The Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, has eaten sashimi made from fish caught off the coast of Fukushima, to show that it is safe.

Though there has been controversy, not least from fishermen in the area, around the release of treated water, it has been deemed safe by experts. Kishida and three of his cabinet ministers ate seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima on Wednesday, including flounder, octopus, and seabass.

Though it may sound suspiciously like the Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish episode of The Simpsons in which Mr Burns attempts to eat a three-eyed fish from a lake his power plant had contaminated, Kishida is not at risk.

Japan began releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last Thursday, over 12 years since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of the Japanese island of Honshu caused a meltdown at the facility. 

Following the meltdown, the reactor was cooled using water, creating 1.3 million tons of contaminated water which has since been stored at the site. This water has been treated using the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) which removes this radioactivity through a series of chemical reactions. At the end of this process, most contamination is removed. 

They are unable to remove tritium – a radioactive isotope of hydrogen – from the water, as currently, the technology cannot remove low concentrations of it from a large body of water. However, Tritium also occurs naturally in our atmosphere and rain, and is present in higher levels in the Pacific Ocean than in the concentration in Fukushima's wastewater.