Monitoring long-term ecological impacts from release of Fukushima radiation water into ocean

Abstract

After 10 years of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, Japan decided to release the nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean on 13 April 2021. It is apparent that Japan has chosen the most cost-efficient way to deal with the contaminated water, however, great opposition and concerns have been raised internationally due to the ecotoxicological features of radioactive materials and their harmful impacts on the environment. Here we analyze the ecological impacts caused by the nuclear accident and the potential impacts of releasing the nuclear wastewater into the ocean. Science-based solutions are proposed through a third-party evaluation and strict environmental assessment, multi-stakeholder public participation, integrated monitoring of the neighboring coastal countries, long-term international collaborative research, and setting up international convention for ecological compensation.

Keywords

Fukushima Nuclear Accident / Ecological impact / Radioactive materials / Public participation / Compensation mechanism

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.71761147001 and 42030707) and the International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No.121311KYSB20190029).

Author contributions

YL conceived the idea and study design, JY, DD, BS, XY and YL collected and analyzed data and drafted the paper, YL and JY revised the paper.

Data and materials availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are presented in the Supplementary Materials.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2021.04.002.

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