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MARK WILLACY: Well Mr Barrett, Scott, has now inspected the Fukushima nuclear plant, he got kitted up in all the protective gear and he spent quite some time there. So he’s had a good look around and he does say yes there is still a lot of work to do but he believes everything is under control.

Now that is despite revelations that about 300,000 litres of contaminated groundwater is flowing into the sea every day and of course it is despite a serious leak of highly radioactive water from one of the hundreds of storage tanks at the site and that was a product of what some say was rushed and shoddy workmanship.

But let’s hear from Lake Barrett, this is what he had to say in Tokyo this afternoon.

LAKE BARRETT: This is not finished. But I don’t believe there’s anything of major concern and they do have an adequate leak control system there but it needs to be better and addressed, it needs to be explained much better than it’s been explained…….

LAKE BARRETT: The levels that are “moving” are very small and very low risk and you know water flows towards the sea so where’s it going? It goes towards the sea, so but as far as any radioactivity of concern in my opinion, it is being adequately controlled……..

MARK WILLACY Lake Barrett said in an opinion piece – a recent opinion piece in a website for atomic scientists, that the radioactive water being stored at Fukushima will probably have to be dumped into the ocean at some point, that is after contamination within that water is brought back to safe levels and he went on to write that this water being stored in tanks, it just can’t be stored like that indefinitely and that spending billions of yen on building tanks to capture every last drop of water on the site is “unsustainable, wasteful and counterproductive.”

So that opinion as you’d imagine Scott hasn’t gone down too well with many Japanese, particularly fishermen who used to make their livelihoods from the waters off Fukushima. http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2013/s3848510.htm