More than eight years ago, in 2011, Japan was struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake. The largest and most devastating earthquake in the country's history. The monumental temblor caused three nuclear meltdowns, as well as three hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
As a result of this catastrophic disaster, the Japanese government now has one million tons of contaminated water. In a chain reaction, the following tsunami, caused the reactor cores to overheat prompting workers to use water as a cooling agent. This water and water that made its way to the reactors through seepage are now highly contaminated with radioactive material.
Japan is currently storing the water in sealed containers, but those are filling up fast. It is projected that by August of 2022, there will be no more space for contaminated water to be stored.
Japan's simple remedy for this complex and potentially enormous problem is somewhat simple; drain the water into the ocean.
Yoshiaki Harada, Japan's environment minister, said in a news brief that by the year 2022, "the only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute" the contaminated water.
This however, is just a tentative plan, Japan is still waiting on a verdict that will come from a group of environmental experts, before they can move forward.
Environmental group Greenpeace, has stated that the "only environmentally acceptable option" would be to leave the water right where it is, and remove all contaminates via filtration.
This is where the Japanese government is going to be put to the test. The required equipment to continue storing the water, along with the filtration equipment are both extremely expensive. The Japan Centre for Economic Research has estimated that the cleanup costs could amount to as much as 660 billion US dollars.
On the other hand, simply dumping radioactive material into the Earth's waterways, is just plain wrong.
After the disaster and cleanup crews began storing the water, filtration was top priority. The first steps of the process were successful. They managed to filter out dangerous materials such as strontium, but ran into trouble when attempting to remove an isotope called tritium.
In 2016, the Japanese ministry announced that all available methods for removing tritium were insufficient.
Greenpeace believes that the cost of the available methods caused Japanese officials to reconsider safely filtering the water in favor of simply dumping it. Citing that the estimated price for the filtration equipment could be as much as one billion US dollars and yearly operating costs could be as high several hundred million a year.
It has been reported that nearly 80 percent of Japan's stored water is still radioactive.
