Japan wants to release Fukushima's waste water into the ocean - and a lot of people are not happy.
By Tessa WongJapan's controversial plan to release treated waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean has sparked anxiety and anger at home and abroad.
Since the disaster, power plant company Tepco has been pumping in water to cool down the Fukushima nuclear reactors' fuel rods. This means every day the plant produces contaminated water, which is stored in massive tanks. Tritium and carbon-14 are, respectively, radioactive forms of hydrogen and carbon, and are difficult to separate from water. They are widely present in the natural environment, water and even in humans, as they are formed in the Earth's atmosphere and can enter the water cycle.The filtered water goes through another treatment, and is then diluted with seawater to reduce the remaining substances' concentrations, before it is released into the ocean via a 1km underground tunnel.
He said the impact of the annual radiation doses from the discharge into the ocean were lower than dental x-rays or mammograms - even for those who eat a lot of seafood. Tatsujiro Suzuki, a nuclear engineering professor from Nagasaki University's Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, told the BBC the plan would "not necessarily lead to serious pollution or readily harm the public - if everything goes well".
"The government enforces a strong no-littering policy at sea… But now the government is not saying a word about the wastewater flowing into the ocean," Park Hee-jun, a South Korean fisherman told BBC Korean.
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