More risk assessments will be made by Hong Kong on Japan's plan to discharge treated radioactive water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear power station, despite a UN watchdog giving the go-ahead to pump it into the sea.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Tuesday said, after two years of consideration, that the Japanese plan to dispose of the contaminated water was in line with international safety standards.
The report, presented in Tokyo to Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida by the IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi, said controlled and gradual discharge of the treated water "would have a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment."
"We have agreed that the IAEA will have its continued presence at the site and will continue to review if the plan moves forward … If the government decides to proceed with it, the IAEA will be permanently here reviewing, monitoring and assessing this activity for decades to come," Grossi promised.
The water from the plant, damaged by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, will be diluted with seawater to one-40th of the concentration permitted under Japanese safety standards before it is released through an underwater tunnel.
It is expected it will take up to 30 years to dispose of the 1.37 million tons of contaminated water in the plant, a long-term process which sparked fears in the Hong Kong government and among lawmakers over the potential health and environmental effects.
The Environment and Ecology Bureau said a task force set up to examine the plan was reviewing the IAEA final report, would make further risk assessments and ask Japan for more information on the discharge plan.
It added it had several times told Japanese authorities that, once the country started to discharge the water, Hong Kong would introduce precautions, including import controls on marine produce from high risk prefectures in the country to prevent potentially contaminated food from entering the city.
The bureau said the government would "formulate and announce the import control measures on relevant food from Japan based on scientific and risk-based principles after taking into full consideration the final report of the IAEA, the opinion of mainland China's experts, risk assessments and relevant information."
Elizabeth Quat, the chairwoman of the Legislative Council panel on environmental affairs, appealed to the government to immediately ban the import of seafood from Fukushima and surrounding areas and strengthen the testing of food from other parts of Japan in the interests of environmental health.
She added that members of the public had told her that they were worried that the release of the waste water would cause irreversible damage to the global marine ecology and affect the health of future generations.
Luk Bing-lam, the chairman of the Hong Kong Nuclear Society, said, although radioactivity levels in treated waste water were usually not high enough to damage human health, he agreed the government should conduct stricter checks on Japanese food imports.
"As a responsible government, they should not completely rely on another country's research. The government should adopt a more conservative approach to address citizens' concerns and do their own risk assessment," he said.
Hong Kong was Japan's second-largest market for agricultural and fisheries exports in 2022 and imported about HK$12.3 billion (US$1.6 billion) worth of goods.
