Russia announced on Monday that it would join China’s restrictive measures and ban all seafood imports from Japan in response to the release of water into the sea from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Russia’s agricultural products regulator Rosselkhoznadzor “joins China’s interim restrictive measures on imports of fish and seafood from Japan from October 16, 2023,” it said. In a press release, she stated that it was a “precautionary measure.” .
“The restrictions will remain in effect until comprehensive information necessary to confirm the safety of seafood (…) is available,” the same source said.
China suspended all seafood imports from Japan in August in response to the start of water denials that resulted particularly from the injections needed to cool the reactors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, devastated by the terrible tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011.
This process was validated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Tokyo assured that it was safe for the environment and human health.
The second phase of releasing treated water from Japan’s damaged Fukushima power plant into the sea began on October 5.
In total, Japan plans to release more than 1.3 million m3 of tritium-containing water from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – the equivalent of 540 Olympic swimming pools – but very gradually, until the early 2050s, according to the current schedule.
This water was treated to remove radioactive substances, with the exception of tritium, and then diluted with seawater before being discharged into the ocean so that its radioactivity did not exceed the target maximum level of 1500 Bq/L, a 40-fold lower value than the Japanese standard for this type of operation.