Japan accuses Russia of concern-trolling over Fukushima
Plus how Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions put the U.S. in a bind.
Last month, the Japanese government began releasing treated radioactive water from the defunct Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant.
A reasonable person might assume that dumping radioactive wastewater from the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl into the ocean is a bad thing. How could it not be? It sounds like the set up for a new Godzilla movie.
But the details make all the difference. Like how all the dangerous radioisotopes that form during fission – the ones that can actually kill you – are filtered out repeatedly before any water is released. Or how the only radioisotope that remains – a radioactive version of hydrogen called tritium – is relatively harmless and has never been documented to cause cancer in humans. Or how the amount of tritium pumped into the Pacific after dilution is virtually indistinguishable from the naturally-occurring concentrations that come from cosmic rays. Or, for that matter, how the active nuclear reactors along the coasts of South Korea, China and Taiwan routinely discharge what’s called “tritiated water” into the sea with no real documented harm.
But that hasn’t prevented Japan’s neighbors from reacting as if the water releases pose grave public health threats. In South Korea, a country that until recently planned to phase out nuclear energy, the government tried to ameliorate the fears of protesters. But in China – which sees the U.S.-allied Japan as a geopolitical rival, to say nothing of the lingering rage at the Japanese military’s savagery during World War II – the government only fed the flames.
In the lead up to the August start of Japan’s pumping program, China and Russia jointly sent questionnaires to Tokyo requesting more information of the United Nations-approved plan. Despite replying in detail and making the responses public, China accused Japan of treating the Pacific as a “sewer” on the day pumping started.
Beijing then banned all imports of Japanese seafood, cutting off fishermen’s biggest market, and did little to tamp down rumors on otherwise tightly-controlled Chinese social media networks that the tritium releases were something akin to Chernobyl itself, resulting in a run on iodized salt, which panicked Chinese shoppers incorrectly believed offered protection against radiation.
Russia had been somewhat less vocal. But on Wednesday, the Kremlin renewed its criticism of Japan, accusing Tokyo of not being transparent.
When I logged on late Thursday night for a briefing with the Japanese government, an official in Tokyo – who, putting aside the transparency optics, requested anonymity to speak candidly about the fraught diplomacy – told me the rhetoric from Beijing and Moscow is part of a disinformation campaign against Japan.
“It’s political,” said the official. “Misinformation — disinformation — is causing reputational damage and adversely affecting the lives of people in Fukushima.”
It all comes as Japan is getting back into the nuclear energy game 12 years after halting its reactors following the Fukushima disaster. Last week, a Japanese utility bought a stake in the U.S. nuclear reactor startup NuScale. This week, Japan restarted a mothballed reactor in the west-coast Fukui prefecture.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
China, meanwhile, is building more nuclear reactors than any other country. And it might start constructing them overseas soon, too.
Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia is considering an offer from China to build the oil-rich kingdom’s debut nuclear power plant. Such a deal might undercut U.S. efforts to leverage access to American nuclear technology for Saudi recognition of Israel. But the significance is even greater for a bedrock U.S. policy meant to keep countries that don’t already have nuclear weapons from developing their own.
Since 1968, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has set the ground rules for countries seeking to harness the awesome power released when uranium atoms split apart, barring the production of the most deadly materials used in bombs but still allowing nations to enrich, split and recycle their own uranium fuel. But the U.S. has required countries that want its help building nuclear reactors to go even further, signing on to what’s known as a 123 Agreement, a pact granting Washington even more control over how radioactive isotopes are used. The agreements, forged by the State Department and, like a treaty, subject to Senate confirmation, were created to encourage the use of atomic energy without raising the risk that facilities meant to enrich or reprocess uranium for reactor fuels might be misused to produce plutonium for weapons.
In recent years, the U.S. has promoted what it calls “gold standard” agreements, in which the partner country promises to never enrich or reprocess its own fuel. In exchange for signing on to the first such a deal in 2008, Washington gave its blessing to the United Arab Emirates’ first nuclear plant, which that oil-rich kingdom plans to tout in November when it hosts this year’s United Nations climate summit in Dubai.
The Emirates signed onto the pact on the condition that neighboring countries would be held to the same standard. Yet with its own domestic uranium deposits and an ethos built on exporting energy, Saudi Arabia appears reluctant to cede control over its nuclear fuel cycle to Washington. And China is offering an alternative.
I talked to advocates across the spectrum, ranging from self-described progressives to Heritage Foundation conservatives, all of whom agreed the stiff U.S. posture on nuclear fuel might not match the country’s atrophying atomic prowess.
You can read my full story here on HuffPost.
For further reading, I recommend this piece on the blog Neutron Bytes and this short commentary from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Other public agencies such as Nasa are increasingly reliant on the likes of Musk or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company to meet their goals…
This is not just an American phenomenon. Other countries have billionaires whose technological, industrial and media assets give them enormous clout. Yet governments, even as they juggle ever greater spending pressures, should continue to invest and avoid becoming too reliant on private businesses in sectors such as defence, security and space.
The US space programme, for instance, has always been a collaboration between the best of state-directed and private-sector ingenuity, and the internet, the basis of Big Tech’s success, grew out of state-funded research and development. The balance has shifted too far towards the private; while US business investment in R&D more than tripled between 1990 and 2020, federal public R&D spending was almost flat.
– the Financial Times editorial board Elon Musk’s growing geopolitical power.
On thin ice. Russia this week routed thin-hulled oil tankers destined for Asia through the Arctic for the first time, raising fears of a oil spill far from any infrastructure capable of mitigating such a disaster, per the FT.
Can’t spell bull without U. Global uranium prices surged past $60 for the first time since 2011 this week, a key market signal for the nuclear renaissance, Mining Technology reports.
Blackouts in Dagestan. Demonstrators have filled the streets of the Russian region of Dagestan, blocking roads and government offices, every day since July to protest frequent power outages and water cutoffs, according to the independent Russian news site The Insider. Blackouts are disabling traffic lights and leaving families without electricity for hours if not days. In response, the government is accusing protesters of supporting Ukraine.
Atlas plugged. The New Republic has a deep investigation into the Atlas Network, a right-wing global coalition of think tanks promoting legislation in various countries to make routine forms of environmental protest illegal. '
The utility corruption - abortion nexus. My friends over at Floodlight News have a major new story in the Orlando Sentinel on how legal changes won by Florida Power & Light will make it harder and more expensive to hold the kind of ballot initiative that has saved access to safe, legal abortions in other states.
$19 billion. That’s how much the federal government spent last year on insurance payments to farmers for weather-destroyed crops, a record, per this Inside Climate News writeup of a new report from the watchdog Environmental Working Group. It represents a nearly sevenfold increase from 2002, when the program cost under $3 billion.
Hearts and mines. In rapidly-developing Vietnam, fierce debates are unfolding over the environmental toll of local industrial projects, according to this post from reporter Michael Tatarski’s Vietnam Weekly, a Substack worthy of your attention. One involves a sand mine. The other deals with plans to clear pristine woodlands to make way for a new dam and reservoir.
What’s mined is mining. Closer to home, my friends at New York Focus have a jaw-dropping new story about a sand mine on Long Island that has refused to stop mining in defiance of the New York State’s top court and regulators.
H2’s boon to RNG. Canary Media’s Jeff St. John has a new investigation into how new subsidies for hydrogen fuel incentivize more ecologically destructive industrial farm pollution than would have occurred anyway, adding new context to the debate over renewable natural gas.
Exxon knew, part 342351342. Exxon Mobil Corp. continued funding climate denial long after it vowed to stop doing so in 2006, and refocused all its research on technologies and tools explicitly meant to preserve the value of its oil and gas assets, according to internal documents the WSJ published. Not everyone is convinced this is a bombshell:
California may disagree. On Friday, the Golden State filed a major new lawsuit against Exxon, BP, Shell and other oil giants, hoping to force the companies to pay into a statewide fund for addressing climate disasters to compensate for their decadeslong climate-science coverup. The New York Times highlights the contrasts between this and the more than two dozen other state and city lawsuits against Big Oil.
Thank you as always for your time and attention. I hope you feel my writing earned it. If not, maybe this song recommendation will. It’s called “Prepad,” and it’s by Boban Petrovic, the king of 1980s Yugoslavian disco.
Signing off from an autumnally crisp Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where last week we hung colored paper streamers from the living-room ceiling to celebrate my wife Amanda’s 32nd birthday. Her sincere love of festive classics brought a levity to my life that I never knew before we got together. We have left them up all week. In fact, as I wrote this last night, we were sitting beneath them eating apples and honey to ring in 5784. L’shana tova.