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.
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.