The United States has started bulk buying Japanese seafood to supply its military there in response to China’s ban on such products imposed after Tokyo released treated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
Unveiling the initiative in a Reuters interview on Monday, U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said Washington should also look more broadly into how it could help offset China’s ban that he said was part of its “economic wars.”
China, which had been the biggest buyer of Japanese seafood, says its ban is due to food safety fears.
The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog vouched for the safety of the water release that began in August from the plant wrecked by a 2011 tsunami. G7 trade ministers on Sunday called for the immediate repeal of bans on Japanese food.
Here’s a simple fact, there are Chinese nuclear plants that are releasing more tritium into the ocean during normal operations than Fukushima is, or ever will.
Another simple fact, all the tritium released worldwide is basically negligible when you look at the diffusion rates in ocean water.
I’ve got no clue what China is really wanting with the seafood ban, but it’s not to punish Japan for releasing Fukushima water.
To stir conflict and make Japan out to be the bad guy using misinformation.
Sounds like a seafood trade embargo with extra excuses.
have economic problems at home -> pick fights abroad -> blame problems at home on “anti-Chinese sentiment” abroad
It’s quite interesting seeing another country that’s very critical of the US make the exact same mistakes that the US has. It’s a bad portent for their future
Dilution is always the solution baby. Something so simple, yet still so impossible to explain to people who believe in chem trails.
Tbf, that’s kinda what people thought about leaded gasoline, or greenhouse gas emissions.
In this case, yes, everyone seems perfectly fine, but dilution isn’t the solution to everything when the body you’re diluting into is finite.
For those it turned out we weren’t adequately diluting it. And we know a lot more about radionuclides than we knew about those back then.
Dilution would technically still be a solution for both of those problems, the issue is just user input error. If you don’t have the reagents to dilute a proper solution then you have too many solutes.
No…
Well yeah, that’s because the science of homeopathy tells us that diluting things makes them stronger! /s
This entire disaster is a great lesson in why when your engineers say “This site isn’t suitable for a reactor” or “this seawall is insufficient to prevent a tsunami from overwhelming the reactor” you really should listen to them.
The real solution to nuclear disasters is not having them to begin with.
Not necessarily. There are concerns about the wastewater still contains radionuclides which are heavier than tritium and tend to bioaccumulate. As such, it’s possible even if they are not highly concentrated in the release water, they could reach unsafe levels in marine life.
So take a sample of fish from each catch and test them for those levels. This isn’t that difficult.
I agree that testing catches may be a solution here. However, I don’t see why it’s incumbent on China to create such a testing infrastructure especially when they aren’t the only ones with concerns. If Japan wants to negotiate and work something out I’m sure they can. In fact I’d be willing to bet that’s what they’re doing at this very moment.
That’s the thing, the infrastructure already exists, and tests were performed, and the UN atomic council certified the results that the water was clean.
China is saying the fish are unsafe in spite of that. It’s on them to prove that the test is incorrect.
No, that’s just not true. There is no infrastructure for Japanese fishing companies to show that each catch is free of contamination.
Also, as far as I’m aware testing to see if fish have been affected by the initial release of wastewater has only just begun. I don’t even think the results are publicly available yet. To add to that scientists have found contaminated fish from the Fukushima area containing unsafe levels of radionuclides prior to this release of wastewater.
Hmmm. Well I’m interested to see what testing shows.
Here’s the thing, Uranium is already present in seawater at concentrations far above what you would get if you dumped the entirety of Fukushima’s corium straight into the ocean.
See, there’s a common form of uranium oxide that’s water-soluble. A large part of the world’s free uranium is already in the ocean in solution.
What’s your point? Uranium is not the only fissile radionuclide that can make its way into the contaminated wastewater. Also nuclear fuel contains a much higher concentration of fissile Uranium isotopes than what is found in nature. Lastly, the radionuclides in the wastewater are not going to be evenly mixed across all of the worlds oceans so that’s not exactly a useful thought experiment.
Let me put it this way, you could dump ten thousand Fukushimas straight into the ocean and given time to diffuse a bit, not notice a difference in oceanic uranium content.
The Oceans contain 1000 times more uranium than the known terrestrial deposits. This naturally includes the fissile isotopes.
But the real point is that it’s actually fairly easy to filter that shit out via reverse osmosis. Thus, the only thing that the Fukushima water contains is tritium, which is impossible to filter out of water.
IIRC tritium isn’t at the heart of the complaint. China (and other critics) aren’t convinced that other heavier radionuclides won’t make it through the filtering process. These isotopes would be more likely to bioaccumulate in marine life and so they could cause problems even if their concentration was very low to begin with. TEPCO is also not a trustworthy company. They’ve lied about contamination from the Fukushima wastewater in the past. As such, I don’t think China’s actions here are totally unreasonable.
The UN nuclear watchdog has cleared the water as well.
The IAEA’s report is based on the assumption that everything goes as planned. Given TEPCO’s history, why exactly is it unreasonable to want additional assurances before buying Japanese seafood?