Japan's plan on dumping the treated nuclear wastewater is expected to move forward as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) endorsed the plan, saying it's consistent with IAEA safety standards, on Tuesday.

The country has evoked waves of doubts and concerns over safety since it announced it would discharge the treated radioactive wastewater into the sea last year, a plan strongly opposed by local fishing communities and neighboring countries.

The Fukushima plant has stored around 1.3 million cubic meters of treated water. As the storage space is about to run out, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been rushing the plan to dump the wastewater into the ocean.

Although Japan repeatedly claimed the treated wastewater would meet the standard and be harmless to people, there has already been an impact on marine life. Early this June, a report released by the operator of the plant, TEPCO, showed the content of Cs-137 (a radioactive element that is a common byproduct in nuclear reactors) in the marine fish caught in the harbor of the plant was 180 times that of the standard maximum stipulated in Japan's food safety law.

Even the system to release the hazardous nuclide into the water was found damaged, leaking radioactive contamination in 2021.

Chen Zhi, associate professor at the University of Science and Technology of China and also the executive director of Chinese Society of Radiation Protection, criticized the approach of just releasing the wastewater into the sea as being too crude and simple. "It's the crudest, simplest way, with lowest cost."

He added that it's not legitimate to dump the radioactive water into the sea. "No matter how much water there is, they shouldn't just let it go into the sea."

Ignoring alternatives

Releasing the wastewater into the sea is not the only way. In fact, multiple approaches have been proposed.

Option 1: The wastewater can be poured into the 2,500-meter-deep earth layers. 
Option 2: Diluting the radioactive wastewater and filtering the radioactive content, then releasing it to the sea 
Option 3: Vaporizing the contaminated water and releasing it through exhaust pipes into the atmosphere. 
Option 4: Using electrolysis to resolve the wastewater and then releasing the generated hydrogen into the atmosphere. 
Option 5: Mixing the contaminated water and cement into solid cement concrete and then burying it underground.

However, the government opted to release the wastewater, which was the cheapest option while coming with unknown consequences in a wide range.

Tilman Ruff, a professor at the University of Melbourne, said Japan's option to dump the wastewater is "an unfortunate regressive step." He said it's a 19th-century (idea that) "dilution is the solution to pollution." 

"It's a problem (that) should be dealt with (in) a much more modern way," he said.

Chen said the level of radioactivity could increase sharply after dumping the water. "It can accumulate in the bodies of marine life, then go into the human body when they consume seafood. The radioactive content may have (an) impact on humans."

Yasuro Kawai, a member of Japan's Citizens' Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE), said mixing the wastewater with cement is worth considering. "Hardening the cement mortar will make the radioactivity decay over hundreds or thousands of years, which is almost harmless."

Mixed concepts of nuclear wastewater

In the face of international doubts about the safety of the wastewater, Japan insists that the purified "treated water" is no different from the normal discharged water from a nuclear power plant.

Li Song, China's permanent representative to the UN and other international organizations, at an IAEA board of governors meeting held in June in Vienna, pointed out that Japan has adjusted the concept. 

In fact, the discharge of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from Fukushima into the sea is completely different from the normal operation of nuclear power plants.

The so-called treated nuclear wastewater that Japan insists on refers to the wastewater produced by a nuclear power plant during normal operation, where the water does not come into contact with radioactive materials in nuclear reactors, while the Fukushima nuclear-contaminated wastewater came into direct contact with radioactive materials during the accident and is highly radioactive, which must be strictly stored and treated by multiple processes and evaluated by experts before it is allowed to be discharged.

"The coast of Fukushima has the strongest ocean currents in the world. Ten years after the nuclear-contaminated water is discharged into the sea, the radionuclides will spread to the seas of the world. This move transfers the risk to all human beings," a Chinese representative once said to the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May.