‘Not a land of waste’: Pacific Ocean condemns Fukushima water plan | Nuclear Energy News

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands says there is a viable alternative to Japan’s plan to dump more than one million tons of treated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean, and that requires urgent consideration.

The wastewater is the product of efforts to cool the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that were badly damaged in the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The Northern Mariana Islands, a territory of the United States with a population of about 51,659, is located 2,500 kilometers (1,553 mi) southeast of Japan. The islands’ leaders have declared Japan’s plan, which was officially announced last year, unacceptable.

“The expectation is that layoffs won’t happen until 2023. There is time to rescind this decision,” Sheila J. Babuta, a member of the House of Representatives for the Northern Mariana Islands, told Al Jazeera in an interview last month. In December, her government adopted a joint resolution opposing any country’s decision to dispose of nuclear waste in the Pacific Ocean.

“The efforts that went into creating the joint resolution revealed research and reports from Greenpeace East Asia highlighting alternatives to the storage of Japanese nuclear waste, including the only acceptable option, long-term storage and processing using BAT,” Papauta said. .

Currently, Japan intends to dispose of all wastewater, which will be treated, over a period of about 30 years.

Concern is high among local Japanese fishermen and coastal communities. Its plan has met with outspoken opposition from neighboring countries, including China, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as the Pacific Island States and the Pacific Islands Forum, the region’s intergovernmental organization.

“This water is adding to oceans that are already nuclear-polluted. This threatens the lives and livelihoods of islanders who depend heavily on marine resources. These include inshore fisheries as well as pelagic fish such as tuna. The first provides daily sustenance and food security, and the second is much-needed foreign exchange via Fishing licenses for far-water fishing nations’ fleets,” Vijay Naidu, Associate Professor in the School of Law and Social Sciences of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, told Al Jazeera.

It was the use of the Pacific islands for nuclear weapons testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France from the 1940s until the late 2000s that led to heated opposition among the islanders to any nuclear-related activities in the region.

Nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, including at Bikini Atoll in 1946, led to strong opposition to nuclear activities in the region. [File: AFP)

Radioactive contamination from more than 300 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests rendered many locations, especially in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, uninhabitable and led to irreversible long-term health disorders in affected communities.

Satyendra Prasad, the Chair of Pacific Islands Forum Ambassadors at the United Nations, reminded the world in September last year of the Pacific’s “ongoing struggle with the legacy of nuclear testing from the transboundary contamination of homes and habitats to higher numbers of birth defects and cancers”.

In 1985, regional leaders established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, prohibiting the testing and use of nuclear explosive devices and the dumping of radioactive wastes in the sea by member states, including Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Island nations.

“For us in the Pacific, the Pacific Ocean has become a proving ground, a theatre of war, a highway for nuclear submarines and waste. The Pacific is not a dumping ground for radioactive waste water,” Maureen Penjueli, Co-ordinator of the Pacific Network on Globalisation, added.

Running out of space

When the earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima power plant, three nuclear reactors went into meltdown.

The process of decommissioning the disaster-hit site, which could take up to four decades, includes pumping cooling water through the affected infrastructure to prevent overheating. About 170 cubic metres of treated wastewater is accumulating every day and now fills at least 1,000 tanks around the site.

The Japanese government says it needs to release the water because it is running out of space to store it all.

It says it consulted with other countries in the region after announcing its plan in April last year, conducting briefings with Pacific Island Forum countries and the organisation’s secretariat. It adds that it will cooperate with the international community and adhere to relevant international standards.

“In November last year, experts from laboratories of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]France, Germany and the Republic of Korea visited Japan to collect specimens such as fish. “These samples will be divided and sent to these laboratories for analysis,” a spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry told Al Jazeera.

Monitoring of the offshore area will be enhanced from one year prior to discharge, which is expected to begin in the spring of 2022 under the current plan. Measurement of the concentration of nuclides regulated by law, including tritium and carbon-14, will be measured prior to discharge into the sea, and results reports will be published.”

Last year, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, expressed support for Japan’s decision.

“We will work closely with Japan before, during and after the water discharge,” Grossi said. “Our cooperation and presence will help build confidence, in Japan and abroad, that water disposal is being done without negative impact on human health and the environment.”

The United States also gave its support to Japan.

Babauta believes that storage space is available at the Fukushima Daiichi site and on adjacent lands in the Futaba and Okuma regions of Japan.

In a report published in 2020, Greenpeace argued that the “only acceptable solution” was for Japan to continue storing and treating the polluted water over the long term.

“This is logistically feasible and will allow time to deploy a more efficient processing technology as well as allow the risk of radioactive tritium to naturally diminish,” the environmental group said. Greenpeace said that while the Japanese government considered allocating land for storage in Okuma and Futaba, ocean drainage was seen as easier and less time-consuming.

The option of storing wastewater is also favored by the expert civil society organisation, Citizens Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE), which is supported by Tilman Rove, Associate Professor at the Institute of Global Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

“they [CCNE’s] The recommendation for water management is that the first thing to do is store it in large, secure, long-lived, properly built tanks similar to those Japan uses for its national oil and petroleum reserves… The argument they make, which I think is really very valid, is that if stored This water is not for an indefinite period, but even for about 50-60 years, then, by then, the tritium will have disintegrated into a tiny bit “what it is today and hardly a problem,” Raff told Al Jazeera.

An aerial view shows treated water storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which were destroyed in the 2011 tsunami. [File: Kyodo/via Reuters]

The Japanese government insists that the impact of radiation on human health as a result of the discharge is minimal, specifying that it will reach 0.00081 mSv/year (mSv of radiation annually), which is part of the normal radiation exposure level, estimated at 2.1 mSv/year. But medical experts have serious concerns about the sheer volume of the sewage and the potential precipitation of even trace amounts of tritium, a radioactive isotope that won’t be removed during treatment.

“Tritium is a natural pollutant from the discharges, and the cooling water is from normal reactor operations, but that equates to several centuries of natural production of tritium that is in this water, so it’s a pretty big amount,” Rove said.

“The government says it will dilute the water so that it does not exceed the concentration limits that are regulated … It might allow you to flag a regulatory requirement, but it doesn’t actually reduce the amount of radioactivity that enters the environment and is a Nobel Prize winner and co-chair of International Physicians to Prevent Nuclear War: “The amount of radioactivity being released here is really critical.”

He says the human and environmental consequences of very low levels of radiation exposure cannot be ruled out.

“Obviously, the higher the exposure level [to radiation]”The higher the risk, but no lower level there is no effect,” Rove said. “It has now been proven fairly conclusively, because in the past decade or so there have been very impressive large numbers of people exposed to low doses of radiation. At levels, even a fraction of those we receive from the normal background. [radiation] Exposure from rocks, from cosmic radiation. Even at those extremely low levels, adverse effects have been demonstrated.”

For Papota and other Pacific Islanders, no effect can be defended.

Right now, she says, it’s critical that the Northern Mariana Islands “have a seat at the decision-making table. Major decisions like these affect the very essence of our lives as Pacific Islanders, and in turn affect the future of our children and future generations.”

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