STORY:  Japan's plan to dump nuke-contaminated water into sea sparks huge outcry worldwide
DATELINE: June 23, 2023
LENGTH: 00:03:20
LOCATION: Tokyo/Seoul
CATEGORY: POLITICS/ENVIRONMENT

SHOTLIST:
1. various of protesters in Japan and South Korea
2. various of the protest in Fukushima Prefectural, Japan, on June 20, 2023
3. SOUNDBITE 1 (Japanese): CHIYO ODA, Organizer of the event
4. SOUNDBITE 2 (Japanese): MASUKO EIICHI, Fukushima Prefecture resident
5. various of the protest in Seoul, South Korea, on June 12, 2023
6. SOUNDBITE 3 (Korean): KIM KWANG-SHIK, South Korean protester
7. SOUNDBITE 4 (English): TIMOTHY MOUSSEAU, Professor of biological sciences at University of South Carolina
8. SOUNDBITE 5 (English): SHAUN BURNIE, Senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace East Asia

STORYLINE:

Despite ongoing opposition from both home and abroad, Japan has been rushing to carry out its plan of dumping radioactive wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, raising growing anger among the global community.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant's operator, began trialing the equipment for discharging the nuclear-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean on June 12. The test run of the discharge facility is expected to finish on June 26. The nuclear wastewater release led by the Japanese government seems to have entered the countdown.

Nearly 100 Japanese people rallied on Tuesday outside the Fukushima Prefectural Government Office to voice their strong opposition to the dumping plan.

SOUNDBITE 1 (Japanese): CHIYO ODA, Organizer of the event
"The government says every day that the trial operation will end soon, making everyone feel that the ocean discharge is an established fact, and wants us to give up. But it is wrong in the first place to discharge nuclear-contaminated water into the sea, and there are still places for the water storage tanks, so it has not reached the point where it must be discharged."

SOUNDBITE 2 (Japanese): MASUKO EIICHI, Fukushima Prefecture resident
"The nuclear-contaminated water can be diluted, but the total amount of nuclear pollutants discharged remains unchanged. This is something that even schoolchildren understand. Moreover, there are not only the radioactive element tritium in the water, but also 57 kinds of radioactive substances, such as cesium and strontium, which cannot be removed."

In South Korea, around 2,000 fishermen and civic activists gathered in Seoul last week to clamor against Japan's planned discharge of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific.

SOUNDBITE 3 (Korean): KIM KWANG-SHIK, South Korean protester
"I am a fisherman from Yeosu, (Jeollanam-do). This is a bad thing, I know, and I think all people in the country also know it. If the Fukushima contaminated water is safe (as Japan claimed), it can be left in Japan's soil rather than be released into the ocean, I think."

Scientists have also voiced concern at a recent press conference in Seoul that the discharge of tritium from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will severely harm human bodies.

SOUNDBITE 4 (English): TIMOTHY MOUSSEAU, Professor of biological sciences at University of South Carolina
"When tritium gets inside the body, it's at least as dangerous as any of the other radionuclides. And in some cases, it's more than double as dangerous in terms of the effects of the radiation on the genetic material, on the proteins, on the amino acids."

SOUNDBITE 5 (English): SHAUN BURNIE, Senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace East Asia
"It's unclear how successful the ALPS system processes the water. Around 70 percent of the water in the tanks still needs to undergo further processing. So we still don't know how effective it's going to be. It can't be discharged as it is at the moment."

Hit by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and an ensuing tsunami on March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered core meltdowns that released radiation, resulting in a level-7 nuclear accident, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.

In April 2021, the Japanese government announced its controversial plan to release wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.

Xinhua News Agency correspondents reporting from Tokyo/Seoul.
(XHTV)