One Year After Fukushima Dumping Water, Still No Known Radioactive Impact

TOKYO (FR 24) – August 24, 2024 marks one year since the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) began discharging contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea. Since then, the biggest concern has been whether the ocean will be contaminated by radioactive materials.

The plant’s three reactors were destroyed by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011. One of the problems was that the fuel used at the plant began to melt, and to cool the plant the company pumped groundwater and rainwater.

Since then, the water, contaminated with radioactive residues, has been piling up in 1,000 tanks within the Fukushima nuclear power plant. On April 13, 2021, the Japanese government announced that it would use the Advanced Liquid Processing System ALPS to treat the water before discharging it into the sea. Finally, dumping began on August 24, 2023.

Since then, until August 7, 2024, there have been 8 downloads. They have each released 7,800 cubic meters of treated water, and TEPCO explains that they have dumped 62,400 cubic meters of the plant into the sea. This is less than 5% of the 1.3 million tons of water they have collected, and in fact, the company warns that this work will take at least 30 years.

Tritium: a component not removed during water treatment

Environmental concerns focus on the only radioactive isotope that cannot be removed but only reduced after water treatment: tritium. The Japanese government explains that through the ALPS process, they inject seawater before pouring the concentrated water into the ocean to dilute it more than 100 times, and insists that this reduces the tritium content to one-fortieth.

However, even in small quantities, tritium can have an impact, as explained by María Florencia Ferreira, a marine biologist in the field of ecotoxicology who studies how tritium affects the environment. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Plymouth, she specifically studied the case of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and published an academic article on the topic in March this year.

She told France 24 that tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that releases energy and causes damage when in direct contact. Its half-life is 12 years, meaning it can release energy during this time.

Ferreira explains that this energy can affect marine biodiversity. “We know that there are some invertebrates, such as mollusks and even larvae, that are severely affected by the presence of tritium, since it affects the developing cells and can produce malformations or changes in mobility due to changes in muscle development, for example,” he points out. This depends on the species being evaluated and to clarify it requires many studies, since most of them focus on the best-known models.

Hong Kong bans import of Japanese seafood

In the case of humans, it says that ingestion of tritium, for example through fish contaminated with this radioactive isotope, could produce genetic damage “because cells have genetic material that can be damaged by the energy of tritium and create an imbalance within the organism.”

In fact, Hong Kong has banned seafood imports from 10 Japanese prefectures since the dumping of garbage in the Fukushima Sea began, and this restriction is still in effect. At the same time, from August 23, 2023 to August 23, 2024, they sampled 78,800 Japanese products to check whether they exceeded the permitted level of radioactive contamination. But according to the Food Safety Center, the Hong Kong agency in charge of this matter, they all passed the test.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has studied the tritium content of each Tepco discharge and has stated in eight studies that the radioactive isotope is below the Japanese limit of 1,500 becquerels per liter; although the IAEA has not published data on exactly how much tritium was found. On the other hand, it is necessary to clarify that these operational limits are far below the limit set by the World Health Organization for water to be drinkable, as the WHO limit is 10,000 becquerels per liter.

Nevertheless, over time, some consequences could arise. “At the moment, these limits are safe based on the information we have. But that’s today, and the question is what will happen in the long term, because we know that some species can bioaccumulate tritium in their bodies and that it can be amplified throughout the food chain; that is, the levels of tritium can increase,” explains Ferreira.

In addition to the lack of knowledge about tritium’s long-term effects, studies to date on its behavior in animals and humans have generally been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, rather than directly in the field, according to Ferreira.

But science has proven that existing environmental problems can make tritium’s consequences worse. On the one hand, ocean warming puts additional pressure on marine biodiversity, which will be affected by radioactivity. On the other hand, as Ferreira points out, when tritium binds to microplastics in the water, the isotope can persist longer in organisms.

Even so, Ferreira believes that a controlled release of water from the Fukushima plant is by far the safest way to eliminate the liquid, because the disaster could be exacerbated if another earthquake destroyed the tanks currently storing contaminated water and liquids were even released without treatment. This would cause not only more tritium to be released, but also all the radioactive components eliminated by current treatments.

Ferreira did recommend ongoing monitoring to assess the long-term consequences of tritium.