By G. Edward Griffin
A panel of experts advised the government of Japan to dump over a million tons of radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. The option of allowing it to evaporate was rejected because it is expensive. And, as Reuters notes, based on past practice it is likely the government will accept the recommendation, even though it means that Japan’s neighbors will now have to suffer the consequences of the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Since the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, has collected nearly 1.2-million tones of contaminated water from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting. Japan’s neighbors now must deal with the consequences of contaminated water.
Japan’s neighbor, South Korea, has for much of the past decade retained a ban on imports of seafood from Japan’s Fukushima region imposed after the nuclear disaster and summoned a senior Japanese embassy official last year to explain how the Fukushima water would be dealt with. They will soon have a very unsatisfactory answer.
The build-up of contaminated water at Fukushima has been a major sticking point in the clean-up, which is likely to last decades, especially as the Olympics are due to be held in Tokyo this summer with some events less than 60 km from the wrecked plant and the Fukushima seclusion zone which will remain uninhabitable for centuries. According to Reuters, athletes are planning to bring their own radiation detectors and food to the Games.
In 2018, the plant operator, TEPCO, apologized after admitting it lied about the cleanup efforts and that its filtration systems had not removed all dangerous material from the water – and the site was running out of room for storage tanks. Among the ludicrous proposals concocted to contain the radioactive water was an idea straight out of Game of Thrones – an underground ice wall. It did not work.
As a result, having given up on any containment approaches, Tokyo will now literally flood the world with radioactive water. Perhaps in an attempt to mitigate the angry outcry from a world that is suddenly obsessed with a clean environment, Japan said it plans to remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that cannot be effectively removed with current technology. While it is unclear just how Japan plans on “filtering” out radiation, we with them the best of luck with that particular PR campaign.