A major earthquake and tsunami occurred in Japan 10 years ago, resulting in the explosion of Tokyo Electric Power Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The accident treatment of the nuclear power plant has accumulated a large amount of nuclear contaminated water containing radioactive substances such as tritium.
Now the total amount has reached 1.25 million tons, and the number of tanks exceeds 1,000. The treatment of nuclear sewage has always troubled Japan. On the 13th, the Japanese government decided to discharge the accumulated nuclear sewage into the sea at a cabinet meeting. Zhou Weisheng, a professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan, said in an exclusive interview with the reporter of Science and Technology Daily that Japan’s discharge of nuclear sewage into the sea is both a domestic and international problem.
Zhou Weisheng believes that first of all, it is Japan’s responsibility to treat nuclear sewage safely and harmlessly, and the first victim of nuclear sewage is also Japan. After so many years of efforts, the fishing industry around the Fukushima nuclear accident has just begun to return to normal, so fishermen and related groups engaged in fishing around Fukushima are the strongest opponents.But what they are more worried about is the actual impact of international public opinion caused by the nuclear pollution discharge incident.
If nuclear sewage is discharged into the sea, it will become an international problem again. There are two main aspects:
The first is the problem of pollution of the marine environment.The Japanese government said it would dilute the concentration of harmful substances to less than one-40 of Japan’s national emission standards. But this sentence needs an open and transparent scientific basis and neutral third-party supervision to be effective. If it can be harmless by dilution, Japan should have done so long ago.
Now, Japan’s preparation to discharge nuclear sewage into the sea has been questioned and opposed by many countries and groups at home and abroad. The main reason is that Japan did not decide to discharge into the sea because of the availability of nuclear sewage treatment technology to ensure harmless treatment, but because the existing storage capacity of nuclear sewage for less than two years. Although there is great uncertainty about the speed and scope of its diffusion and dilution, nuclear sewage discharged into the sea, will move long distances through currents, marine life and other large-range, which may affect neighboring countries such as China and South Korea and the marine ecological environment. Therefore, this is a practice with serious hidden dangers.
The second is the nuclear sewage treatment problem facing Japan, which is a world problem and a problem that all countries in the world have nuclear power may face. How to deal with large-scale nuclear sewage? There is no reliable technology in the world now.
Zhou Weisheng’s Laboratory is studying and proposing to build a safety and security system for nuclear power plants in China, Japan and South Korea. He believes that Japan, as a developed country, should consider the harm it poses to the global environment while taking into account its own interests, and the world should also consider solutions to the same difficulties.
In terms of nuclear power security, mankind is also a community of destiny that shares benefits and risks.
