Protest as Japan Plans to Dump Treated Radioactive Fukushima Water Into the Ocean

Japan will release more than a million cubic meters of treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, the government said Tuesday. Demonstrators gather outside Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s office in Tokyo to protest the decision.

The controlled release won’t occur for about two years as Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. prepares for the process, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The water will be diluted before release, and the government will strengthen efforts to monitor radioactivity, METI said.

The U.S. said the move was in line with global standards but Japan’s neighbors criticized the plan ahead of the official announcement. South Korea on Monday expressed “grave concern” over an ocean release and China has urged Japan to prudently deal with the issue. Local fishing groups in Fukushima prefecture have also said they strongly oppose the release.

“Disposing of the treated water is an unavoidable issue for decommissioning the Fukushima nuclear power plant,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said.

The decision ends years of debate over how to dispose of the water that’s enough to fill more than 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools, which has been leaking into the power stations that suffered core meltdowns after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

The radioactive water is pumped out of the facility, treated, and then stored in one of roughly 1,000 tanks at the site. The processing removes most of the radioactive elements except for tritium. Storage tanks for the water at the site are forecast to be full by mid-2022.

Japan “appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards” with regard to its decision on disposing radioactive water from Fukushima into the sea, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement. Discharges are a common practice in the industry and Japan has said its release meets global guidelines.

A panel within Japan’s METI recommended to the government last year that the water should be released into the ocean or evaporated. The proposal stipulated that any water that is released into the environment will be re-purified and diluted to meet standards and that the discharges take place over decades, according to a December 2019 report from METI.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report in April 2020 that those recommendations were “based on a sufficiently comprehensive analysis and on a sound scientific and technical basis.”