks.
Members of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party hold electric candles and a sign reading "No Nuclear Contaminated Water From Fukushima!" during a demonstration against Japan's plan on Wednesday. Other Pacific states are also concerned about release.Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images hide title
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Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images
Members of South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party hold electric candles and a sign reading "No Nuclear Contaminated Water From Fukushima!" during a demonstration against Japan's plan on Wednesday. Other Pacific states are also concerned about release.
Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images
Do others think this process is safe?
The Japanese government claims that the tritium isn't too bad, especially compared to some of the other radioactive material on the site. Its radioactive decay is relatively weak, and since it is part of water, it actually moves through biological organisms quite quickly. And its half-life is 12 years, so it doesn't stay in the environment for very long, unlike elements like uranium-235, which has a half-life of 700 million years.
With this in mind, the government believes that this is the safest option available.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency has peer reviewed this plan and believes it is consistent with international safety standards. The IAEA also plans to carry out independent monitoring to ensure that the discharge is safe.
“The risk is really, very, very low. And I wouldn't consider it a risk at all," says Jim Smith, aEnvironmental Science Professorat the University of Portsmouth. He has spent the last few decades studying radioactivity in waterways after nuclear accidents, including Chernobyl.
"We need to put the radiation in perspective and the release from plants, if it's done correctly, then I don't think the doses to people and the doses to the ecosystem are just not significant," says Smith. .
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Edwin Lyman is the oneDirector of Nuclear Safetyby the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. He says that of Japan's limited options for this wastewater, none are good, but "unfortunately, in my opinion, their current plan is probably the least bad of a bunch of bad options," he says.
"The idea of deliberately dumping hazardous substances into the environment, into the ocean, is sickening," Lyman says. "But if we look at it from a technical point of view, unfortunately it is difficult to say that the effects of this spill would be worse than those that occur in nuclear power plants that operate around the world."
But not everyone agrees that draining the water is the best option. ken buesseler,a senior scientistof the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says it would have been better if the contaminated water had been left on land "where it's much easier to monitor." Options could have included mixing it with concrete to immobilize it.
Buesseler does not believe the water poses a threat anywhere in the Pacific. "We don't expect any large-scale direct health impacts, either on humans or on marine life," he says. However, he postulates that pollution other than tritium could accumulate near the coast over time and was not detected by the ALPS system.
"The coastal zone of Japan could be affected in the long term due to the accumulation of forms of radioactivity other than tritium," he says. Ultimately, this could harm the region's fisheries.
And Bussler is concerned about the message being sent to other nations that may be interested in dumping nuclear waste into the sea.
How are other nations reacting to Japan's decision?
Other nations expressed concern about Japan's plan. In South Korea there were increasing public protests against the decision.
Buesseler advises for thePacific Islands Forum, a coalition of nations including the Marshall Islands and Tahiti, which are also concerned about Japan's decision. He notes that many of these countries experienced high levels of radioactive fallout as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing during the Cold War. "There are islands that they cannot return to because of the contaminated sites," says Büsseler.
Furthermore, "in many ways they are suffering more from climate change and sea level rise than the rest of the world," he says. In his opinion, Japan's liberation in the Pacific is "just an insult to the environment, among other things."