“What else is in the tanks is an important question before you decide what to do with it,” cautioned Buesseler, one of the world’s top experts on the issue.
Unlike the gases that escaped from the plant in high volumes in the early months of the crisis, he says, the kinds of radioactive contamination found in the waters used to cool the reactors is “a completely different beast” that includes far more dangerous isotopes such as Cobalt-60, Strontium-90, and Caesium.īy TEPCO’s own account, ALPS has “reduced” concentrations of these much more concerning isotopes but it has not eliminated them. Toxic water from the devastated Fukushima plant is being stored on-site, and the government has suggested it should be released into the sea However, Buesseler says there are more serious grounds for concern about the other more dangerous elements that will be discharged when water from the Fukushima Daiichi is let out into the sea. Much larger amounts of Tritium have already been deposited in the seas, since hundreds of nuclear reactors around the world are allowed to release it and because nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Pacific in the 1950s also discharged it into the surrounding oceans. Tritium, explains Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is “one of the least harmful” radioactive isotopes, and may not pose any significant threat to human health. The plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has treated the contaminated water through what it calls the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), noting on its website that this “eventually removes most of the radioactive materials except Tritium.” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, touring the nearby city of Minamisoma on Saturday, said that the water disposal policy would be decided “at an appropriate time and in a responsible manner.” But he added: “We can’t delay our decision indefinitely”. The concern has delayed the authorities’ decision about the radioactive waters’ release but no answers have been forthcoming since then.
Widely reported plans to dump the water into the Pacific Ocean have created national and international alarm. The contaminated water is currently housed in about 1,000 thousand metal tanks on the grounds of the plant and the authorities say that there is little space for more. And the voices calling for the government to embrace alternative, greener forms of energy and to decommission its nuclear reactors have only grown louder.Īfter Fukushima was swamped by a tsunami that left three of its reactors in meltdown in 2011, its opaque decommissioning process has ensured the crippled plant remains in the spotlight as authorities debate what to do with the nearly 1.25 million tonnes of radioactive water used to cool the melted reactors down.
Ten years after a tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northeastern Japan, controversy and doubts over its clean-up efforts continue to dog the industry.
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