Interview with Nuclear Specialist Shaun Burnie, "Japan Releasing Radioactive Water Because It Can't Store It? They Have Space for 'Tanks.'"

"Last week, there was a report that all the storage tanks where Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) stored radioactive water would be full by 2022, right? That's not true."

Shaun Burnie (pictured), chief nuclear expert at Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, sat for an interview with the Kyunghyang Shinmun on August 13 and also said that the claim that Japan did not have the capacity to store the contaminated water was a groundless belief.

Burnie was the one who recently exposed that the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power were planning to release over a million ton of high-level radioactive water from unit one of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the sea, after the accident following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011.

As proof, he presented the details of a conversation between a member of the Tritiated Water Task Force and Tokyo Electric Power from a task force meeting in Japan last week. According to Burnie, the power company admitted that they had enough space to build more storage tanks to store the radioactive water, but failed to properly explain why they were not building those storage tanks. In other words Japan had the capacity to store more of the contaminated water without releasing it into the Pacific Ocean, but was still planning to release the radioactive water into the sea. He said Japan only needed to make a decision to secure the land, build more storage tanks and store the polluted water. He added that storing the radioactive water was physically and economically possible. He also advised the South Korean government to aggressively respond by publically raising the issue of the radioactive water in the international community.

In a Greenpeace report on the risks of the contaminated water from Fukushima Power Plant unit one written in January, Burnie mentioned that TEPCO had tried to remove the contaminants from the radioactive water for the past eight years but failed, and that as a result, the amount of contaminated water increased to over 1.1 million tons (as of December 13, 2018). This includes the water that the company used to cool the nuclear reactor as well as the groundwater. According to Burnie's analysis, the amount of contaminated water increases by two thousand to four thousand tons every week. In the report he recommended that the only effective solution to the problem of contaminated water was to store the water mid to long term in storage tanks and seek to develop the technology to treat the contaminated water in the meantime.

As for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, he said that it was true that the accident site was near the Fukushima Stadium, and added that the Japanese government should conduct a prior investigation on the impact and damage of the radioactive pollution and share the results with the athletes.

Burnie led the campaign against nuclear power at Greenpeace international headquarters for seventeen years. Since the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, he has visited Japan several times every year since 2013 to check the status of recovery operations.

He inspected the Fukushima site for six days from August 8 and said that the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was still an ongoing catastrophe today, eight years later.

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