Soon we’ll have warning labels on fish that say “collected in Radioactive free waters.” Oh Godzilla coming soon – PB/TK
Fukushima’s Nuclear Waste Will Be Dumped Into the Ocean, Japanese Plant Owner Decides – By Tom O’Connor / July 14 2017
Toxic waste produced by one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters will be dumped into the sea, according to the head of the Japanese company tasked with cleaning up the radioactive mess, despite protests from local fishermen.
Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), told foreign media that nearly 777,000 tons of water tainted with tritium, a byproduct of the nuclear process that is notoriously difficult to filter out of water, will be dumped into the Pacific Ocean as part of a multibillion-dollar recovery effort following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. That year, an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing over 15,000 people and leading to a series of meltdowns at the TEPCO-owned Fukushima No. 1, or Daiichi, nuclear power plant, causing it to spew radiation that has plagued the region ever since. While much progress has been made to clean the area, the company has only just resolved the debate over what to do with the water that was used to cool the plant’s damaged reactors, causing it to become tainted with tritium.
“The decision has already been made,” Kawamura said, according to The Japan Times.
“We could have decided much earlier, and that is TEPCO’s responsibility,” he added, according to Reuters.
Tritium is relatively harmless to humans in small doses, and Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Agency Chairman Shunichi Tanaka told The Guardian last year that the tritium in Fukushima’s tanks was “so weak in its radioactivity it won’t penetrate plastic wrapping.” Dumping tritium-contaminated water into the sea is not at all an uncommon practice at nuclear power plants, but it’s been met with opposition by local fishermen, who say their industry has suffered enough in the aftermath of the environmental crisis.
Continue to newsweek.com article: http://www.newsweek.com/fukushima-nuclear-waste-dumped-ocean-japanese-protests-637108
