Epoch Times - 86,000 Tons of Nuclear Waste Dumped into Pacific Ocean

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July 29, 2025 - Epoch Times

10:43

86,000 Tons of Nuclear Waste Dumped into Pacific Ocean

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	Unbeknownst to most people, Japan has just released their 12th batch of radioactive nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
	This latest discharge weighed approximately 7,800 tons, which is equal to 15.6 million pounds.
	And again, this was the 12th round of nuclear wastewater that they dumped.
	In total, thus far, the nation of Japan has dumped approximately 86,000 tons of nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually just the beginning.
	Their plan is to continue doing this for the next 30 years and in that process, dump approximately 1.3 million tons of this nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
	And if this is the first time you're hearing about this, you might be shocked.
	But there is a good reason for why the Japanese are doing this.
	And the reason stems from what happened 14 years ago during the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
	If you remember, that was when an earthquake, as well as a subsequent tsunami, caused a near meltdown of a nuclear power plant over in Japan.
	The situation was a complete mess.
	The reactors got shut down, the backup generators, which fueled the cooling systems, they lost power, which then led to three nuclear meltdowns and the contamination of a million tons of water.
	Now, for approximately 12 years, the Japanese government kept this water inside of the plant where they've been slowly treating it.
	But they eventually ran out of space.
	And so the Japanese government, they announced in 2023 a plan to begin slowly releasing this treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
	Now, the big question here, very obviously, is whether this is safe or not, both for the surrounding nations as well as for the United States.
	And so in order to answer those questions, let's unpack the entire situation step by step, starting at the very beginning.
	14 years ago, on March 11th, 2021, there was a massive earthquake, which was a 9.0 on the Richter scale, over by Japan.
	That massive earthquake caused a 40-foot-high tsunami, which then slammed into the city of Fukushima, Japan, killing over 15,000 people and destroying much of the Fukushima nuclear power plant's cooling systems, causing, as we mentioned earlier, three of the reactors to melt down.
	Now, as an immediate response to this disaster, in order to prevent an actual nuclear explosion, the plant operators began pumping in seawater in order to cool down the overheated fuel cores.
	Now, fortunately, that plan of theirs was successful.
	There was no nuclear explosion on that day.
	However, after the disaster was averted, the plant operators were left with about a million tons of this contaminated seawater alongside a growing body of contaminated groundwater.
	And since 2011, that water has been collected, treated, and stored every single day in that facility to the point where now they have a grand total of 1,073 containers holding over 1.3 million tons of treated water.
	For a visual, just to understand how much water this actually is, 1.3 million tons of water can be used to fill 472 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
	Comparing that to the ocean, well, it's just a tiny little drop, but for a man-made facility, it's a lot.
	And the problem is that the Fukushima facility simply ran out of space.
	The over 1,000 containers that they were using to hold this amount of water accounted for 97% of the nuclear power plant's total storage space, meaning they quite literally had no more room.
	And so government officials, alongside officials from TEPCO, the utility company which actually operates the power plant, they came out in 2023 and jointly announced that the wastewater, it must be removed to prevent any accidental leaks in case of another earthquake.
	And then also, they said that the wastewater must be removed because the nuclear power plant was actually slowly being decommissioned.
	And the only way that you can remove 1.3 million tons of wastewater is to pour it back into the ocean.
	Now, for the past 14 years or so, this wastewater was being treated in this facility in order to remove harmful contaminants.
	The decontamination process works something like this.
	The contaminated water is first treated with cesium and strontium filtering equipment in order to remove most of the contamination before the water even is stored in the tank.
	And then the water is treated in a multi-nuclide removal facility that Japan calls ALPS, ALPS, which stands for the Advanced Liquid Processing System.
	That process of theirs works on 62 out of the 64 known radioactive isotopes.
	And it removes enough of these 62 radionuclides, as they're called, in order to bring the concentration levels below Japan's regulatory limits.
	Then, once this ALPS treatment process is complete, the water is then stored in another tank while the concentrated slurry byproduct, which contains all the contaminants, is stored in a separate facility.
	However, it's worth noting that as good as the ALPS process appears to be, it does not remove two of the known radioactive isotopes, namely carbon-14 as well as tritium.
	Now, tritium, also known as hydrogen-3, is chemically identical to normal water, which is exactly why separating it from wastewater is expensive, energy-intensive, and just generally very hard and time-consuming.
	But as far as radioactive elements go, tritium appears to be relatively benign.
	From the research, it's been shown to pass through living organisms in a similar way to water, and it doesn't appear to strongly accumulate in the bodies of living things.
	And just as a fun fact, tritium is what's often used to create the glow-in-the-dark effect on watches.
	The known problem, though, is that as tritium decays, it gives off a beta particle that can damage DNA if it's ingested.
	But then the positive side is that this beta particle is not very energetic, meaning that a person would need to ingest a lot of it in order to get a significant dose of radiation.
	And so as a whole, high doses of tritium appear to be dangerous, but extremely microscopic doses might not be.
	At least, that's the theory that the Japanese chose to run with.
	And so what they've been doing at that facility is diluting the treated water so that it's one part wastewater, 100 parts seawater.
	This dilution process, theoretically at least, makes the relative level of carbon-14 as well as tritium acceptable and safe.
	Now, the company that's actually physically in charge of this process is the Tokyo Energy Production Company, otherwise known as TEPCO.
	They're the ones I mentioned earlier that operate this nuclear facility.
	And when speaking about this process of releasing the wastewater into the ocean, their officials said that the resulting concentration of tritium in the final solution that actually hits the ocean is around 1500 baccarills per liter.
	And the baccarils per liter is a measure of the amount of radioactivity in a given substance.
	And the level that they claim to have achieved is actually significantly lower than the guidelines for tritium in drinking water That were put out recently by the World Health Organization.
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	In a report that you can see up on your screen titled Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality, the World Health Organization wrote that in terms of tritium, 10,000 baccarills per liter is acceptable.
	And so the 1,500 baccarilles per liter that the Japanese were able to achieve with their dilution process is well below that limit.
	Meaning that as long as you trust the guidelines that were put out by the WHO, this water is well within the limits that are safe for humans.
	However, it appears that not everyone trusted this water to indeed be safe.
	Back in 2023, when the Japanese began to pour out batches of this water, with each batch representing thousands of tons of water, neighboring countries imposed import bans and import restrictions on Japanese fish.
	The Chinese and the Russians went the furthest, imposing a blanket ban on Japanese fish imports.
	However, after roughly two years, just last month, the Chinese actually lifted their ban, at least partially.
	The lifting of this ban, it came on the heels of a report which found no abnormalities in the samples that were collected near the Fukushima plant in Japan.
	Quote, China's tests of seawater samples collected from near Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant have found no negative impact on marine species, increasing the chances that Beijing will eventually lift its ban on Japanese seafood imports.
	And indeed, shortly after the report was released, the ban on Japanese fish imports was lifted at least partially.
	Quote, As a result, China decided to conditionally resume seafood imports from Japan, with the exception of imports from 10 of the country's 47 prefectures, including Fukushima and Tokyo, which remained banned.
	This was obviously a boon to the Japanese fishing industry, as well as a tacit acknowledgement, well, actually an overt acknowledgement, that it appears that this process does dilute the water enough to make it safe.
	And so there you have it.
	The Japanese have been dumping out batches of this treated nuclear wastewater for the last two years, making roughly five to six dumps a year.
	The neighboring countries obviously were not pleased with it, but after two years, it appears that the data shows no abnormalities in the surrounding marine life.
	We'll just have to wait and see what the area looks like in 2053, the approximate date for when all this wastewater has finally been released.
	If you'd like to go deeper into this particular story, I'll throw both my research notes about the problem as well as the most recent developments with China.
	Russia, I don't believe, has still lifted their import ban.
	I believe that ban is still in place.
	I wonder whether it'll get lifted as well.
	Who knows?
	But yeah, I'll throw all those most up-to-date details that you can find them down in the description box below as well.
	And all I ask can return, as always, is if you're going to go down there to look for those links, take a quick detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm.
	And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.
	Stay informed.

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