April 28th, 2021
It’s been ten years since the devastating 9.0 magnitude Tōhoku earthquake and its subsequent 46 foot-tall tsunami killed more than 18,000 people, obliterated entire towns, and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. As the incident unfolded in March, 2011, the stricken power plant released massive amounts of cesium-137 into the surrounding environment (roughly 80 percent of the material running into the Pacific ocean) and continued to pour out around 30 gigabecquerel of cesium-137 and strontium-90 for the next two years. And, as of 2018, around 2 gigabecquerel of radioactive pollution still manages to escape the site daily.
Now, as a decommissioning project that is expected to take a generation to complete enters its second decade, Japan’s government announced a controversial decision regarding the site’s continued cleanup. The government reportedly has approved a plan to dump more than a million tons (~250 million gallons) of seawater treated with the Advanced Liquid Processing System which has been stored at the Fukushima site into surrounding Japanese waters. This water has been stored in a series of 1,000 submerged metal tanks holding the equivalent to 500 Olympic sized swimming pools, which have been built out of over the years as increased capacity has become necessary. Problem is, the site is running out of space so the plan is to slowly release the treated water, gradually diluting it into the surrounding seas over the course of 20 to 30 years. Really, what could go wrong with a plan to release radioactively contaminated liquids — despite being stringently purified — into the open ocean? Perhaps not as much as we’d initially feared.