The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared himself, on Wednesday, satisfied with Japan’s plans to dump treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, despite the controversy surrounding them.
Rafael Mariano Grossi’s statement came after learning, on the spot, the situation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, destroyed by an earthquake and a tsunami.
Grossi pointed out where the treated water would be sent through an aqueduct to a shoreline facility, where it would be diluted with salt water, and received a final test sample. The water will then be released one kilometer offshore through an underwater tunnel.
“I’m satisfied with what I saw,” Grossi said, after viewing the equipment in the unit for the planned unloading, which Japan intends to start this summer. “I didn’t see pending issues,” he added.
The release of this water arouses opposition inside and outside Japan.
Early Wednesday morning, Grossi met with mayors and leaders of fishermen’s associations and stressed that the IAEA will be present during the discharge of the water, which should take decades, to guarantee safety and respond to the concerns of the residents.
He revealed that a permanent IAEA presence will be organized at the center, to demonstrate its long-term commitment.
The discharge of the water is not “some strange plan that was conceived only to be applied here and they proposed it,” Grossi said, during the meeting in Iwaki, 40 kilometers from the plant. He added that the method is certified by the IAEA and is applied in other parts of the world.
The IAEA, in its final report on the Fukushima plan, published on Tuesday, concludes that the treated water, which still contains a small amount of radioactivity, is safer than international standards and its environmental impact and on people’s health. it will be negligible.
Local fishing organizations have rejected the plan because they are concerned about the reputational impact, even if their catches are not contaminated.
South Korea, China and some Pacific island groups still oppose the plan, for both political and security reasons.
Grossi should also travel to South Korea, New Zealand and the Cook Islands, to try to reduce concerns there. His goal, he explained, is to explain what the IAEA is doing to ensure there are no problems.
To try to ease concerns about fisheries and the marine environment, Grossi and Tomoaki Kobayakawa, president of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, signed an agreement for a joint project to determine the impact of tritium, the only radionuclide that the technicians assure cannot be removed from the water due to the treatment it may have.
In South Korea, government officials said Wednesday that the water released is highly unlikely to have worrying levels of contamination.
Meanwhile, China reiterated its objections to the release of the water in a statement issued on Tuesday, accusing the IAEA of not reflecting all views and Japan of treating the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground.
An earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 destroyed the plant’s cooling systems, causing three reactors to melt down and contaminating the cooling water, which has been permanently draining. The water has been collected, treated and stored in about a thousand tanks, which will reach their capacity in early 2024.
After meeting with Grossi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that Japan would continue to provide “detailed explanations based on scientific evidence, with a high degree of transparency, both internally and externally.”
Source: TSF
