How not to handle radioactive waste

YOKOHAMA – This week Japan began releasing more than a million tons of treated radioactive water, now stored at the disabled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, into the Pacific Ocean.

It is expected to take decades to release all of the water at the plant, which was devastated in 2011 by a tsunami generated by the powerful Tohoku earthquake. Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the facility, and the International Atomic Energy Agency both say the radiation to be released will be of such low concentrations that it will have a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.

That may turn out to be true, if everything goes according to Tepco’s plans, consistently and without major mishap, for at least the next 30 years. Only time will tell. But the most important questions here may not be the technical, scientific and radiological ones, but about the example being set.

The Japanese government and Tepco made the decision to release the water after a process that has been neither fully transparent nor adequately inclusive of important stakeholders, both in Japan and abroad. This plants the seeds for what could be decades of mistrust and contention.

But perhaps even more worrying, Japan is setting a precedent for other governments that might be even less transparent. This is dangerous, particularly in Asia, where more than 140 nuclear power reactors are already in operation and, led by growth in China and India, dozens more are either being built, are in the planning stages or have been proposed. If Japan, a globally respected cultural and economic force, can get away with dumping radioactive water, what’s to stop other countries?

There’s no denying that Japan and Tepco are in a bind over what to do with the byproducts of the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. Melted nuclear fuel debris inside the damaged reactors is being cooled by pumped-in water, which comes into contact with a toxic cocktail of radioactive substances known as radionuclides. To this is added approximately 100 tons of groundwater and rainwater, which leak into the reactor buildings each day and also become contaminated. All of the water is sent through a powerful filtration system to remove much of the radioactivity and is stored on-site in more than 1,000 giant steel tanks. But the amount of water is constantly growing, and Tepco has repeatedly warned that it is running out of storage space at Fukushima.

I have researched or written about Fukushima and affected communities ever since the disaster and have closely followed the official response. As early as 2013, the IAEA began advising Tepco to consider discharging the water into the sea. The government also looked at other options, such as releasing the water into the air as vapor or injecting it deep underground. But numerous experts and environmental groups have complained that there has been a consistent lack of sufficient public input and that some viable alternatives, such as long-term storage in more robust tanks, were not seriously evaluated. Despite opposition from many Japanese citizens, the country’s fisheries association and neighbors like South Korea and China, the government announced in April 2021 that it had decided on releasing the water into the ocean.

Public hearings, some of which I attended, were held before and after the final decision, but these seemed more about selling the ocean release option than about giving the public a say. It was only months after the decision was announced that a radiological environmental impact assessment – conducted by Tepco – was finally released. When Tepco called for public comments for the study, some experts pointed out troubling information gaps, such as the lack of a full inventory of what radioactive elements remained in the tanks. There is no evidence that serious efforts were made to address some of these issues.

Involving local residents, civil society groups, technical experts and – when necessary – neighboring nations in decision-making can lead to notable successes. In choosing the site of a long-term repository for low-level radioactive waste, Belgian regulators in 1998 gave decision-making power to a broad cross-section of public and private stakeholders. In the end, two neighboring towns actually competed to be the site, and in 2006 a proposal by the municipality of Dessel was approved. After years of study and environmental approvals, a final permit was issued this year. Similar processes have been followed in Finland and Sweden.

Fukushima’s water was a golden opportunity for Japan to not only match those successes but to set a new global model for addressing the difficulty of nuclear waste disposal with transparency and inclusion. Instead, the decision was essentially made by the government, announced and then vigorously defended.

All of this might have been fine except that Tepco and the Japanese government suffer from a severe trust deficit on Fukushima. During the 2011 disaster, they repeatedly minimized the risks, withheld crucial information on threats to public safety and even resisted using the term “core meltdown,” even though that is what occurred. Separate investigations by an official Japanese commission, the IAEA and other entities put much of the blame on poor regulatory oversight and a lack of preparedness despite Japan’s history of earthquakes and tsunamis.

Yet the mistrust remains.

Tepco said for years that its purification system would reduce 62 radionuclides to safe or non-detectable levels, and that only traces of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, and two other isotopes would remain. But it emerged in 2018 that 70 percent of the tanks also contained levels of other radioactive substances that were higher than legal limits. After the ocean release decision was made, an IAEA advisory task force identified a number of problems with the plan, most of which were reportedly resolved later or deemed insufficient to force reconsideration.

Countries like South Korea, China and some Pacific Island nations have been particularly critical, with Seoul complaining of a lack of consultation by Tokyo. Following recent Japanese diplomatic efforts, South Korea and Micronesia have lifted their opposition. China, however, has redoubled its criticism, accusing Japan of treating the ocean like a “private sewer.” The Pacific Islands Forum, which represents 18 nations – some of which are acutely aware of the legacy of American nuclear testing – remains opposed.

At this stage, it looks unlikely that Japan will change course. The country’s bureaucratic and corporate culture is notoriously complex and slow-moving, and major decisions like this are nearly impossible to reverse.

But it’s not too late to improve on public trust. Japan has invited the IAEA to help monitor the release, and this is welcome. But many Japanese, accustomed to obfuscation and a lack of transparency on Fukushima, simply no longer trust official assurances. Only a truly independent, international and participatory monitoring regime – with the close involvement of those most likely to be affected – will be sufficient to make sure that the release of the water is being done safely and responsibly.

With that, a bad precedent could be transformed into a globally admired one.

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Azby Brown is an author, an expert on Japanese design and architecture and the lead researcher for the environmental monitoring organization Safecast. He has lived in Japan since 1985 and has written extensively on the impact of the Fukushima disaster.