Fukushima Nuclear Wastewater Discharge : Why Must We Stop It?

Original Text: Seunghyun Hong(Issue Briefing Team, ISC)
Translation: Jae Oh Lee (Translation Team, ISC)

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has completed its preparations to discharge the wastewater from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. According to a recent report by the Korea Broadcasting System, an undersea tunnel approximately 1.3km long has been excavated to carry the wastewater into the sea. In addition, the two-week long test run of the facility has begun. In July, Director General Rafael Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Japan to inspect the nuclear plant itself, after which the IAEA will report its final assessment to Prime Minister Kishida. It is likely that the Japanese government will make the final decision on when to begin the wastewater discharge based on the IAEA assessment.

Recently, this wastewater dump has become a fierce controversy. Of course, the overwhelming majority of opinions oppose the action, but there are some who defend the wastewater dump, citing alleged scholarly evidence to frame the opposition as an unscientific hoax.  

In May, the Korean Federation of Environmental Movements commissioned a survey to Research View, and the results showed an 85.4% opposition to the wastewater dump. With the majority of the Korean public against this move, why do some still claim scientific basis in their support of the disposal? 

An article published by Yonhap News in April shows that the so-called scientific evidence in support of the dump does not hold up to scrutiny.

TEPCO released the following statement through their Treated Water Portal site:

Multi-nuclide removal equipment (ALPS) can remove 62 types of nuclides. The wastewater currently in storage has already been treated with ALPS, and will undergo repurification until the concentration of radioactive materials meet national standards for discharge. ALPS treated water has been purified to meet ALPS recommended standards, and is different from wastewater. As for Tritium and Carbon-14 which cannot be removed by ALPS, dilution with seawater will reduce the nuclide concentration to one-seventh of WHO standards for drinking water. 

The Japanese government officially adopted this Basic Policy on Handling of the ALPS Treated Water in a cabinet meeting on April 13th, 2021. At the time, IAEA welcomed the decision, stating that “Japan’s chosen water disposal method is both technically feasible and in line with international practice”. 

The supporters of the wastewater dump cite the above statement word-for-word in order to frame the Korean public opinion as an unscientific hoax. However, the skepticism of the Korean public is not directed to scientific findings, but towards the Japanese government. Even if there were scientific proofs supporting wastewater discharge, it would not be unreasonable to oppose such a disposal when there is no clear proof of its safety.  

While the United States and the IAEA support the wastewater discharge, the Pacific Island Forum (PIF), composed of 18 states including Australia and New Zealand, has requested information from TEPCO regarding the discharge, and formed an independent advisory body of scientists to review it.   

The PIF advisory group composed of experts in nuclear physics, marine science and biology participated in the debate held at Korean National Assembly in January to share their findings from analyzing the TEPCO data. According to their report, the expert consensus is that the TEPCO data is “incomplete, inadequate, inconsistent”. TEPCO provided their analysis data of the wastewater across the 4.3 year period from October 2017 to February 2023, but their data sample was too incomplete to be an adequate representation of the situation.

One of the presenters at the debate, Professor Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, stated in an interview with Yonhap News that “TEPCO only sampled a third of the 1038 storage tanks, with no more than nine nuclides measured in each sample. TEPCO had previously agreed to measure 64 nuclides in the wastewater”. 

He also stated that “TEPCO’s samples are not from a single storage tank but rather from a batch of ten”, adding that “from each tank of 10 million liters, only 30 liters would have been sampled”. 

In addition, he further stated that there was no mention of collecting samples from different depths of the wastewater tanks, and that there were very few measurements, if any, of the radioactive sludges that had sedimented at the bottom of the tanks.

Radioactive wastewater sediments sludges over time, which causes leads to different types and concentration of nuclides depending on when and where the sample is collected. As such, TEPCO’s data cannot fully represent such variables. 

With the wastewater purification results so questionable at best, how would one accept its discharge into the sea? Even if the ALPS process fully purifies the wastewater, it cannot remove the tritium and carbon-14 nuclides. As such, TEPCO plans to dilute it with seawater before the discharge. However, the total quantity of the radioactive material released would still be the same. The released radioactive materials will then be concentrated along the food chain until they finally reach human consumption. The half-life of tritium is 12.1 years, whereas the half-life of carbon-14 is 5700 years.  

The Japanese government has stated that the preparations for the wastewater discharge are nearly complete, and that they are currently in the process of persuading Fukushima fishermen. They claim that the discharge will not begin as long as the fishermen oppose the action. However, it is unclear if the Japanese government will stay true to its words. 

With the backing of the United States and the IAEA, it is only a matter of time before the wastewater dump begins. Once the discharge starts, the Pacific ocean will be contaminated with radiation for the next three decades. With no clear prediction on how the radioactive discharge might disrupt the ecosystem of the ocean and the planet, what choices should we make? It is time for the people around the world to come in solidarity with the people of Fukushima and international environmental organizations to engage in a sweeping campaign to fight against the wastewater dump. Such a global ecological catastrophe must be stopped.