Turning back toxic flows of misinformation

Year on from Japan's decision to dump Fukushima water into ocean, fears at home and abroad are only deepening

Storage tanks hold treated water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, as seen on April 13, 2021. (KYODO NEWS VIA AP)

For the past week, Hisae Unuma has been traveling from Saitama Prefecture, outside Tokyo, to the heart of the metropolis in Shinjuku, the world's busiest railway station, where he has been handing out leaflets to passersby every day.

Boldly proclaiming "Protect children from exposure to radiation" in Japanese, the fliers are a key element of a campaign by Unuma to provoke stronger calls among ordinary Japanese for the government to scrap a decision to dump contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean.

The Japanese government has a duty to let people know about the fact of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant but they failed to do so and they covered up the truth.

Kenichi Oshima, professor in policy science at Ryukoku University

"The government kept promising reconstruction of my hometown Fukushima in the past decade, but dumping the water seems contrary to that pledge because it threatens a double blow to our community," says Unuma, one of the 38,000 people still unable to return to their homes and who were among the 160,000 residents evacuated from the region when an earthquake triggered a tsunami in March 2011 that devastated communities on the country's northeastern coast.

Living 3 kilometers from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Unuma was moved to the city of Kasu in Saitama Prefecture after the disaster.

"Eleven years have passed and my home remains in a dilapidated condition. The way back home is too difficult," he says.

Wednesday marks a year since Japan announced the plan to release more than 1.3 million metric tons of treated but still radioactive water into the ocean, and Unuma and fellow campaigners plan to protest against that decision on the day outside Japan's parliament, which is also known as the National Diet Building.

"Wednesday's gathering will be a small one because a lot of people have to work on that day and we will have a bigger protest on Saturday," Unuma says.

The decision has drawn widespread condemnation at home and abroad, but policymakers have shown no sign they are considering any reversal of the plan.

In one of the latest actions by opponents, civil society groups in the most affected prefectures submitted a petition in late March to Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, the Fukushima plant's operator. Reaffirming their opposition to the release of the contaminated water, they are demanding that the government pursue other alternatives. Consumer groups and fisheries associations are at the forefront of this action.

The petition had collected some 180,000 signatures from residents in the prefectures.

Katsuhito Fuyuki, the board chairperson of the Miyagi Consumers Cooperative Association, says the government's disposal plan has failed to win support from the people.

"The impact of the 2011 nuclear accident remains and imports of Miyagi fishery products are still banned by nearby countries," says Fuyuki, adding that the decision would deal a further blow to the local economy.

Under the government's plan, the authorities will gradually discharge the still-contaminated water from spring 2023. In all, the release would be sufficient to fill about 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The water has been used to cool highly radioactive damaged reactor cores as the massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima plant's cooling systems, triggering the meltdown of three reactors and the release of large amounts of radiation.

Japan insists there are no alternatives to the ocean discharge. It says that by the end of 2022 there will be no space left for storage. Moreover, after a treatment process known as the Advanced Liquid Processing System, or ALPS, the radioactive tritium-a radioactive isotope of hydrogen-will be the only radionuclide in the water and that it is harmless.

Japanese protest in Tokyo in April 2021 over their government's discharge plan. The release of the toxic water would begin in spring 2023. (DU XIAOYI / XINHUA)

Scathing condemnation

However, many environmental scientists and environmentalists are scathing in their condemnation of Japan's narrative, saying it is misinformation aimed at creating a false impression that the consequences of the 2011 nuclear disaster are short-lived.

A report in 2020 by environmental group Greenpeace says the narrative has been constructed to serve financial and political reasons.

"Long after the Yoshihide Suga (and Shinzo Abe) administrations are historical footnotes, the negative consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown will remain a present and constant threat-most immediately to the people and environment of Fukushima, but also to the rest of Japan and internationally," says the report, referring to Suga as the then prime minister whose government approved the disposal plan a year ago.

According to the Greenpeace report, there is no technical, engineering or legal barrier to securing storage space for ALPS-treated contaminated water. It is only a matter of political will and the decision is based on expediency-the cheapest option is ocean discharge.

The report also took aim at ALPS, describing it as a flawed technology because of its poor performance and inability to remove Carbon-14, a long term radiological hazard with a half-life of 5,730 years.

The half-life of a reaction is the amount of time needed for a reactant concentration to decrease by half. Its application is used in chemistry and medicine to predict the concentration of a substance over time.

In 2018, Kyodo News claimed in a report that radioactive substances such as Carbon-14, Iodine-129, Ruthenium-106 and Technetium-99 still remained in the treated water piling up in tanks at the Fukushima plant despite the application of the ALPS process. TEPCO had been claiming that ALPS can remove all toxins except tritium.

As a result of the Kyodo report, 72 percent of the water in the storage tanks was required to be processed again but questions remain over how effective that will be.

Kenichi Oshima, a professor in policy science at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, says another claim that amounts to a false narrative is TEPCO's statement that it plans to decommission the Fukushima reactor in 30 years.

"Their logic is, in order to decommission the reactors in 30 years, they have to discharge the water now. This is totally unacceptable because the goal itself is a mission impossible," Oshima says. "Building on this false assumption, all the process behind it will be problematic.

"The Japanese government has a duty to let people know about the fact of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant but they failed to do so and they covered up the truth."

Dangers ignored

The decommissioning of a nuclear reactor involves removing the used nuclear fuel from the reactor, placing it into the used fuel pool, and eventually into dry storage containers. The decommissioning process for the three reactors that remained undamaged in the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant started in 2015. The first stage, the so-called final shutdown and preservation stage, could take a decade to complete.

As for Carbon-14, which can reach into communities in Japan and abroad for many generations due to its long half-life, the Greenpeace report says the dangers of it are being ignored by the Japanese government and that it has the potential to damage the structure of human DNA.

Taking a similar view are three United Nations human rights experts, Marcos Orellana, Michael Fakhri and David Boyd, who say in a joint statement that the water may contain quantities of Carbon-14 and other radioactive isotopes. Discharging the tainted water into the Pacific Ocean will threaten the health of people and the planet.

"Japan has noted that the levels of tritium are very low and do not pose a threat to human health. However, scientists warn that the tritium in the water organically binds to other molecules, moving up the food chain affecting plants and fish and humans," the experts say in their report. They say the radioactive hazards of tritium have been underestimated and could pose risks to humans and the environment for over 100 years.

"We remind Japan of its international obligations to prevent exposure to hazardous substances, to conduct environmental impact assessments of the risks that the discharge of water may have, to prevent trans-boundary environmental harms, and to protect the marine environment," the experts say.

A demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2020 highlights South Koreans' fears for the consequences of the Japanese government's plan. (PHOTO / YONHAP)

Lack of sincerity

In a country well versed in public relations and branding, the Japanese government was quick to employ inventive ways in a bid to gather support for the ocean disposal.

Days after it announced the discharge plan, Japan's Reconstruction Agency released a video depicting tritium as a "cute character" in an effort to dispel concerns about the radioactive substance and sweeten the government's message.

Within a day, the tadpolelike character was scrapped and an apology issued after a wave of criticism on social media as well as in Japan's parliament.

"If the government thinks it can get the general public to understand just by creating a cute character, it is making a mockery of risk communication," Riken Komatsu, a writer involved in reconstruction activities in Iwaki, Fukushima, said on Twitter.

Sticking to the message, the national government busied itself organizing expert panels to explain the policy to communities. The efforts fell flat and only made the situation worse.

"They use all those big words and difficult phrases to talk with us. They only repeat their side of the story but never give solutions to our problems," said Katsuo Watanabe, an 82-year-old fisherman in Fukushima. "We just can't understand."

A China Daily investigation found that 41 of Fukushima prefecture's 59 municipal councils oppose the disposal plan, with 25 of them strongly opposing it.

The report ordered by Japan's parliament into the Fukushima nuclear disaster says that TEPCO's corporate culture was to blame for the accident, citing misplaced deference and reluctance to question authority within the company as the root causes, in addition to many other factors.

Yet, a sequence of events that occurred after the accident has raised fears about whether the company has truly changed. Many question why the government still relies on TEPCO to deal with the consequences of the disaster given the repeated accusations of cover-ups and delayed disclosure leveled at the utility.

In September 2021, TEPCO officials first acknowledged that 24 of the 25 filters attached to the water treatment equipment had been found in August to be damaged, and they admitted that they had detected similar damage in all the filters two years ago. But the officials never investigated the cause of the problem and did not take any preventive steps after replacing the filters.

The filters are designed to prevent particles from escaping into the air from the ALPS.

"At the core of this problem is TEPCO's attitude," Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority commissioner, Nobuhiko Ban, said after the problems surfaced.

In January 2021, at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, another plant owned by TEPCO, it was proved that the company had lied about having completed safety work on one of the plant's reactors.

And the list could go further.

"It is safe to say that credibility is the key issue," says Liu Qingbin, a professor at the Institute of Advanced Sciences at Yokohama National University.

According to Liu, even if the disposal plan was deemed perfect in theory, there is no guarantee that TEPCO and the Japanese government could deliver 100 percent safe treatment because all the events put together had "demolished Japan's reputation for craftsmanship".

Japan's dumping plan clearly flies in the face of credibility. In a response to concerns from the Fukushima prefectural federation of fisheries cooperatives in 2020, Naomi Hirose, then president of TEPCO, said in a statement: "We will not proceed with any kind of disposal of treated radioactive water without gaining the understanding from the concerned parties. We will store the water in tanks on the premises of the plant."

Given the fact that the Japanese government owns the majority share in TEPCO through the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation, the company's integrity matters to the Japanese government and its financial performance matters to Japan's public purse.

Japan's unilateral decision a year ago provoked an immediate outcry from neighboring countries and Pacific Island communities. The foreign ministries of China and South Korea vocally expressed the opposition and the Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental organization for the region, said that "Japan has not taken sufficient steps to address the potential harm to the Pacific".

At the time, China's foreign ministry condemned Japan for making the decision without proper consultation with the affected countries, calling Tokyo highly irresponsible and stressing that the Pacific Ocean is not Japan's "trash can".

In a recent news conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said: "We hope the Japanese side will not turn a deaf ear to all parties' concerns and the public opinion at home.

"We urge Japan to revoke the erroneous decision of ocean discharge, conduct thorough consultation with stakeholders and relevant international organizations, and carefully assess the benefits and drawbacks of all disposal plans before making any decision, so as to ensure the safe disposal of nuclear-contaminated water."

In response to the sustained pressure, the Japanese government invited two task forces from the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct missions in Japan to review its dumping proposal in February and March. The findings won't come anytime soon, though the IAEA says a comprehensive report containing the overall conclusions of its task forces "will be published before any treated water is released".

wangxu@chinadaily.com.cn