Tag: fukushima

U.S. Buying ‘Safe and Delicious’ Fukushima Fish Banned by Other Countries

Japan last month completed its fifth release into the Pacific Ocean of treated contaminated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Local fishing groups, residents, neighboring countries and many scientists and environmental organizations strongly oppose the discharges, citing concerns about the contaminated water’s effects on human and environmental health.

In an attempt to allay those concerns, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last Septemer, following the first discharge, released a video clip of himself eating Fukushima fish, which he called “safe and delicious.”

And Japan’s economic minister, Yasutoshi Nishimura, ate sashimi in Tokyo for the news cameras. “It’s really the best!” he said, The New York Times reported.

That didn’t stop China, Russia and South Korea from banning the import of Japanese seafood, over concerns about radioactive contamination.

But the U.S. took a different tack. In October 2023, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel announced the U.S. military would buy bulk Japanese seafood for service members stationed at military bases in Japan and explore more broadly how to help offset China’s ban on Japan’s seafood.

Emanual said the contract between Japanese fisheries and the U.S. armed forces would be long-term. It began by purchasing a metric ton of scallops with plans to expand eventually to all types of seafood.

He said the U.S. was also in talks with Japanese authorities to direct locally caught scallops to U.S.-registered processors and said the U.S. would look at its overall fish imports from Japan and China.

About a month before the announcement the Japanese embassy hosted a sushi-tasting event at the U.S. Capitol to protest China’s decision to ban Japanese seafood.

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Fukushima Area Overrun by Radioactive Wild Boars

Japanese farmers living near the Fukushima nuclear power plant are struggling to overcome an unexpected outcome from the disaster: a surge in radioactive wild boars!

In the last five years, the population of contaminated creatures has been inadvertently left to flourish in the area near the power plant that the Japanese government deemed to be an ‘exclusion zone.’

As such, experts say that their numbers have grown from a mere 3,000 to a whopping 13,000 wild boars.

And, as their numbers swell, the boars have begun expanding beyond the exclusion zone and into nearby farms, leading to devastation as the insatiable animals feast on the food found there.

The cruel irony of the problem is that the boars would normally be a fantastic food source, but the radioactivity of the area has rendered them completely inedible and, thus, an enormous nuisance.

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5.5 Tons Of Radioactive Water Leaks Out Of Damaged Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear plant has been discharging batches of treated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean for six months. A new report, however, has brought to light a newly discovered leak that caused tons of contaminated water to seep into the ground. 

Local media Kyodo News reports that on Wednesday morning – at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear power plant – workers found water leaking from an exhaust port on the outer wall of a high-temperature incinerator building. 

According to the plant operator, TEPCO, the contaminated water treatment equipment connected to the exhaust vent inside the building was being cleaned, and water containing radioactive materials leaked out.

TEPCO estimates that 5.5 tons of water, with over 22 billion becquerels of radioactive material, leaked into the soil outside the building. 

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‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Japan says reason behind 1,200 tonnes of fish washing ashore is unknown

Officials in Japan have admitted they are struggling to determine why hundreds of tonnes of fish have washed ashore in recent days.

Earlier this month, an estimated 1,200 tonnes of sardines and mackerel were found floating on the surface of the sea off the fishing port of Hakodate in Hokkaido, forming a silver blanket stretching for more than a kilometre.

On Wednesday, officials in Nakiri, a town on the Pacific coast hundreds of miles south of Hokkaido, were confronted with 30 to 40 tonnes of Japanese scaled sardines, or sappa, which had been observed in the area a couple of days earlier.

Local fishers scrambled to collect the fish, fearing their carcasses would lower the oxygen content of the water as they decompose and damage the marine environment.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” a fisher who has worked in the area for 25 years told the Mainichi Shimbun. “It was only around last year that we began to catch sappa in Nakiri. It makes me wonder if the marine ecosystem is changing.”

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Thousands of tons of dead fish wash ashore in Japan – three months after the nation released treated Fukushima radioactive water into the sea

Thousands of tons of dead fish have washed up on a beach in northern Japan, prompting speculation that the release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant has wrought havoc on local ecosystems. 

The sardines and some mackerel washed ashore in Hakodate on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido on Thursday morning, creating an unsettling sliver blanket that covered almost a mile of shoreline. 

Officials could not come up with an explanation for the phenomenon, but Takashi Fujioka, a Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute researcher, posited a number of theories as to why the fish could have died en-masse.

He said they may have become exhausted due to a lack of oxygen while moving in a densely packed school in shallow waters, or may have suddenly entered cold waters during their migration and succumbed to shock.

There have been several recorded cases of similar phenomena springing up on several parts of Japan’s coastline.

But this particular phenomenon occurred just three months after Japanese authorities began releasing treated radioactive water back into the sea – a move which angered its neighbours including China and South Korea.

China has since banned Japanese seafood and criticised the country as being ‘extremely selfish and irresponsible’, with the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper The Global Times writing it could open ‘Pandora’s box’ and trigger fears of a ‘real-life Godzilla’. 

South Korean protestors also attempted to enter the Japanese embassy in Seoul carrying banners which read ‘The sea is not Japan’s trash bin’.

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Fukushima nuclear plant’s operator says the first round of wastewater release is complete

The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said Monday that it has safely completed the first release of treated radioactive water from the plant into the sea and will inspect and clean the facility before starting the second round in a few weeks.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant began discharging the treated and diluted wastewater into the Pacific Ocean on Aug. 24. The water has accumulated since the plant was damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011, and the start of its release is a milestone in the plant’s decommissioning.

The discharge, which is expected to continue for decades until the decommissioning is finished, has been strongly opposed by fishing groups and by neighboring countries. China has banned all imports of Japanese seafood in response, hurting producers and exporters and prompting the Japanese government to compile an emergency relief fund. Groups in South Korea have also fiercely protested, demanding Japan stop the release.

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Radioactive Fish Discovered Near Fukushima Renews Concerns Over Plans To Dump Nuclear Wastewater Into Ocean

Japanese plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) studied a black rockfish in May and found that it contained levels of radioactive cesium that were 180 times over Japan’s regulatory limit.

The radioactive fish was caught near drainage outlets at the TEPCO plant, where three nuclear reactors melted down amidst a tsunami in March 2011. Rainwater from areas near the reactors flows into the area where the fish was caught.

The alarming discovery reignited concerns over TEPCO’s plans to start releasing 1.3 million tons of treated wastewater from the former Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant by August.

A report from July 23 showed that the problem is still unaddressed, prompting questions about how dangerous the company’s plans are for the public.

Radioactive cesium health risks

Radioactive cesium has been detected in surface water and different kinds of food, such as breast milk and pasteurized milk. The amount of radioactive cesium in food and milk depends on several factors.

The most important factor is whether or not there has been a recent fallout from a nuclear explosion, like a weapons test or an accident at a nuclear power plant.

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Japan Begins Secretly Releasing Irradiated Water From Fukushima Disaster Into The Ocean

Tokyo Electric Power Company (better known as TEPCO) started releasing irradiated seawater from Monday afternoon into an underwater tunnel that has been built to release Fukushima nuclear contaminated water into the sea, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK said on Tuesday.

According to TEPCO, the tunnel will be filled with some 6,000 tons of seawater by around noon on Tuesday.

The process, according to China Daily, was carried out “secretly” on Monday because Japan’s unilateral decision of dumping more than 1.3 million metric tons of treated but still radioactive water into the ocean provoked consistent protests from neighboring countries, such as China, Pacific Island communities and civil society groups in the most affected prefectures such as Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi.

And instead of targeting what will be a tangible environmental catastrophe in just days, the hollow and hypocritical virtue signaling talking heads continue droning on about such meaningless drivel as ESG and global warming.

Also, oddly enough, there has not been a peep about this clear and present ocean disaster from either the original Greta, or her new and improved for mass-consumption replacement, Sophia Kianni, who lately appears to be more focused on building up her scantily-clad, environmentally-fighting image than, well, fighting for the environment…

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