Japan to release water from stricken Fukushima nuclear plant

Japan will release water from the stricken Fukushima power plant into the Pacific Ocean from Thursday, 12 years after one of the world's worst nuclear disasters. China, which has already partially halted Japanese food shipments, sharply criticised the announcement while Hong Kong said it would ban the import of "aquatic products" from 10 Japanese regions. The Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station was knocked out by a massive earthquake and tsunami that killed around 18,000 people in March 2011, sending three of its reactors into meltdown. "Tritium has been released (by nuclear power plants) for decades with no evidential detrimental environmental or health effects," Tony Hooker, a nuclear expert from the University of Adelaide, told AFP. "Nothing about the water release is beneficial to us," third-generation fisherman Haruo Ono, 71, whose brother was killed in 2011, told AFP in Shinchimachi, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of the nuclear plant.