Fukushima waste water hysteria distracts from real threats to Pacific Ocean’s health
- The shameless scaremongering and geopolitical point-scoring over the release of Fukushima waste water betray a lack of rationality
- People around the Pacific should be concerned about reducing ocean pollution, but the tritium from Fukushima is far from the most pressing issue
At best, this ignorance leaves us unfocused on the true dangers to our health. At worst, it results in the misdirection of billions of dollars to problems that involve negligible or non-existent risk, at the expense of funds being directed to tackle major environmental challenges that threaten our health and livelihoods worldwide.
A National Geographic study published in 2019 noted that up to 1972, oceans were quite literally garbage dumps: “Millions of tons of heavy metals and chemical contaminants, along with thousands of containers of radioactive waste, were purposely thrown into the ocean.”
Compared with such significant hazards, which constitute a direct danger to the health of so many millions worldwide, the dangers arising from the tritium in the Fukushima discharges are almost laughably insignificant.
Or take Nigel Marks, at the Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, who notes that 8,400 grams of pure tritium occur naturally in the Pacific Ocean, compared with the Fukushima release, which will amount to 0.06 grams per year. “A lifetime’s worth of seafood caught a few kilometres from the [Fukushima] ocean outlet has the tritium radiation equivalent of one bite of a banana,” he has said. “In truth, almost everything is radioactive, including the Pacific Ocean, where tritium accounts for a modest 0.04 per cent of total radioactivity.”
They should also be alert to the fact that cat litter is radioactive enough to set off airport radiation alerts. In short, on any scale of risk, we should pause to recognise that there are thousands of greater threats that face us every day than tritium, and that goes for the seriously threatened Pacific Ocean, too.
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As researchers from the University of Chicago said this week in their Air Quality of Life Index, if our governments succeeded in reducing fine particulate pollution in the air down to recommended levels, it would add 2 years and 3 months to the life of every one of us.
In short, people around the Pacific should indeed be passionately concerned about reducing ocean pollution and eliminating the thousands of pollutants that so directly threaten our health and that of our marine life.
Even a brief examination of leading risks, and of priorities for action, tells us tritium is not on the list. Our political leaders should be focusing on the many real and urgent threats rather than playing petty geopolitical games.
David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades