This year, 62,400 tons, Japan's Fukushima nuclear wastewater is being discharged more and more. Will the 30-year marine discharge cause suffering for several generations?

(Source: Shibao New Journey)

5.5 tons of nuclear-contaminated water, 160 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium—those numbers just released by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) look pretty scary, don’t they? But you may not know that this is the result after they’ve “converged” their process. In fiscal year 2026, TEPCO plans to discharge another 8 times, totaling about 6.24 million tons, which is more than this year by over 7,000 tons. At this pace, Fukushima’s nuclear-contaminated water discharge into the sea will last at least 30 years, while we’ve only reached year 3 right now.

Many people are taken in by the line that “the tritium concentration meets international standards,” thinking that everything is fine. But you have to understand that Fukushima’s nuclear-contaminated water is completely different from ordinary cooling water from nuclear power plants—it is “accident water” that has directly contacted the melted reactor core. In addition to tritium, it contains more than 60 radioactive nuclides, including carbon-14, strontium-90, and cesium-137. TEPCO’s ALPS treatment system, to put it plainly, is like a “sieve”—it can block the big ones, but it can’t block the small ones. More importantly, some long-lived nuclides have half-lives of thousands of years; once they’re discharged into the ocean, your grandchild’s grandchild will still be able to detect them.

Let’s look at comparative data. In fiscal year 2024, TEPCO discharged 5.46 million tons; in fiscal year 2025, 5.5 million tons; and in fiscal year 2026, the plan is 6.24 million tons—the discharge volume increases year by year. As of now, after 18 discharges, a total of 14.1 million tons of nuclear-contaminated water has been dumped. And at the Fukushima site, there are still more than 1.3 million tons of nuclear-contaminated water in storage. At this rate, they won’t even be finished in 30 years. While discharging now, TEPCO is also dismantling the storage tanks—clearly committed to treating the ocean discharge as a “long-term solution.”

Let’s talk about the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) endorsement. In 2023, the IAEA issued a report saying the discharges meet safety standards. The result was exposed by South Korean media, and it alleged that Japanese officials allegedly put money pressure on the IAEA. China’s National Nuclear Safety Administration directly called out: the IAEA’s assessment was based only on data provided unilaterally by Japan, and the sampling independence and representativeness were seriously insufficient; the authenticity of the data needs confirmation. Put simply, it’s like “the athletes submit their own medical exam report, and the referee just glances at it and says it’s fine.”

The real impacts are already here. A German ocean research institute simulated that nuclear-contaminated water could spread to most of the Pacific in 57 days, and reach China’s coastal areas in 240 days. The price of the fish that Korean fishermen are catching now has fallen by 30%, and TEPCO has already paid 85 billion yen just in compensation. Even more troublesome is the biological accumulation effect—radioactive materials are consumed by plankton, small fish eat plankton, and large fish eat small fish, and then it ends up on the human dinner table. This cumulative process may take decades to become apparent. By the time you notice it, it will be too late.

So don’t let yourself be numbed by talk of “meeting standards.” A 30-year discharge cycle means that the risk will have to be borne by multiple generations in the future. TEPCO has a track record—they have done things like concealing data and falsifying reports, and they’ve done it more than once. Now that they’ve discharged the nuclear-contaminated water and walked away, their costs are the lowest—but the price is passed on to countries along the entire Pacific coast. This isn’t a scientific issue; it’s a responsibility issue. The ocean isn’t Japan’s sewer—some people just pretend not to understand.

Part of the materials source: TASS (Russian News Agency)

大量资讯、精准解读，尽在新浪财经APP