Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Second Department

W.M. Keck Science Department

Reader 1

Donald McFarlane

Reader 2

Sarah Gilman

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2024 Grant Ho

Abstract

Since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami that triggered the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, numerous studies have been published on the extent and effect of the radionuclide contamination of the air, land, and sea. Due to the nature of the nuclear accident, approximately 1.2 million tons of water contaminated with nuclear waste have been stored in tanks on site. Twelve years later, the government of Japan approved the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner of the power plant, to begin discharging the water into the ocean after treating it to remove most of the harmful radionuclides. Concerns over the safety of these planned releases, which will occur in measured amounts over the next 30 years, gave rise to new studies on the extent and environmental effect of the wastewater on humans and marine biota. This paper aims to review and analyze the studies that model the radionuclide dispersal and effects of the discharges on humans and marine biota. While the studies overall assumed a worst case scenario to give a conservative estimate of the level of additional radiation exposure and sought to include as many relevant radionuclides as possible to provide the total amount of radioactivity, the models generally assumed that the radionuclides do not biomagnify in the food web, which can increase exponentially even if the amount of radioactivity is low. The studies also relied on the safety limits established by the Japanese government, which were largely adopted from international bodies and based on values for an average Japanese citizen. These guidelines did not account for the considerable levels of radiation that residents of Fukushima have already absorbed independent of the additional radioactivity from the regular discharges that will occur, for many, for the remainder of their lifetime.

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