HONG KONG and Macao will ban aquatic products from 10 Japanese prefectures, governments of the two special administrative regions announced yesterday over Tokyo’s plans to release water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

Despite public concern and raging opposition from both home and abroad, Japan announced yesterday it has decided to start releasing nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean tomorrow, 12 years after the Fukushima disaster.

“The [Hong Kong] government will ban the imports of all aquatic products from 10 prefectures of Japan from the 24th of August,” Tse Chin-wan, Hong Kong’s secretary for environment and ecology, said during a press conference.

The products include “all live, frozen, chilled, dried or otherwise preserved aquatic products, sea salt and raw or processed seaweeds.”

The 10 prefectures named are Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano and Saitama.

Tse also said there was no timeline for how long the ban will be in place, as it will depend on “how well the Japanese Government’s supervising system works.”

China yesterday slammed Japan’s decision and strongly urged the country to cancel the plan, saying it “transferred the risk of nuclear contamination to the world.”

“This action is extremely selfish and irresponsible,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.

Last month, China’s General Administration of Customs said the country will ban the import of food from the 10 prefectures for safety reasons.

China said it will also strictly review the documents for food, especially aquatic products, from other parts of Japan, the customs said in a statement.

Hit by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and an ensuing tsunami March 11, 2011, the Fukushima plant suffered core meltdowns that released radiation, resulting in a level-7 nuclear accident, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.

The plant has been generating a massive amount of water tainted with radioactive substances from cooling down the nuclear fuel in the reactor buildings, which are now being stored in about 1,000 storage tanks.

The plant has stored more than 1.3 million tons of nuclear-contaminated wastewater, and the discharge is planned to continue for more than 30 years.

(SD-Xinhua)