Tokyo has urged Beijing to “ensure the safety of Japanese residents in China” after a wave of telephone harassment targeting businesses in Japan sparked by the controversial discharge of Fukushima wastewater.

While Japan insists the release of the treated water is safe - a view backed by the UN’s nuclear watchdog - China has staunchly opposed it and banned all Japanese seafood imports, saying it contaminates the ocean.

The Japanese government on Sunday (Aug 27) published new data showing waters off Fukushima continued to post radioactivity levels well within safe limits.

  • @WhatAmLemmy
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    8810 months ago

    The Japanese eat a huge amount of seafood. They aren’t dumb enough to pollute their main source of protein more than what’s deemed scientifically safe, and I trust them to do that.

    This is just age old Chinese racism shrouded in greenwashing. I’d like to see the stats on the pollution flowing into the ocean from China. I guarantee it’s 10x worse than anything Japan is doing.

    • @Stovetop
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      3210 months ago

      Based on my experience living in China, even if the government or local industries did release stats of this nature, take it with a mountain of salt.

      It took far too long for the government to even acknowledge that there were problems with air quality in urban centers, and that was plain as day (or…lack thereof) for all to see. And even still there are instances of poor air quality being misreported.

      For something like ocean pollution, which the average person has almost no personal exposure to, a problem may as well not exist if no one notices. And now if someone does notice, well, China now has a convenient scapegoat in Japan.

    • @schroedingershat
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      10 months ago

      Yeah because it’s not as if TEPCO would lie to the public about danger they were in. or try to release water that wasn’t safe by not planning to have anywhere to store it or fail to filter the way they claimed

      They’re definitely trustworthy this time. Anyone who doesn’t believe everything they say is just crazy, there is absolutely no reason to not take everything they say at face value. Why are you even checking?

      Realistically this is China playing political games, but it is also Japan playing political games to try and paint all the times they were lying and there was danger (andnall the times they intend to lie) as innocuous.

    • @Treczoks
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      110 months ago

      The Japanese eat a huge amount of seafood. They aren’t dumb enough to pollute their main source of protein more than what’s deemed scientifically safe, and I trust them to do that.

      If they care, why do they dump so much plastic in the sea? That is way, way worse than then minute amounts Tritium dumped into the ocean on the other side of Japan.

    • @Pat12
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      1310 months ago

      Basically china wants Japan to be hated by chinese people.

      …ww2 already took care of that?

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      I bet China is currently doing some shady shit or is planning to. Them denouncing Japan for a non issue means they want to get a favor for something else. Old tactics “See you’re bad, so you better look away while we do …” Basic deflection.

      • Flying SquidM
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        210 months ago

        I think this whole rejection of Japanese seafood is tied to fishing rights which is, more generally, tied to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

  • @WhatAmLemmy
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    2510 months ago

    The Japanese eat a huge amount of seafood. They aren’t dumb enough to pollute their main source of protein more than what’s deemed scientifically safe, and I trust them to do that.

    This is just age old Chinese racism shrouded in greenwashing. I’d like to see the stats on the pollution flowing into the ocean from China. I guarantee it’s 10x worse than anything Japan is doing.

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      Tepco is a private enterprise, isn’t it?

      Wouldn’t be the first time a private company fucked people over for profit.

      • @schroedingershat
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        310 months ago

        I seem to remember tepco doing something where they cut corners and lied and put the japanese people in danger and cost them $400 billion and then lied about the cleanup and cut corners further contaminating fisheries for 9 years.

        I can’t quite remember what that was. Must have been chinese propaganda.

    • andyburke
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      -5010 months ago

      Japan is releasing nuclear waste from a reactor they failed to design with sufficient safety protections given its location.

      China pollutes like crazy, but your whataboutism argument doesn’t matter.

      Japan is releasing nuclear waste into the oceans because they failed to understand the safety requirements necessary for their nuclear reactors.

      • @A7thStone
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        4010 months ago

        The tritium levels in the water they are releasing are far below what is considered safe for drinking water by almost any group in the world. At that level of you were to drink the water all year you would receive a dose of 4 mrem. 30 mrem is the average radiation dose a person receives just from background radiation. But you go off repeating 50 year old fossil fuel propaganda.

      • @abbotsbury
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        2110 months ago

        Nuclear waste? You mean tritium?

      • @Chickenstalker
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        910 months ago

        It was hit by an unprecedented strong earthquake tsunami combo. No amount of engineering could have prevented its destruction. Bear in mind the Richter scale is not linear. Dumbass.

        • @anlumo
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          10 months ago

          The tsunami was a direct consequence of the earthquake, they should have calculated that in.

          If they can’t build a power plant to the necessary specifications to not explode at that location, they should build it somewhere else.

          • @Alexstarfire
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            210 months ago

            The scale matters. That earthquake is one of the biggest ever recorded. It’s difficult to account for things that are entirely unprecedented. That said, if that actually built it to spec it probably would have survived just fine.

        • @Alexstarfire
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          010 months ago

          There was literally another plant in nearly the same conditions that survived because they didn’t cut corners when building it.

    • @[email protected]
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      1110 months ago

      I have asked this guy to tell me what the actual levels of these contaminants are and he won’t tell me. Just continues to fearmonger.

      The ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium, and that contributes a relatively small minority of the natural radioactivity of the ocean. No regulatory authority with oversight of this has expressed concern and there’s no observed contamination in wildlife

          • @[email protected]
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            110 months ago

            I’m really not sure what your confusion is. Do you not have access? I think it’s on scihub, but you can also probably access it at your local library.

              • @[email protected]
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                110 months ago

                I’ve told you multiple options for accessing Science… Y’know, one of the most prestigious journals in the world.

                • @[email protected]
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                  110 months ago

                  It’s your source, not mine. I’m not going to a library just because some douchebag on lemmy doesn’t understand the need to cite readily available material rather than paywalled content.