Old videos were falsely claimed to be from the nuclear wastewater release in Fukushima

On August 24th, the Japanese government released treated water from the contaminated radioactive water of the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. This has caused concern for neighboring countries, as well as countries affected by imports of seafood from Japan, and its own citizens. (Read the more here)

We recently received a viral video on our LINE Fact-Check Channel that shows a massive amount of dead fish floating on the surface. The video is accompanied by claims that it was filmed in Japan during the discharge of treated water into the ocean.

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Apart from the the user request through our Line channel, we also found the same video being shared on the TikTok platform.

Source | Archive

In addition to the previously mentioned video, we have found another video claiming to show footage from Japan of wastewater being released into the sea. This video has already been viewed over 20,000 times on the TikTok platform.

Source | Archive

After conducting an investigation, we discovered that neither of the above videos is related to last week's release of wastewater from the Fukushima power plant in any way.

Fact-Check

Video 1: Large School of Dead Fish

We conducted a reverse video search and a reverse image search using key frames from the aforementioned footage. Our investigation revealed that this video was posted on the Weibo website six months ago.

Source | Archive

Upon further investigation, it was discovered that thousands of sardines had washed up ashore in Niigata, Japan in early February 2023, which is the same time period as when the aforementioned video was uploaded on Weibo. The news, which can be found here, shows elements in the photo that match the clip above, making it highly likely that it is the same location.

Left: Keyframe from the viral clip

Right: Picture from the news article

See additional photos and videos of the aforementioned incident from NHK World here.

Furthermore, the prefectures of Niigata and Fukushima are located on opposite sides of Japan. The release of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant only began on August 24th, as shown in the video mentioned earlier. Therefore, the events depicted in the video are unrelated to the treated water release.

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Video 2: Wastewater Being Released into the Sea

We have traced the source of the aforementioned video and discovered that it depicts the massive sewage overflow event that occurred in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico beach, three years ago. The news can be found in this article from Mirror. An archived version of the article can be accessed here.

Source: News World

Furthermore, Japan has confirmed that most of the radioactive contaminants have been filtered out of the polluted water, except for tritium and carbon-14, which are difficult to remove from the water but are confirmed to be safe according to the standards. (Source)

In Thailand, the Department of Fisheries and the Food and Drug Administration have implemented measures to inspect for seafood contamination, and most recently, no excessive levels of pollutants were found. (Source)

Summary

Videos circulating on social media claim to show the release of nuclear plant wastewater into the sea in Fukushima, Japan, and thousands of dead fish resulting from the incident. However, upon investigation, it has been found that both videos are not related to the recent release of wastewater from the nuclear plant. Rather, they show different incidents from the past.