South Korean shoppers are snapping up sea salt and other items as worry grows about their safety with Japan due to dump more than 1 million tonnes of treated radioactive water from a wrecked nuclear power plant into the sea.
The water was mainly used to cool damaged reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant north of Tokyo, after it was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
The release of the water from huge storage tanks into the Pacific is expected soon, though no date has been set.
Photo: Reuters
Japan has given repeated assurances that the water is safe, saying it has been filtered to remove most isotopes, although it does contain traces of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water.
However, fishers and shoppers in Japan and across the region are afraid.
“I recently bought 5kg of salt,” Lee Young-min, a 38-year-old mother of two children, said as she made seaweed soup in her kitchen in Seongnam, just south of the South Korean capital, Seoul.
She said she had never bought so much salt before, but felt she had to do what she could to protect her family.
“As a mother raising two children, I can’t just sit back and do nothing. I want to feed them safely,” she said.
The rush to stock up contributed to a nearly 27 percent rise in the price of salt in South Korea this month from two months ago, though officials say the weather and lower production were also to blame.
In response, the government is releasing about 50 tonnes of salt a day from stocks, at a 20 percent discount from market prices, until July 11, South Korean Vice Minister of Fisheries Song Sang-keun said on Wednesday.
South Korean fisheries authorities say they would keep a close eye on salt farms for any rise in radioactivity.
Japan has said it has provided detailed and science-backed explanations of its plan to neighbors.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno last week said that Japan was seeing increasing understanding on the issue, although that was not so apparent in Seoul shops this week.
“I came to buy salt, but there’s none left,” 73-year-old Kim Myung-ok said, standing by empty supermarket shelves. “There was none the last time I came, too.”
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