Here in SK right now (yes it's 4:30am), everyone's against it but no one knows the data. Once people see the data they're like "oh".
South Korea has an inherent hatred for Japan, so this isn't surprising at all.
The Japanese did some pretty radical things during the occupation. It's interesting to see the ripple effects of these policies so far into the future.
Japan also never apologised and pretends they did nothing wrong.
It's more like a wound that never healed than just ripples - early South Korean leaders were people who had formerly collaborated with the Japanese, and it showed in the way they treated their people. It's only relatively recently that South Korea became what anyone would call a liberal democracy.
Korea has an inherent hatred for Japan
As we should. The Japanese government has been jovially profiteering off of Korea since they annexed and "colonized" the peninsula all the way to well after the Korean War where they used the genocidal massacre of Koreans in the bloody brothers war to jump-start their economy out of their post-war devastation.
I keep hearing about this, but haven't delved into it.
Usually when they do a water release like this, or there's potential for contamination to interact with humans in other matricies, such as metals on mines being uptaken in berries and plants used in traditional use (consumption by first Nations), they will do a Human Health and Environment Risk Assessment (HHERA).
These HHERAs look at multiple exposure pathways and consider rates and likelihood of exposure. I find it hard to think that they didn't do this step with something as dangerous as treated waste water from a nuclear plant.
The plan was reviewed, and tested by, the UN and by the International Atomic Energy Agency and found to be very safe. Here'san article that briefly talks about it.
And this is exactly what I suspected. So the comment from China wilfully ignored this, and the protests in South Korea probably did not take this into account.
I had a feeling this was just run of the mill procedure that's been propped up to appear unsafe by various interest groups.
China's reaction is purely political, not science.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
SEOUL, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Protesters gathered in the capital of South Korea on Saturday to demand that the government take steps to avoid what they fear is a looming disaster from Japan's release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Japan began dumping the water from the plant north of Tokyo into the sea on Thursday despite objections both at home and abroad from fishing communities and others worried about the environmental impact.
"We will not be immediately seeing disasters like detecting radioactive materials in seafood but it seems inevitable that this discharge would pose a risk to the local fishing industry and the government needs to come up with solutions," said Choi Kyoungsook of the Korea Radiation Watch group that organised the rally.
Japan and scientific organisations say the water, distilled after being contaminated by contact with fuel rods when the reactor was destroyed in a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, is safe.
Japan's fisheries agency said on Saturday that fish tested in waters around the plant did not contain detectable levels of tritium, Kyodo news service reported.
Japan says it needs to start releasing the water as storage tanks holding about 1.3 million metric tons of it - enough to fill 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools - are full.
The original article contains 319 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 33%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The country was nuked twice and hit with one of the worst nuclear disasters ever. I'm gonna go ahead and trust them with that water
For more information on this subject, check out Bong Joon Ho's 2006 documentary The Host.
How far do they dump it from the coast?
0km from Fukushima's coast, so about 500km from South Korea
They aren't dumping it. They dug miles of caves below the sea floor and are pumping the filtered water into the caves slowly over the span of decades. That's why this whole thing is very dumb. Japan is taking enormous measures to do this safely.
This whole thing would legitimately be the stupidest story of the decade in any decade where Donald Trump isn't making daily headlines.
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