Japanese environment minister threatens (yet again) to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste water into Pacific

As posted at the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Project's WHAT'S NEWS page:

• The Guardian - Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into Pacific, minister says - Justin Mccurry In Tokyo
• The Independent - Japan to dump radioactive water from Fukushima nuclear disaster into Pacific, minister says - Corazon Miller
• Japan Today - TEPCO will have to dump radioactive Fukushima water into Pacific, minister says

Update on September 11, 2019 by admin

Beyond Nuclear was interviewed on the Thom Hartmann Program, TRT World, as well as by RT t.v., on Sept. 10th about this story.

Sputnik International's "Loud & Clear" also interviewed Beyond Nuclear about this on Sept. 11th.

Update on September 12, 2019 by admin

A note, and link, from Dr. Gordon Edwards at Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility:

"Water, Water, Everywhere 

 And Not a Drop to Drink!"

                         - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 

                         The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Here is a link below to a TV News interview I gave this morning on CTV. It’ s about 1000 huge tanks of radioactively contaminated water at Fukushima in Japan, and the fact that the industry wants to dump it all into the Pacific Ocean!!

Note: to hear the interview, you may have to “unmute” the sound.

South Korea has insisted that its Olympic athletes in attendance at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics must have their own kitchen and food preparation because the Korean gov't does not want its athletes eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated beverages.

https://www.ctv.ca/Your-Morning/Video/Why-Japan-might-dump-radioactive-water-into-the-Pacific-and-who-is-trying-to-stop-it-vid1776456

Update on September 12, 2019 by admin

Here is an entry from Beyond Nuclear's Sept. 12, 2019 weekly email bulletin:

Japanese environment minister threatens (yet again) to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste water into Pacific 

As posted at our Japan website section, the Shinzo Abe administration has floated its biggest trial balloon yet, regarding dumping a million tons of highly radioactive waste water into the ocean. The waste water is currently stored onsite at the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, in around a thousand large, shoddy containers (see photo, above). Beyond Nuclear was interviewed about this dangerous scheme by several media outlets, including on Sputnik International's "Loud & Clear" program, TRT World, and the Thom Hartmann Program. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been pushing this idea for years, but so far has been blocked by Japanese fishing co-operatives, as well as diplomatic pressure from the likes of South Korea. TEPCO even hired American "experts" to provide it shameless political cover for the scheme, namely former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Dale Klein, and former U.S. Department of Energy Yucca Mountain Project acting director Lake Barrett.  

 

As Rosalie Bertell stated "Dilution is not the solution to radioactive pollution!" Michael Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes has said, "dilution is a delusion." Indeed, rather than diluting and dispersing in the ocean, the astronomically high concentrations of tritium (radioactive hydrogen) in the waste water would re-concentrate in the food chain through bio-accumulation, harming humans at the top. Contrary to nuclear industry false assurances, tritium is hazardous to human health. Rather than dumping it in the ocean, or evaporating it into the air (in which case people downwind would be inhaling hazardous tritium), the tritiated water could be loaded onto supertankers and taken away to a more stable, safe, and secure location, and allowed to radioactively decay (tritium has a 12.3-year half-life, so 123 years of hazardous persistence). Dr. Arjun Makhijani of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research shared this proposal in a PBS NewsHour interview many years ago, early in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe. As Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International has pointed out, the waste water contains other hazardous radioactive isotopes besides tritium, so still needs to undergo additional filtering. These radioactive isotopes must be isolated from the living environment for as long as they remain hazardous.