Radioactive Fish and Transboundary Nuclear Pollution

So we’ve finally come to the end of our time with the fishing industry and its pollutive nature. To conclude this series, I’d like to talk about an interesting article I came across about the long-lasting impacts of the release of nuclear, radioactive wastewater from a power plant in Fukushima on the fishing industry.

This study is an excellent example of transboundary pollution as it provided insights on the perspective of a neighboring country, China [1]. 10 years after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the Japanese government decided on releasing wastewater from the damaged plants into the marine waters [2]. Despite their claims of having treated the wastewater and removed its radioactive components, there was still strong push-back from the local fishing industry and neighboring countries such as China and South Korea [2]. The study cited several ways that the wastewater could harm the environment as seen in Figure 1 below [1].

With the aid of oceanic currents, the radioactive wastewater can potentially enter the fishing grounds of other neighboring countries [1]. This can become a prominent issue when these countries are not equipped to handle such pollution. From the perspective of China, their current regulations for their fishing industry has been insufficient to address the problem of transboundary nuclear waste pollution and existing regulations are not strictly upheld by the authorities [1]. Due to this, fisheries in China are not prohibited from fishing in contaminated waters and can continue to sell contaminated fish to their consumers [1].

Li et al. proposed possible solutions to this problem by changing China’s current legislations on transboundary nuclear pollution [1]. Regulations need to be placed on catching contaminated fish, and to enact a strict regulation of jurisdiction limits on fishing activities. Inspection efforts and monitoring technologies should also be ramped up to prevent illegal fishing of contaminated fish.

Overall, it really struck me how even years after such disasters, the negative impact on the environment and society persists despite years of rehabilitation and continues to spread beyond just the place of disaster [2]. Such impacts can become more severe when the affected countries and industries are unable to effectively combat it. In the case of the fishing industry, the lack of proper regulations can harm more than just the fish, but also the consumers who eat the contaminated fish.

 

References:

[3] The Fukushima Daiichi Accident. Non-serial Publications. IAEA, Vienna. 2015.