Yuyan Wang

By Rabedirkwennigsen

Introduction

On August 24, 2023, the Japanese government started to release more than 1.3 million tons of treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo hailed the decision as a scientifically justified step that had to be taken to decommission the plant, with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) providing its approval. However, this has caused discontent among the people. People protested in Seoul, civil society figures raged in Fiji, and China slapped an immediate ban on Japanese seafood imports. This is not even a disagreement on policy – this is a fight between legal compliance and environmental justice. Right at the centre of this controversy, there is a big question, one that asks: When international law allows something that creates ecological burdens meted out upon defenceless communities unable to participate in the process, can that possibly be a just act? This case study critically examines how Japan’s Fukushima wastewater discharge, which is possibly legal under the current frameworks, points to the shortcomings of international environmental law from the perspective of environmental justice. Based on scholarly theory and worldly outcomes, it contends that the case does not call for technical assessment but a moral accounting which rethinks the meaning of justice in a transboundary context.

What is Environmental Justice?

Environmental justice captures the equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, the equitable involvement of affected communities in decision-making processes, and the recognition of alternative patterns of relating to the environment, particularly for historically marginalised communities.

The concept was conceived from grassroots struggles during the 1980s and was theoretically defined by Robert Bullard, who documented how race and class are strong predictors of environmental risk and pollution exposure. Modern theorists, including Figueroa and Mills, define environmental justice as complex, involving: Distributive justice —who gets harmed and who gets benefited? Procedural justice — who gets included in decision-making? And ocean justice — How are ecosystems in and of themselves treated, preserved, or plundered? Such dimensions are not abstract theory, they are the necessary assessment apparatus of the Fukushima discharge. Who made the decision? Who was consulted? Who is at risk? Who benefits? And, most importantly, what is the response of international law to these questions, and its failure to answer in some cases?

Procedural injustice

One of the worst nuclear accidents in history has been caused by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had, experienced multiple reactor meltdowns. To mitigate the onset of an escalation, massive amounts of water from the sea were used to cool the reactors, polluting over 1.3 million tons of water. This water was stored for more than ten years in over 1,000 tanks resident on-site, and the capacity was exhausted by mid-2023.

In April 2021, the Japanese government announced its plan to discharge the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS)-treated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. This choice, supported in 2023, will take place within decades. Japan insists that the main remaining radionuclide, ie, tritium, is harmless to health, and that the operation is in line with IAEA guidance and country’s safety rules. However, this scientific configuration hides procedural injustice: local fishing cooperatives, regional fisheries, and Pacific Island nations were either poorly consulted or completely left out in the conversations.

Main UN obligations dealing with marine protection are expressed within the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Article 192 maintains a general duty for the states to protect and maintain the marine environment while Article 194 requires the states to implement “all measures consistent with this Convention… to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment”. However, these are open-ended and discretionary provisions, and hence, hard to implement.

The Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident(to which Japan is a party) – obliges the states to inform others about nuclear incidents with transboundary consequences. Japan’s failure to participate compellingly in real transboundary consultation with China, South Korea, and Pacific Island States will likely contravene this binding commitment. Additionally, the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) encourages transparency and safety without enforcement teeth and instead, thus relying on a non-binding “peer review” mechanism.

According to a detailed legal study by Liu and Hoskin, Japan’s approach to international obligations is based on legal technicalities and not environmental justice. For instance, Japan argues that its release is not “dumping” as defined by the London Protocol 1996 because the water is discharged via a 1-kilometre undersea tunnel from land, not from a vessel or platform. But this interpretation bypasses the spirit of the law, which seeks to prohibit the deliberate introduction of radioactive substances into the ocean.

The legal context is therefore littered with soft law, discretionary words, and basic process requirements. In other words, this means that Japan’s decision could be legally justified, but morally unjustifiable – a typical contradiction between the formal legality and procedural justice. It is the existent loophole in the definition of global ocean governance, which this case highlights. In the case that regulatory compliance is attained through semantic evasion, the law becomes an instrument of injustice and not that of accountability.

By IAEA Imagebank

Distributive injustice

As the capacity for storage of radioactive wastewater at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has reached its limit, the Japanese government and TEPCO have launched a plan to discharge treated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. Even though this plan was made to be safe and technically sound, it demonstrates an underlying problem: distributive injustice.

Japan and TEPCO are the economic and political beneficiaries of such action. Greenpeace alleged that the cost and convenience were favoured by the Japanese government over the best technologies of long-term storage. Nevertheless, the dangers are transferred to other people: the coastal fishing communities in Japan, Pacific Island countries, and neighbouring states, including South Korea and the Chinese regime. These communities will be left with the burden of ecological uncertainty, shamed reputation of their fisheries as well as historical trauma of radioactive exposure.

And as Bullard notes, environmental burdens do not fall randomly – they flow along lines of power. Fukushima’s wastewater release exemplifies this: a dominating industrial country in its pursuit of fulfilling self-interest while displacing damage on other communities with lesser political or financial strength. Distributive justice requires that the environmental decisions take into consideration who gains and who pays. In the case of Fukushima, the answer once again reveals the familiar narrative pattern of distributive injustice.

Ocean injustice

Japan’s defence is based on science, claiming that the primary remaining isotope in the treated water, i.e. tritium, is not dangerous in small amounts. However, such cherry-picking of story-telling neglects crucial data. As found out by Greenpeace East Asia and Greenpeace Japan, the ALPS treatment system does not perform effectively in the extraction of carbon-14, a radionuclide with a long half-life and capable of causing genetic damage. Although the concentration of these radioactive substances is extremely low, there is uncertainty about their future impact on marine life.

Overall, the rest of the scientific community is nowhere near unified in their approval of Japan’s plan. As pointed out in the article by Liu and Hoskin, radioactive isotopes can bioaccumulate through the marine food chain, with a higher impact on coastal communities that depend on fishing. According to research, reveal that pollutants such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 can disperse unpredictably via complex ocean currents, reaching distant ecosystems and human populations. Oceanographic modelling would go so far as to speculate that even traces of Fukushima-origin radionuclides could end up on the western shores of the United States in as little as five years. Such risks are not distributed equally. The Kuroshio current, that pass by the coast of Fukushima, links Japan to South Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific Islands. Most of these states do not have the technical equipment to monitor radiation, or to bring Japan to legal responsibility. That this, Japan’s decision serves as an example of epistemic injustice as Figueroa and Mills would call it–where the dominant actors control the concept of “valid” knowledge, while silencing local ecological understanding.

This is when ocean justice comes in at its most sorely required state. The ocean cannot be comprehended as a territorial waste site but as a global common – a living system that requires transboundary equity to be governed. Japan’s unilateral move contravenes the normative underpinning of stewardship of the commons, which sways the scale of convenience in favour of nationality over regionalism.

Law Without Justice? Rethinking Accountability and Reform

Japan’s legal defence is based on the fact that Japan has always acted within the scheme of international law and in many ways, that may indeed be so. The discharge has been adjudged “consistent with international safety standards” by the IAEA and Japan has proceeded to adhere to its local protocols. But legality is not justice. Law is an important tool for ensuring environmental justice, but it can also hinder the realisation of environmental justice and exacerbate environmental injustice.

According to some scholars, the international environmental law has gaps in terms of enforcement, lack of clear language and reliance on soft law instruments in the forms of guidelines and peer reviews. Such mechanisms as CNS and London Protocol do not have teeth. They depend on cooperation from the states, good faith reporting, and the cooperation of nations to undergo non-binding assessment. When such a strong state as Japan acts within such legal frameworks, but has created regional damage, it indicates the structural imbalance between states’ rights and global liabilities.

Without binding mechanisms, affected states and communities are left with few remedial measures whereby to resort. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea holds promise; provided that, both the disputant parties agree with its jurisdiction. In this instance, Japan’s monist approach to international law limits the avenues available to affected countries, including China, South Korea and Pacific island countries, to seek legal redress.

This reality calls for reform. We have to rediscover the notion of environmental law from a neutral judge of the state behaviour to a justice-seeking template that gives priority to weak voices and transboundary ethics. Four critical reforms emerge:

1. Binding Transboundary Consultation Protocols

Environmental decisions that have cross border implication – particularly with reference to the oceanic commons – must be required to have the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) of affected states and communities. Involvement of the process is not a luxury but a legal and ethical necessity as demonstrated by the Fukushima case.

• Redefining “Dumping” in Marine Law

The London Protocol needs to be revised to take care of the definitional loophole that Japan has taken advantage of to construct an under-sea tunnel. The separation between “dumping” and “discharge” should not permit legally permissible pollution of world waters.

• Ecological Rights and Ocean Personhood

After recognising river personhood in such jurisdictions as New Zealand, international law could bend toward personifying the ocean as the subject of rights – a revolutionary change granting moral and ecological separation of the marine environment from property or resource.

• Environmental Justice Integration

The distributive, procedural and ocean justice pillars have to be legalised in legal interpretation. This would enable the courts, tribunals, and treaty bodies to take justice (not simply compliance) as a legitimate criterion for assessing environmental injury.

These reforms are not utopian. They are based on a steadily strengthening movement around the world to acknowledge that the existing legal regimes, anchored upon the 20th-century assumptions of sovereignty and extractives, are ill-equipped to deal with the 21st-century scenario of climate collapse, biodiversity loss, and environmental inequality.

From Technical Legality to Moral Urgency

The discharge of processed ALPS water from Fukushima is not an isolated incident. It is a trend of global environmental governance where technical compliance was an ethical replacement. Japan’s outcome, possibly legal, is representative of what Bullard referred to as the “path of least resistance” – where the costs of environmental risk are distributed unfairly to communities with political power, fewer economic resources, and deeper ecological ties to place.

This case makes us rethink: Who speaks for the ocean? Who decides what is safe? How is anyone to be blamed if “minimal risk” turns out to be actual harm?

At the essence of this problem is a legitimacy crisis. When the law lags behind the scientific uncertainties, community outrage, and the fragility of planets, then justice becomes the collateral of a process. Environmental justice demands that we re-open this crisis in the context not of regulatory failure, but failure of imagination, empathy, and equity. It requires we move past thresholds and isotopes to the orders of exclusion and domination of who risks and who profits.

Therefore, the case study on Fukushima is not only about tritium or treaties. It is the argument of whose worldview is held in front when decisions are made. It is concerned with the invisibility of the knowledge of the Pacific Islanders, the obliteration of the Indigenous ecological ethics, and the legal silencing of the marine ecosystems. It is about the power asymmetries inherent to global environmental law, where those who foul could claim compliance, while the foul-receivers must beg for visibility.

Conclusion: Charting a New Tide

Japan’s decision to discharge nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is irreversible. And its legacy is being continued. It can be the victory of sovereign discretion over ecological ethics or the agent to initiate a new era of environmental legal thinking that facilitates justice instead of technicality, solidarity instead of sovereignty.

We are at a turnaround point. The Pacific is not the margin. It is a place of life, culture, and climate resilience. The people who depend on it should be given not only consultation but a proper place to lead it to its future. The environmental law must transform, from being more than protecting environments, but nations, people, and humanity’s more-than-human-world interface.

In this sense, justice is not theoretical. It is as immediate as radioactive material in a fish, as hurtful as a community’s livelihood being washed away, as permanent as oceanic flows that transport waste beyond the borders and into the generations. The realisation of environmental justice depends not only on technological maturity or legal compliance, but more importantly on whether the voices of all people, especially those who are easily overlooked, are truly heard. If the law cannot stop injustice, then maybe justice will need to revise the law.

Source lists

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