My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcotin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torrestrate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily os It's Monday, the twenty eighth of August. I'm Sam Kraslowski.
I'm Zara Seidler.
The controversial release of treated radioactive water from the Fukashima Nuclear power plant in Japan has just begun. Japan is releasing water contaminated during the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the ocean. The UN's nuclear monitoring body has signed off on the plan and Japan insists it's safe, but not everyone is convinced.
There is white bear public opposition to the move in neighboring China and South Korea, and China has already reacted by banning all seafood imported from the country of Japan.
Tda's brilliant deputy editor, Emma Gillespie is going to explain exactly what is being released into the ocean and whether or not it's safe the first sam what's making headlines this morning.
Three US Marines have been killed and five hospitalized after their military aircraft crashed on Melville Island, part of the Tiwi Islands, yesterday. Twenty three people, all US personnel, were on board the plane when it crashed on the island, which is sixty kilometers off the coast from Darwin, during a training exercise.
A twelve year old girl has been taken to hospital following a stabbing at an Adelaide school. The student suffered non life threatening injuries after she was stabbed in the torso. On Friday, A twelve year old boy was arrested and will face court in October on an assault charge.
The largest study into the effects of salt on heart health has revealed that cutting salt from one's diet you can reduce the risk of heart issues and strokes by almost twenty percent. Researchers also found that those who never add additional salt to their food were eighteen percent less likely to develop atrial fibrillation, which is the irregular heart rhythms that can lead to heart failure than those who do. Add a pinch of.
Salt and the good news. Lego will start selling bricks coated with braille to help vision impaired children play Braille. Bricks had previously been distributed for free to some learning organizations, will now be available for purchase in English and French languages from Friday.
Emma, welcome back to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
So Japan has begun releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Nuclear power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. There's a lot to unpack here. Why don't we start at the very beginning. Tell me how Japan ended up with this radioactive water, something you're not meant to have to begin with.
This goes way back to March two thousand and eleven, when a massive earthquake off Japan's northeast coast triggered a tsunami.
I remember that earthquake.
It was huge, It devastated parts of Japan, and this huge, super fast wave just smashed into the coast thirty minutes after this earthquake, there was very little time to prepare and it hit this power plant, the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, which knocked out the power supply to the plant and triggered a chain reaction which caused three reactor cause to melt down.
Nuclear officials there a warning of a possible nuclear reactor meltdown. They are still cooling three reactors at the site using seawater, but today they admitted the number two reactor at one point was dry the overheating fuel rods completely exposed.
So these three reactor CAUs were melting down and water had to be used to cool those reactors down. Now that water became highly radioactive, So over the course of a few weeks, all this additional water was used to cool the reactors down, and that contaminated water was then treated and stored in tanks. Lots of water, lots of tanks. On top of that, we had contaminations spilling out from the plant into nearby waterways that also needed to be
pumped back out and stored. So the process of cooling those reactors is still ongoing, meaning more and more water continues to be contaminated, more and more water to be stored.
Twelve or thirteen years later, Yes.
So what happened. Fukushima was declared one of the worst nuclear disasters in history and clearly, all these years on, we're still talking about it. The impact is still being felt.
What do you mean when you say a lot of water?
We're talking about five hundred Olympic sized swimming pool's worth of contaminated water that Japan's been storing in tanks ever since twenty eleven. There's some visuals of these tanks. It's you can hardly comprehend how much water they're storing.
So the water is still there at the plan. What's happened in the decade plus since then?
So the Fukushima plant is now a decommissioning project. That means that it's being shut down. But we're talking about nuclear power, so that has to be a gradual process, and they reckon it's going to take around a generation to complete this task, and so part of that decommissioning, part of that project is dealing with this enormous amount
of nuclear wastewater. But the problem is there are only so many tanks that we can store wastewater in and they're due to reach full capacity at the plant very soon, so they have to figure out what to do with the more than one point two million tons spread across one thousand tanks sitting there at this plant. So the news now is that, following a consultation period, they've now begun releasing a treated version of this contaminated water into the ocean.
And I imagine that's not great, right, Well.
It's only divided international communities and Japan's neighbors. And to understand the risk of releasing this wastewater, the risk it might have on the ocean, the animals that live in the ocean, and those of us who consume food from the ocean or drink water, it's important to consider what
happened in the years after the disaster. So after that nuclear meltdown in the tsunami, large amounts of radioactive materials were released into the Pacific Ocean, and in twenty eleven, seawater sites recorded really high levels of lingering radioactive substances. Many were concerned about what the potential impact of that
long term was on marine life. Since then, the World Health Organization have conducted studies that thankfully show us that there actually hasn't been a significant level of cancer and radioactive impact on wildlife, certainly not as much as was predicted, and not at all to the levels of precursors that we look to like Noble, a disaster which saw immediate deaths.
So should we then be worried for marine life? Is it safe to put it?
Simply? The UN says it's safe. So the United Nations has endorsed Japan's plans to pump the additional million plus tons of treated radioactive wastewater back into the ocean. The UN basically said it deems the risk of that water to be low. But this is a controversial plan and it has attracted a lot of attention and concern.
What do you mean by treating water?
So this is a process of basically cleaning the contaminated water to remove most of the problematic contaminants. But there is still one radioactive contaminant that does remain, and it's called tritium. It's something that can't really be removed by modern technology. But there are international standards for how much
tritium is safe to release into the water. Japanese authorities have chosen a concentration of tritium seven times smaller than the World Health Organization's recommendation for water that you can drink for tritium levels in drinking water that is safe to consume, So seven times under that number and The International Atomic Energy Agency says it will be monitoring the release process, and they claim the water will have a negligible radiological impact to people and the environment.
So the UN's given the tick. The Japanese government's obviously in favor of it because it's their initiative. What's the opposition been to the plan?
So Japan's fisheries unions have really been opposed to the release of this wastewater. They've said that even if treated, that the water will have a catastrophic impact on the fishing industry. We know that Japan's fishing industry.
Is enormous, world renowned.
Exactly, China has already announced an immediate blank at ban on importing seafood from Japan, so there'll be huge economic impacts there. A Chinese official has also been quoted in Chinese state run media calling Japan's decision selfish and irresponsible. But Japan has pointed out that China fairly has discharged its own water from nuclear plants with much higher levels of tritium than Japan's currently proposing. The BBC says that they verified that, so there could be a bit of
politic and going on there. But the response to this extends well beyond Japan and China. The response has been international. Thousands of people have protested this decision, including in Korea in Seoul, where they're calling for government action, people taking to the streets there. But interestingly enough, the South Korean
government has actually endorsed this plan themselves. There are also researchers who criticize the plants, saying that if the water was left in storage for one hundred and twenty years over that period of time, the tritium would diminish significantly,
and that would of course lower the risk significantly. But proponents of the current plans say storing contaminated water for that long is just unrealistic and increases the risk of accidents storing that water, of course, things can go wrong, Humans can come into contact with that contaminated water, and then you know, we deal with a whole other set of potential disasters.
Why do you think this story has grabbed you?
I think this story has captivated so many of us because it's just unlike anything we see in the headlines. You know, we deal with the constant expected news stories of cost of living, crisis politics, but this is just a weird one. If I can be so blunt, like, whoever thought we would be talking about a tsunami from twenty eleven impacting the safety of a fishing economy of drinking water and causing such division between countries and advocacy
groups and the science community. Yeah, it's a really interesting one and we'll certainly be keeping an eye on what comes from here.
It'll be really interesting to see if there's those economic impacts to Japan's fishing industry plays out and what that actually looks like. Thanks for joining us on the Daily AuSIM.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you for listening to us this morning. If you have a question that you'd like us to explore this week, all some comments on today's episode, we'd love to see your feedback. You can leave it in a little question box at the bottom of your Spotify page. We'll be back again tomorrow. Until then, have a great start to the week.