THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
May 26, 2023 at 18:38 JST
Yoo Guk-hee, chairman of South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, speaks to reporters at the Foreign Ministry building in Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki district on May 25. (Kota Kawano)
South Korean inspectors on May 25 concluded their safety check of the Japanese government’s plan to release treated water into the ocean from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
But the team did not release its findings publicly.
“After reviewing the results of the inspection, we would like to explain our final evaluation,” team leader Yoo Guk-hee, chairman of South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, told reporters that day.
Yoo said the team met with officials from the Foreign Ministry and the industry ministry on May 25.
“We have checked everything we needed to directly examine on-site,” he said. “We also requested information materials from the Japanese side regarding power supply measures in the event of an external power outage.”
Many residents and officials in South Korea are deeply concerned about the safety of the discharge of the treated water from the plant, which is operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
The South Korean visit came about after an agreement between South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at their bilateral summit on May 7.
The 21-member team, including experts on nuclear power plants and the marine environment, visited Japan from May 21 to 26.
Members inspected the Fukushima nuclear plant on May 23 and 24. They checked the relevant facilities for the water discharge and TEPCO’s advanced liquid processing system, or ALPS, which can remove most radioactive substances from the contaminated water, except for tritium.
ALPS-treated water will be diluted until the tritium concentration measures one-40th of the government safety standard, or one-seventh of the World Health Organization’s standard for drinking water, before being discharged into the sea.
The industry ministry stresses that “only the International Atomic Energy Agency can properly evaluate from a third-party perspective.”
The ministry said the South Korean visit aims “to deepen understanding.”
A ministry official said the Japanese side showed everything that the South Korean side requested.
(This article was written by Kota Kawano and Yushin Adachi.)
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