While outlining the government position in sympathetic details, the Post is more dismissive of the opposition, which is led by the regional fishing industry, which is only halfway recovered from 2011. "Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away across the sea," snidely reports the Post without mentioning that South Korea has banned Fukushima seafood. The Post also omits Japanese resistance from the Coastal Science and Societies and other environmental organizations, as well as the Catholic bishops of Japan and South Korea.
As for the routine sampling of fish caught off Fukushima, the Post writes rather dismissively: "Tests routinely come back clear, although last month a solitary black rockfish was found to have cesium levels five times the national standard, the first fish to fail the test in 16 months." Cesium at five times the "safe level"? Not important? Perhaps it's an anomaly, but the understanding of Fukushima's radioactive particle is still rudimentary. In 2011 it became well known that Cesium particles spread as far as Tokyo. In 2021, a team of international scientists has announced the discovery of a previously unknown, larger and more radioactive Cesium particle. This Cesium particle was apparently formed in the Fukushima Unit 1 hydrogen explosion and spread to the northwest of the reactor. Ten years later, and they're still discovering what needs to be cleaned up. That's on land. So how much more is unknown about radioactivity in the ocean?
On March 3, Yonhap News Agency summed up the status of Fukushima radioactive water dumping this way:
"A Japanese government official said Wednesday that Tokyo cannot continue to delay the disposal of contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant due to tank storage limits, though it has yet to decide when and how to release it."
There is no plan in place but the government and TEPCO argue that they have to carry it out because they will run out of storage space for contaminated water by the summer of 2022. At the same time, the radiation level at the perimeter of the Fukushima facility is already eight times the "safe level" set by the government.
"TEPCO told the press that the predominant reason behind the sharp increase in radiation at the plant was X-rays coming from storage tanks holding radioactive water that has been leaking from the Fukushima facility. The water in the tanks contains traces of radioactive strontium along with other substances that react with the materials the tank is composed of, producing X-rays, said officials."
Apparently they didn't know how the tanks would interact with radioactive materials before they set about filling more than a thousand of them. Or if they did know, they went ahead anyway. That would be consistent with the government's allowing TEPCO to build the Fukushima plant in 1967 at sea level rather than on a bluff less vulnerable to tsunamis or groundwater flow. And it would be consistent with the government allowing TEPCO to ignore safeguards in the government's 2002 long-term earthquake assessment.
Nuclear power has always been a corrupt enterprise, but in Japan now that corruption is coming back to hold its perpetrators accountable. On February 19, the Tokyo High Court ordered the government and TEPCO to pay damages of $2.63 million to 43 people who were forced to evacuate from their homes by the Fukushima disaster. The presiding judge called the government's regulatory inaction "extremely unreasonable." There are as many as 30 more such suits pending in Japanese courts.
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