The Japanese government stresses the release of accumulating water used to cool melted nuclear fuel at the crippled Fukushima power plant will be regulated in line with international standards, but concerns remain among consumers, fishermen and environmentalists over the impact on marine products.
The concerns are in no small part rooted in persistent distrust among the Japanese public toward the government and the plant operator,
The government and
The company is set to be effectively banned by
"We cannot help but have strong concerns about relying on
The series of misconduct came on top of an incident at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa complex in which a
The local fisheries industry says it is worried about further reputational damage to its products even if the government promises countermeasures such as publicizing that only food proven safe is shipped to consumers.
"The government may allocate budgets on measures against reputational damage, such damage will not disappear easily. All what we have done to resume fishing was for nothing," said a man in his 50s
The government's decision to discharge the treated water into the sea comes at a crucial time for the fisheries industry in the area, which has been banned from operating off the eastern
The local fishermen have just ended at the end of March test operations limiting days and areas of operations and were about to gradually start easing restrictions on fishing from April.
"Even if we insist that our fish are 'safe,' how the consumer feels is another issue. I am also worried about how people overseas would react to it," said
The total catch off Fukushima in 2020 remained less than 20 percent of that in 2010, a year before the disaster.
Some environmental groups assert it is wrong to say tritium-containing water poses little risk to human health when it is not proven. The government says that releasing water with a low concentration of tritium into the sea is a practice conducted by nuclear power plant operators around the world.
"Such significant differences in the standards across countries prove that there is no scientific foundation for the safety of tritium," Goto said, adding many countries have merely set standards because they needed to run nuclear power plants, which produce tritium as a byproduct.
"The government and
The storing of processed water used to cool down melted fuel is filling up all the tanks at the complex, and
It remains unclear when the debris can be taken out given the high radiation levels and how it would be stored, critics say. The roadmap to scrap the complex by 2041 to 2051 is being questioned after a series of delays in the process.
"The government says that the accumulation of treated water will hinder efforts to take out debris and thereby delay the decommissioning process, but retrieval of debris is impossible in the first place," said
"The decision to release treated water into the sea comes as part of the government's attempts to minimize the impact of the Fukushima crisis and show that the process to dismantle the complex is moving according to the roadmap," Tsutsui said.
==Kyodo
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