Kevin McCarthy, the U.S. House of Representatives speaker with about as much knowledge on nuclear waste as your mailman, visited Japan this week and endorsed Tokyo’s move to dump toxic waste from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific, and criticized China for raising concerns. 

McCarthy, who is in the region in hopes to inflame China over Taiwan, evidently did some extensive research into nuclear fusion on the flight from Washington to Japan and determined that Beijing’s concern over the toxic dump is “another way of the Communist Party of China putting falsities out there, trying to divide,” Reuters reported.

“And it’s just an unfair position that they have and a false position that they have from the rest of the world’s stance,” McCarthy said.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog earlier this summer gave the final approval for the release of 1.25 million tons of treated wastewater from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was badly damaged in an earthquake 12 years ago. The meltdown included three reactors and is considered the worst radioactive disaster since Chernobyl.

Those in favor of the release call the situation at the facility unsustainable. The water used to cool the molten fuel has been kept in large tanks. The spent water is laced with toxic tritium. These tanks are reaching their capacity and there is fear that another major quake could result in these tanks spilling over.  

Japan plans to dilute the cooling water with seawater through an IAEA-approved Advanced Liquid Processing System and the release will take about three decades and end up diluting the wastewater with seawater at a ratio of less than 1:100, according to Gizmodo. The process removes most radionuclides except for tritium, a radioactive isotope.

The Chinese foreign ministry has also been critical of the release and accused Japan of turning the Pacific Ocean into the country’s own “private sewer.”

China’s Global Times reported that Tokyo has released 4,200 tons of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific as of Monday last week.

Tilman Ruff, an associate professor in the University of Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health, raised questions about the testing process up until this point and said the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s process has been incomplete, unexpected, and unexplained. He noted the presence of a “very short-lived tellurium-127, indicating either laboratory error or a nuclear chain reaction in the melted fuel, which would be a very important finding.”

McCarthy wants you to think that it is just China raising concerns about the release, but Japanese fishermen, South Koreans, and other countries have also criticized the decision.

Japanese fishermen filed a lawsuit last week to stop the release, claiming that the move “damages the livelihoods of the fishing community and violates residents’ right to live peacefully,” The Associated Press reported.

“The intentional release to the sea is an intentional harmful act that adds to the (nuclear plant) accident,” Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer, said.

TRENDPOST: McCarthy’s public criticism of China for raising concerns about Japan’s toxic dump shows the mindset in Washington. Every policy position that Beijing and Moscow have must be considered poisonous and quickly dismissed—even when a wrong decision can have a major impact on the environment. (See “JAPAN GETS FINAL APPROVAL TO RELEASE RADIOACTIVE WASTE FROM FUKUSHIMA INTO PACIFIC AS OUTRAGE GROWS” 11 Jul 2023, “IAEA HEAD TO VISIT JAPAN TO GIVE FUKUSHIMA TOXIC DUMP FINAL BLESSING” 5 Jul 2023, and “‘EXTREMELY IRRESPONSIBLE’: CHINA CONDEMNS JAPAN FOR PLANNED RELEASE OF FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR-CONTAMINATED WATER” 14 Mar 2023.)

There’s a sick new trend on social media. Politicians in the Pacific region are taking to social media to show how they’re eating locally caught fish and produce from near Fukushima. The videos resemble how politicians and celebrities would roll up their sleeves to take the COVID-19 vaccines. 

The general public doesn’t care and most likely thinks Fukushima is a new computer company, but those who have been paying attention must find it odd that the same people who endorsed COVID-19 vaccines are endorsing Fukushima Fish Cakes.