The paper "Fukushima Contaminated Water Risk Factor: Global Implications" has been published in the international journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The discharge of contaminated water from Fukushima poses a comprehensive threat to the global marine ecosystem and human health. Currently, discussions on the risks of discharging the contaminated water from Fukushima mostly lack quantitative indicators and fail to comprehensively consider various factors. To address these deficiencies, we innovatively proposed the Fukushima Contaminated Water Risk Factor (FCWRF), which integrates the risks of radionuclide diffusion, bioaccumulation, and global seafood trade to quantitatively assess the risks of discharging the contaminated water into the sea. The results show that the measurable comprehensive risk will spread to six continents around the world, and the diffusion of this comprehensive risk will be six times faster than that driven by ocean currents. FCWRF bridges the gap between different fields of radioactive nuclide risk assessment and provides support for timely and effective global response measures. Additionally, we have developed a visualization website for the dynamic database of the spatiotemporal distribution of FCWRF, named "Fukushima Risk", and made it available globally. This website visually presents the spatiotemporal evolution process of the global distribution of FCWRF and provides users with channels to select, view, and download the data they are concerned about.
The Environmental Science & Technology Journal is a top-tier publication in both the JCR and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Engineering Technology category 1, with an impact factor of 10.8. Professor Zhang Jianmin and I are the corresponding authors of the paper, while the first author is doctoral student Liu Yi, with Li Yilin and Min Yantao as co-authors. The research was funded by the Guangdong Provincial Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Liao Shan Laboratory.