opinion

Japan keeps dumping radioactive contaminated water into the sea.

On August 25, the Tokyo Electric Power Company announced it finished the fourth round of dumping of radioactive contaminated water of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant this year. It has so far discharged about 62 400 tons of nuclear wastewater into the sea under the active patronage of the Japanese authorities on eight occasions since August 24 last year.

The company has dumped nearly 7 800 tons of the water in the waters about 1 kilometre off by diluting it with a large amount of water every time and is planning to dump the water three times more this year alone.

Japan is facing a barrage of stronger protest and denunciation at home and abroad.

In Tokyo, citizens held a protest rally to mark the first anniversary of the start of dumping. The participants demanded that the authorities stop the dumping polluting the sea, holding such placards reading “Don’t discharge contaminated water into the sea”.

Researchers of the Pacific Ocean Research Institute of Russia detected that the tritium content has got higher excessively in the sea off the Russian Far East after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant dumped the nuclear wastewater.

On the other hand, the fishermen in Fukushima are complaining of their plight as they are compelled to co-exist with the contaminated water in great anxiety under the pressure of the unilateral “safety declaration” of the TEPCO and the government.

It has been revealed that the power plant dumped the wastewater directly into the sea in the fourth time, though it had diluted it with seawater and filled tanks with it to check the tritium concentration even for form’s sake before discharging it in the sea during the first three discharges.

It is quite impudent and shameless of Japan to dump the nuclear wastewater into the sea, regardless of whether the Pacific is polluted or the safety of humanity is endangered.

Japan’s insistence that the radioactive contaminated water is safe “treated water” gives no scientific assurance and is implausible.

The ocean is not the possession of any country, but belongs to the whole humankind.

Japan’s move to sacrifice the lives and safety of others, nay, the entire mankind to serve its own self-interest is absolutely intolerable and it is wholly to blame for that.