TOKYO, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) — Local residents in Japan on Thursday submitted a joint petition urging the Japanese authorities to retract its plan to discharge nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean.
The petition, signed by 28,627 individuals, was handed to representatives of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry collectively by 17 organizations, together with the non-governmental group Friends of the Earth Japan and Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.
The petition marketing campaign commenced in May 2020, gathering signatures by on-line platforms and mails.
The signatories are demanding that the Japanese authorities rethink its plan of releasing radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant into the ocean, and as an alternative proceed with on-land storage or discover various options.
Hit by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and an ensuing tsunami on March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant suffered core meltdowns that launched radiation, leading to a level-7 nuclear accident, the best on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
The plant has been producing a large quantity of water tainted with radioactive substances from cooling down the nuclear gas within the reactor buildings, which are actually being saved in about 1,000 storage tanks.
Stored nuclear-contaminated water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accommodates not solely tritium however numerous different radioactive substances, the cumulative portions of which haven’t been publicly disclosed, mentioned representatives of the petitioning organizations on Thursday.
They emphasised the issues raised amongst home and worldwide stakeholders, together with these inside the fishing business.
In 2015, the Japanese authorities and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant, made an settlement with fisheries cooperative associations of each Fukushima prefecture and the nation that they won’t proceed with any wastewater disposal “without the understanding of relevant parties.”
However, the Japanese authorities introduced in April 2021 its controversial plan to launch diluted wastewater into the Pacific Ocean and said in January this yr that the discharge will begin “in the spring or summer.”
“Just like we can’t casually dispose of any kind of waste in our lives, the waste produced by nuclear power plants, including nuclear-polluted water, should never be released into the ocean. Tokyo Electric Power Company should manage their own waste generated locally,” a petitioner who goes by the net title of Kazuki Shibata mentioned.
“Once released, there is no turning back. Talking about dilution with seawater is merely a pseudoscientific argument we’ve heard all too often,” wrote one other petitioner utilizing the title Tsutomu Aihara.
Japanese media shops broadly predicted that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, after getting back from his go to to the United States, will convene a cupboard assembly to find out the precise discharge date.
The begin of the discharge course of is broadly believed to happen between the top of this month and early September.