WESLEY SEALE
AS MOST parts of the Western Cape suffer from floods and more rain is expected, one’s mind casts back to the floods in KwaZulu-Natal in April last year.
Climate change is real and it would seem that our coastal regions in particular are coming under significant onslaught from the weather.
Yet we need to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is man-made. Another man-made environmental disaster waiting to happen remains nuclear waste.
In this respect and unsurprisingly Japan, and how it disposes of nuclear water waste, remains one of the biggest threats to that region and our world’s oceans.
In fact, instead of focusing on Russia and China, one would have expected the recent G7 leaders’ summit held in Hiroshima, Japan, to address the host country’s flagrant disregard for our oceans in its nuclear waste dumping.
Present at this year’s G7 summit was the South Korean leader, Yoon Suk Yeol, whose foreign ministry in January this year complained that Tokyo was not providing transparent security information in relation to its nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant dumping into the sea.
According to reports, dumping nuclear contaminated water into the sea is the cheapest and fastest way of disposing of such water, but it has a devastating effect on marine life for the entire globe’s oceans, not just the seas surrounding the Japanese islands.
Already two years ago, in April 2021, UN human rights experts deplored Japan’s decision to release the contaminated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, stating that such “discharge could impact millions of lives and livelihoods in the Pacific region”.
The independent experts, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, said that “the release of one million tons of contaminated water into the marine environment imposes considerable risks to the full enjoyment of human rights of concerned populations in and beyond the borders of Japan”.
Echoing this global impact that the dumping of this nuclear-waste-contaminated water could have on the world’s oceans, Tshwane University of Technology professor Mammo Muchie wrote earlier this year how “discharging Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean should not be Japan’s private matter. Japan will be dumping nuclear contaminated water into the ocean for 30 years. A decade after nuclear contaminated water was released and because of some of the world's strongest ocean currents are near Fukushima, radionuclides could spread to the globe.”
For those of us familiar with nuclear energy and its waste, the UN panel went further to point out that the water may contain quantities of radioactive carbon-14 and other radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90 and tritium.
This should be alarming for the international community because, for example, the International Atomic Energy Agency reports that “owing to (tritium’s) relatively long half-life, high residence time in the environment, high isotopic exchange rate and ease of assimilation into living matter, it is necessary to control its production at nuclear facilities. There is also a requirement for the proper management of related waste and material, because of the potential impact on human health.”
At the last Council of Ministers’ meeting of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (Iora), the association’s “outlook on the Indo-Pacific” was released.
Among others, the ministers insisted that promotion must be made of conserving, the sustainable use as well as management of marine resources of the Indo-Pacific region.
As a member of the Iora, South Africa has a bit more work to do, through its foreign policy, than simply concentrating on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will come for BRICS, and pleasing the West.
As a country with the 40th longest coastline in the world, our government must insist that countries like Japan do more to preserve our oceans.
Seale has a PhD in international relations.