Fukushima, radioactive water will end up in the sea. China and South Korea against Japan- time.news

by time news

The government of the Japan decided on Tuesday 13 April 2021 to start release the water that had been contaminated in the nuclear disaster to the central Fukushima, in 2011, inPacific Ocean.

The release will take place in two years.

The decision was fiercely contested by residents, fishermen and neighboring countries, starting with China e South Korea. While the United States has in fact supported the choice of Tokyo – expressing understanding, according to the Japanese press, especially in the face of the scarcity of options available to the Japanese government – Seoul has summoned the ambassador.

The water has been so far stored in tanks around the nuclear plant since 2011, when a huge earthquake, followed by a tsunami, damaged the reactors of the plant, causing water contamination.

The company Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), which manages the nuclear power plant damaged by the tsunami of 11 March 2011, has announced that in 2022 the tanks will no longer have space.

As indicated here, 200 cubic meters of water (equal to 200,000 liters weighing about 200 tons) are used every day in Fukushima to cool the damaged reactors. The water is contaminated by radioactivity and must be stored in the 960 tanks built for this purpose with a total capacity of 1.15 million tons.

The only other option under consideration by the government was the evaporation of contaminated water. We have no choice but to address the issue of waste water. We must proceed with the decommissioning of nuclear reactors, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at the end of the government meeting.

L’incidente a Fukushima

The Fukushima accident occurred on March 11, 2011. At 14.46 Japan time, early in the morning in Italy, an earthquake of the ninth degree on the Richter scale raises the ocean floor off the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. The shock generates a tsunami with waves higher than 20 meters. The tsunami takes about half an hour to reach the Japanese coasts, also affecting the Fukushima area, which is located about 200 km from Tokyo and where there is a nuclear power plant that produces electricity. The walls protecting the power plant are a maximum of 6 meters high, that is much lower than the waves raised by the earthquake: the water invades the nuclear power plant, flooding it and blowing up all the electrical circuits, including those of the electric generators that had come into operation immediately after the shock. Thus began the most serious nuclear accident in history, together with that of Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. Below, the podcast of Paolo Salom, who went to Japan to tell about that catastrophe.


Article being updated …

April 13, 2021 (change April 13, 2021 | 10:36 am)

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