Fishy Business: China and Japan Settle Seafood Dispute After Fukushima Water Release

By Kevin Williams

On September 20 the Chinese and Japanese governments announced an agreement to eventually restart Japanese seafood exports to China. This announcement marks progress in China’s easing opposition to Japan’s release of water from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific Ocean in 2023. Both China and Russia enacted seafood import bans on Japan in 2023 despite the water release meeting the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) standards. The agreement between Japan and China will involve coordination with the IAEA to ensure the water release plan meets agreed upon safety standards. 

In 2011 several of Fukushima plants’ reactors melted down following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The reactors were flooded with water to arrest further disaster, resulting in around 350 million gallons of contaminated water at present. Although the reactors are offline, they still require new cooling water, which has reached near storage capacity. The Japanese government has since worked toward a filtration system called Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove the majority of the radioactive isotopes from the water. ALPS has been successful at removing dangerous isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, but not tritium. The Japanese government’s three step plan for the tritium is to first saturate the water with seawater, diluting the tritium concentration to safe levels. Secondly, the diluted water will be sent under the seafloor via tunnels, and finally released slowly over decades to minimize risk. It should be noted that nuclear plants around the world release tritium into water and the half life of this isotope is only 12 years.

Although no timeline has been announced for the import ban’s lift, China’s agreement to gradually allow Japanese seafood to return marks a positive point in the two countries’ growing tensions. The agreement is especially beneficial to Japan as prior to 2023 China stood as the largest outside market for Japanese seafood products, accounting for 23%. It still remains unseen how China’s agreement to lift the bad will impact other regional tensions with Japan.