Palace calls on Japan to follow laws on releasing wastewater into ocean

Japan should comply with environmental laws and shoulder damages, if warranted, in connection with its plan to release wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said.

“I can only repeat the principles of International Environmental Law that I hope all countries will comply with,” Roque, a lawyer, said.

“First principle is that we are one ecosystem. Second principle is that we are interconnected, and the third principle is that the polluter must pay,” he added.

Japan plans to discharge about 1.3 million metric tons of treated water from the plant into the sea, with the first release to occur in two years' time.

According to a Reuters report, Japan has argued the water release is necessary to press ahead with the complex decommissioning of the plant after it was crippled by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It says similarly filtered water is routinely released from nuclear plants around the world.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) plans to filter the contaminated water to remove isotopes, leaving only tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water. Tepco will then dilute the water until tritium levels fall below regulatory limits, before pumping it into the ocean.

Tritium is considered to be relatively harmless because it does not emit enough energy to penetrate human skin. Other nuclear plants around the world routinely pump water with low levels of the isotope into the ocean.

The water, enough to fill about 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools, is stored in huge tanks at the plant at an annual cost of about 100 billion yen ($912.66 million)—and space is running out.

Fukushima's nuclear plant was damaged by the magnitude 9 earthquake and  tsunami that hit the Tohoku region in March 2011 which left around 20,000 people dead or missing. Japan commemorated the 10th anniversary of the disaster last month. — BM, GMA News