TOKYO: Wastewater discharges from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant were temporarily suspended on Friday after an earthquake, its operator said.
A 5.8-magnitude tremor occurred off the coast of the northeastern Fukushima area, where a power plant destroyed by the tsunami is located in 2011 at 00:14 on Friday (15:14 on Thursday), the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
“We have remotely confirmed that there are no abnormalities at the ALPS treated water dilution/discharge facility, etc.,” Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said on X, formerly Twitter, referring to the water release process.
But “just in case, we have suspended the operation of the facility by pre-defined operating procedures”, it said in the early hours of Friday.
Hours later, TEPCO said in a statement that “no abnormalities were detected” and a spokesman told AFP that water releases would resume.
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After TEPCO completed the necessary checks, no radiation leakage was detected, while “data from monitoring stations remains normal”, he added.
Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority also said shortly after the earthquake that no abnormalities had been detected at either the crashed Fukushima Daiichi plant or its sister plant, Fukushima Daini.
Last August, TEPCO began discharging into the Pacific Ocean about 540 Olympic-sized pools of wastewater that had accumulated at Fukushima Daiichi since the 2011 accident, one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
The operation was approved by the UN Atomic Agency, and TEPCO says all radioactive elements have been filtered out except for tritium, whose levels are within safe limits.
But China and Russia criticized the Pacific dumping and banned Japanese seafood imports, saying Japan was polluting the environment.
Japan experiences hundreds of earthquakes each year, and the vast majority cause no damage.
There were no immediate reports of injuries from the latest tremor and no tsunami warning.
