SEOUL, July 7 (UPI) — A South Korean government task force said Friday that Japan’s plan to release radioactive wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant meets international safety standards, echoing an assessment by the U.N.’s atomic watchdog released earlier this week.
“We have reviewed the implementation plan put forward by Tokyo Electric Power Co.,” Yoo Guk-hee, chairman of South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, said at a joint government press briefing in Seoul. “If this plan is followed, we have confirmed that it meets emission standards and targets and meets various international standards.”
South Korea sent its own delegation of experts to inspect the Fukushima plant in May and conducted its own assessment of the Japanese plan to treat and release more than 1 million metric tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency released the results of a two-year safety review Tuesday, concluding that the water release “would have a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”
The South Korean government “respects the findings of [the IAEA] report,” South Korea’s minister in the Office for Government Policy Coordination, Bang Moon-kyu, told the press briefing Friday.
“A domestic review was also done from the perspective of confirming the impact of Japan’s release of polluted water” on South Korea, Bang said. “As a result, the impact on our waters was found to be insignificant.”
Bang added that South Korea would not lift its 2013 import ban on seafood from the Fukushima region, however.
Some 1.3 million metric tons of water, most of it used to cool the Fukushima plant’s three overheating reactors, has been accumulating on the site since the March 2011 tsunami that caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The water has been treated by a filtration and pumping system known as advanced liquid processing system, which removes all radioactivity except for tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. Before discharging it into the Pacific Ocean, Japan will dilute the water to bring the tritium to below regulatory standards.
The release plan, first announced in early 2021, has caused alarm among environmental groups, the fishing industry and neighboring countries.
Opposition lawmakers in South Korea held an overnight sit-in at the National Assembly on Thursday to protest the release plan and criticize the government’s response.
“The South Korean government did not have a proper discussion with the public about its decision to release contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant,” Democratic Party assembly member Lee So-young said in a statement Friday.
“This final [IAEA] report cannot justify the dumping of large amounts of contaminated water from the nuclear accident into the sea for decades, nor can it force the people of the affected countries to take risks,” she said.
While diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Seoul have improved significantly in recent months, public opinion in South Korea is fiercely against the release. A recent joint survey by the Hankook Ilbo and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspapers found 84% of respondents opposed the plan.
Beijing, meanwhile, has long been vocal in its opposition to Japan’s plan.
“The discharge plan is a gamble with no precedent and it is full of uncertainties,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press conference on Thursday.
Wang said the decision to go forward with the discharge despite international opposition “reveals the selfishness and arrogance of Japan.”
On Friday, China’s General Administration of Customs announced it would ban the import of food from 10 Japanese prefectures and step up monitoring for radioactive substances in response to the Fukushima discharge plan, state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi, who visited the Fukushima site and met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida this week to release his agency’s report, was scheduled to arrive in South Korea for a three-day visit on Friday.
