Japan has been given the okay by UN to dump radioactive waste water into the ocean, but nearby countries are protesting that its unsafe. Is it unsafe? Is it safe?
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It’s not ‘unsafe’, per se — such a release is not permitted until the water is assessed and declared safe, and the water is filtered and diluted to meet safety standards. Even then, the release is done in small volumes, through costal pipelines.
However, the precise effects of a *large-volume* release, such as the million gallons of water being used to cool the Fukishima plant’s disabled-but-still-hot reactors, are harder to determine.
Some studies have shown that a number of marine species could suffer some form of DNA damage from the radionucleotides in the released cooling water, but most of those studies are entirely lab-based; because of concerns about human safety, there’s relatively little data on the external environmental effects of large-volume wastewater releases.
That makes fisheries nervous, particularly in a time when 10% of the planet’s population depend on fisheries for their livelihood — an environmental contamination has the potential to affect the food-chain, causing cancers, fertility problems, and serious damage to the marine species we rely on for food security.
So, the release of wastewater itself isn’t necessarily a problem; it’s the *volume* of the release, and the unpredictable consequences, that are causing concern.
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