The Japanese Prime Minister stated this Friday that the Chinese ban on importing Japanese fish products, due to the release of treated radioactive water into the ocean, contrasts with the understanding shown by members of the international community.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, located on the northeast coast of Japan, began releasing treated and diluted radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean at the end of August. The Japanese fishing community opposed this release and China banned the import of all Japanese seafood products.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, after a session attended by leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as South Korea and China, that the release of water The treatment is carried out in accordance with international safety standards and with the assistance of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The official also stated that Japan has been gaining broad understanding from the international community and instead “highlighted” China’s blanket ban on Japanese seafood products.
The first period of water discharge into the sea from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant ends on Monday, as planned, the company responsible for the operations (Tepco) announced this Friday.
Samples were collected and analyzed daily to measure the radioactivity of the discharged water, and this level was systematically lower than the maximum limit set at 1,500 becquerels/liter, Tepco announced in a statement.
This limit is 40 times lower than the Japanese standard for this type of discharge into the sea and is also almost seven times lower than the limit set by the World Health Organization for drinking water (10,000 Bq/L).
The water that Tepco began pouring into the Pacific Ocean on August 24 comes from rain, groundwater and injections necessary to cool the cores of the three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant (northeast Japan) that melted after the 2011 tsunami. .
For a long time, this water was stored in huge tanks at the plant site and treated to remove radioactive substances, except for tritium, which experts say is only dangerous in very high concentrated doses.
For this reason, Tepco widely dilutes water with tritium in seawater before discharging it into the ocean, so that its radioactivity level does not exceed the limit of 1,500 Bq/L.
An alarm from a filtered water pipe leak detector sounded on Wednesday, but an immediate inspection “confirmed” it was a false alarm, Tepco said in the statement.
In total, during this first phase of 17 days, around 7,800 cubic meters of water containing tritium will have been discharged. In late August, Tepco said it was planning three more similar operations by the end of March 2024.
In total, Japan plans to dump more than 1.3 million m3 of Fukushima water into the Pacific Ocean – the equivalent of 540 Olympic swimming pools – but very gradually, until the early 2050s, according to the current calendar.
Source: TSF
