Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and three Cabinet ministers ate Fukushima fish sashimi at a lunch meeting Wednesday, in an apparent effort to show that fish is safe following the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that began last week.

Kishida and the three ministers had sashimi of flounder, octopus and sea bass, caught off the Fukushima coast after the water release, along with vegetables, fruits and a bowl of rice that were harvested in the prefecture, Economy and Industry Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who was at the meeting, told reporters.

The release of the treated wastewater into the ocean, which began Thursday and is expected to continue for decades, has been strongly opposed by fishing groups and by neighboring countries. China immediately banned all imports of Japanese seafood in response. In South Korea, thousands of people joined rallies over the weekend to condemn the discharge.

All seawater and fish sampling data since the release have been way below set safety limits.

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I am so tired of hearing about this.

    If the media did one tenth the pearl clutching concern for the shit that is actually destroying the environment, the dumping of gigatons of co2 into the atmosphere every fucking year, we may have done something about it.

    • IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This entire Fukushima waste water thing is just the modern plastic straw. Dumping it isn’t great, but fuck, there’s like three billion other things we should be really worried about more when it comes to the environment.

      The media’s priorities on particular issues is fucked sometimes.

      • xep@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s been amplified to a considerable degree due to regional geopolitics, unfortunately.

      • Scrof@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        While it isn’t great it isn’t terrible either. It just is. Also the media wouldn’t have to force scientists and responsible politicians to explain it this non-issue over and over if the public finally understood that Fukushima disaster is hardly a goddamn disaster. The moronic public opinion in this particular case did way more harm than the actual accident.

  • Don Escobar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s funny cuz I thought they’ve been doing this all along, what have they been doing until now?

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      There’s less radiation in this water than a banana. A cigarette is not comparable in health risk.

  • anlumo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Not in the news is that after that PR stunt, he went straight to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out.

    (No, I’m not serious)

    • Sentrovasi@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It is actually safe, though, and all this fear-mongering based on misinformation rather than what actually has been said by not just Japan but the IAEA (and admitted by SK) is really hindering efforts at sustainable energy.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The difference is that this actually is safe.

      See, the radiation released is actually lower than the background radiation of standard ocean water, because the ocean is full of naturally occurring uranium oxide. It’s water-soluble.

      Anyway, the tritium in the discharge water is diluted so much that it will be a non-issue. This just gets headlines because people are kind of stupid when it comes to the scary radiation word, as if you weren’t bathing in ionizing radiation right this very second from all the natural sources around you.

      You have gamma from cosmic rays, alpha and beta emitters in the soil, and a dozen other sources of radiation around you.

    • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Sure. No problem.

      A little info.

      If you drank nothing but the released water (forget about the salt for a while), so 2L of this water every day for a year, you would receive a radiation dose of 4 mili-rem.

      To put that into perspective. Every year humans receive 30 mili-rem from background radiation exposure.

      • osarusan@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        This is the most frustrating thing because posts like the one you replied to get posted constantly, and debunked constantly as you and other commenters nicely did. Yet they never come back to say, “Thanks for the correction!” or edit their comments to remove the false information. They just go on to repeat the same tripe elsewhere.

        • milkjug@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This is classical confirmation bias + Dunning Kruger at work. People like to think they know the facts and are hesitant to admit they might have erroneous information. It’s likely those that sprout misinformation would scroll right past over our discourse and see the next misinformed post and go “AH HA! I was right!”