Earlier this week, news broke of Japan’s Environmental Prime Minister Yoshiaki Harada announcing his preferred solution for an impending overflow of toxic water at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant: dump it into the Pacific Ocean.
According to TEPCO, in 2022, they will run out of storage space for the contaminated water that’s been used in cooling pipes that have kept fuel cores from melting since a 2011 earthquake caused the meltdown of three reactors. To be exact, they already have more than 1,000 storage tanks and now more than 250 million gallons of contaminated water.
“The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it,” he said Tuesday, according to Reuters.“The whole of the government will discuss this, but I would like to offer my simple opinion.”
Officially, the Japanese government is waiting on a report and recommendations from an expert panel to decide what they’ll do. While we don’t need a scientist to describe to the world why dumping nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is potentially dangerous, it does require some expert analysis to argue the contrary. And some in the know are obliging, outlining exactly why it might be okay to dump contaminated water from a nuclear power plant into said ocean.
“Although not intuitive, this is a very good idea,” author and Earth and environmental sciences expert, James Conca wrote in Forbes this week. Conca and professor Neil Hyatt from the University of Sheffield, who is also an expert in radioactive waste management, are just two people familiar with the idea who advocate for dumping the contaminated water into the ocean as a means to diluting it. Never mind the fact that a 2018 study revealed toxic water was actually flowing into the nearby bay for five years after the 2011 disaster that caused the meltdown in the first place. So really, the debate now is whether or not to purposefully dump it all into the water.
“All of the other radioactive elements have been removed from the water by chemical treatment and the amount of other elements in the water is relatively small and wouldn’t pose a hazard,” Conca writes in his piece.
Hyatt explained to CNA this week (in the video, above) that the process of cooling damaged reactors leaves the water (mostly) with a radioisotope called tritium, which is considered harmless to people and regularly dumped into the ocean by coastal power plants. And by Hyatt’s (and Yoshiaki Harada’s) logic, the ocean is really big so it will actually just dilute the contaminated water. CNA’s anchors didn’t exactly let Hyatt off the hook though, considering that even though the Pacific Ocean is, in fact, really large, the dumping will still take place in concentrated areas. On top of that, TEPCO and Harada didn’t reveal exactly how much waste would need to be dumped to solve their storage problem. Hyatt explains that “if done correctly,” the process is quite safe. CNA’s anchors again went after Hyatt, reminding him that the entire reason TEPCO landed in this predicament, to begin with, was because of an unpredictable massive earthquake. Newly-appointed Japanese environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi shares a similar sentiment, arguing that Japan should scrap Nuclear reactors after Fukushima precisely because earthquakes can’t be predicted or controlled, and another disaster is always a possibility.
“I would like to study how we will scrap them, not how to retain them,” Koizumi said. “We will be doomed if we allow another nuclear accident to occur. We never know when we’ll have an earthquake.”
