Fukushima’s nuclear accident was one of the most serious in history, unique – together with Chernobyl – to have reached the maximum degree in the scale of nuclear catastrophes. He caused an ascertained dead, 184 thousand evacuated, and the accumulation of over 1.3 million tons of radioactive water, used to cool the number 1 reactor, meeting the merger of the core after a sequence of errors, accidents and unfortunate circumstances, never completely clarified.
The fate of these radioactive waste waters has fueled the international debate for years (and skepticism towards the safety of nuclear energy), with the Japanese government, supported by the International Agency for Atomic Energy (AIEA), determined to splay them into the sea after having subjected them to a process of decontamination, and many neighboring nations contrary to the project, for fear of environmental consequences and on the health of the coastal communities. Despite the protests, the program went on, and the latest results of the AIEA monitoring seem to give reason to the Japanese: for now everything would in fact proceed for the best, without significant increases in radioactivity along the coasts of Fukushima, or elsewhere.
As announced by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) recently the 11th Fukushima waste water discharge, the seventh and last of the tax year 2024, has ended. A process followed closely by the observers of the AIEA, which monitored the surveys on the content of the waters paid to the sea as well as those on the sea water, and verified the operation of all the appliances used, without reporting critical or abnormal values.
During the latter cycle, which began last December, a total of 7,800 tons of water were poured into the sea, from which the filtering processes used by Tepco remove 62 dangerous radionuclides, however, not being able to eliminate the trick, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can be dangerous for man and for marine creatures, when present in extremely high concentrations.
In the samples analyzed, collected at sea in four sites placed at 3 and 10 kilometers away from the control unit, the trick was present in quantities lower than the 350 Becquerel (unit of measurement of the activity of a radionuclide), the detection limit of the instruments used for monitoring. And therefore a lot below 1,500 Becquerl set by the AIEA as a security limit for human health.
Since the start of the Fukushima wastewater disposal program, about 85,500 tons of water were spilled in the sea in 2023. A fraction of the total, given that more than one million and three hundred thousand tons of contaminated water remain still preserved in over a thousand huge tanks in the control sites of the plant. In 2025, however, an acceleration of the program is expected, with the spill of another 54,600 tons of radioactive water, in a disposal program that should end in about three decades.